For whatever it’s worth I do. But I’m just a print evangelist that, as far as I can tell, most journalist’s think is an old fogey, wedded to an outmoded technology.

Thank you for the granular description of the real world.

I’ve been in the newspaper business since ’68 if you include my delivery days. I’ve been a rep, production artist, sales manager, publisher, and have owned my own publications and rep house. For the past 8 years I have been selling web based ad sales services. Put simply, I sell web sites that let newspapers sell ads to their customers.

I think I know what I am talking about. This is my opinion on how to fix newspapers.

More print display ad sales are needed. Manufacturing and input costs must be reduced.

To bolster the value to print advertisers, don’t give away the value proposition on the web.

Better to give away the print product and get more print ad sales revenue than to make the content freely available on the web.

Then, newspapers should use the web as a tool to lower costs, and to improve print product marketing. Get rid of much of the ‘legacy’ accounting and production systems that worked so well in the 80′s and 90′s. They are cost elephants that can be replaced for a fraction of the price thru outsourcing. Doing that will dramatically reduce payroll and other input costs. Get over ‘pride of ownership’ of big printing presses. Cost elephants.

And pretty much across the board, get rid of most existing management. They don’t get it all. It’s about selling lucrative print ads. And keeping costs lower than revenue. And they have failed, across the board.

What are the newspaper owners actually doing? Besides fretting?

Get down to business. Dump failed management. Completely. Focus narrowly on the core profitable product. Get rid of the competition. Start with your own internal competitors.

Here’s an example: the web side competes with print side for ad revenue. Go to a newspaper web site. Try to buy a print ad. It ain’t easy… the web staff ‘stash’ the print ad sales info, hide entry points, etc, and promote web ads instead.

Another example; the flyer sales dept sells delivery of preprints and the value to those advertiser is way higher than comparable ROP. So raise flyer rates, lower ROP for multipage ads, and lobby the hell out of the government to prevent the Post Office from delivering unaddressed mail.

Yet another example: Look at a sales rep’s list of products. They have 50 different things to sell, and they end up being a jack of all trades, and a master of none. They can’t believe “all 50 are the best”. They can’t really be ‘sales knowledgeable’ about all 50. It’s like saying “We specialize in everything.” Doesn’t work.

Stop competing with yourself and truly believe in your core product.

Look at the vertical market publications that have eaten newspapers’ collective lunches: Autotrader, Homes and Land, the local (and chain) weekly entertainment rags, etc. What do they all have in common? They are experts in their areas. They are focused. And they all run tightly cost-controlled operations.

So, down to brass tacks: who are these advertisers who will spend the money to save newspapers as a business?

Small local businesses in several verticals such as entertainment, auto, realty, travel, insurance, services, banking etc. Ads sold locally, at a much lower ad rate than national ads. Zone your product if you have to get rates the advertisers can afford.

Newspapers have to win these local ad battles – and they are not. I often admonished my sales reps: “Win the ad sales battles on Main Street, and Madison Avenue will follow.”

Flyer conversions. First newspapers must lower their manufacturing costs and then reduce rates in order to convert big box, and vertical market flyer advertising into ROP. Those businesses are currently using newspapers as ‘nearly-free’ delivery vehicles , without paying the true cost of newspaper manufacturing ~ specifically the cost of editorial, which ultimately is the cost of gathering the eyeballs – the end product that newspapers sell.

And for newspaper owners: it’s about selling profitable ads. It’s not about Pulitzers.

Of course, I speak as an ad seller. But who listens to me ….

Actually I think an examination of the history of newspapers is that they sell ads and use news to fill the news hole between ads. Sports, crosswords, cartoons and gossip has been the most successful formula for gathering eyeballs for ads.

If they ” start phasing out (or at least stop relying on) print editions,” they will have given up their competitive advantage. It’s important to notice that Politico, a very successful news website actually makes it revenue by selling a niche print publication to, I assume, Washington politicians and lobbyists.

@Natty,
“Its “watchdog” function will be limited to “topics” the “community” approves of with its “click support” of “bloggers/information gatherers.”
I think the “watchdog” function of journalism is part of the problem. It probably started in Watergate days and has supported the meme fo the journalist as hero. In a world of opaque institutions it made some sense. As governing institutions become more and more transparent, watchdog is morphing into guide through the information that is dispersed by needs to be organized.

If the Cedar Rapids papers are paying close attention to the stories that their readers might find interesting, I think that’s a feature, not a bug.

When the print edition dies, so will the staffs for these web sites. You’ll end up with 20 people working for the web sites.

And something about all these new/social media is that they can let them sell ads better than they have ever been able to. And that’s where their revenue model has to change, in the delivery of advertising.

They have to start phasing out (or at least stop relying on) print editions, and start thinking of ways to use web technologies to better deliver both their content and the ads that they sell alongside it.

And it’s not rocket science, either. It’s something that plenty of A-list bloggers and affiliate marketers have already figured out how to do on a much smaller level. All newspapers have to do, then, is scale out a revenue model that’s already proven.

Over the decades I have more and more respect for the grunt work that goes into journalism, the shoe-leather gathering of the raw material, the hideously long public meetings, and the combing of the stories by copy editors. It takes a long time, a lot of concentration, and frankly, I wouldn’t do it for free.

Any thoughts about working with local bloggers as information sources not as reporters. The partisans throw the dirt in the air. The journalist makes sense of it.

It should mean more time for the journalist and more engagement of the reader/stringers/bloggers.

What everyone really uses their blogs for is as a forum to complain at numbing length.

Here’s the sequence of events:

1) pay wall goes up
2) readership plummets
3) revenue plummets
4) without dropping pay wall, companies look for profitable paid content
5) newspapers finally have an incentive to become the cluster of niche products, under a single parent brand, that everyone’s been predicting for so long
6) profit!

I’m 62 and know of lots of people who use a social network in a small city in Central PA. It’s part of a newspaper website.

@anon “You do realize that Web ads pay just a fraction of what print ads pay, right?”

What is the problem with putting more effort into selling print ads to local business and using the website to identify what people are interested in, by counting the clicks.

@Larry,
“to pay the reports that go out where the news is and write about it.”

What if reporters spent more time on the web and the phone covering a beat? Based on what I’ve seen from beat blogging, the readers of the blog are often the best sources of leads. Maybe it’s team reporting. A reporter, an outside prosumer or prosumers, and writer cover the education, or government or xyz beat.

How a newspaper functions will have to change. This is something the NY Times will have to figure out, but they will need to bring in revenue to pay the reports that go out where the news is and write about it. Google won’t be able to aggregate the news if there isn’t anything to link to. Of course if Google wants to pay reporters, so be it. But news can’t be free any more than groceries and real estate can be free.

Gannett’s 13.6-percent growth is laughable, and there’s no 2005 data with which to judge Tribune, but I’d venture to guess that several of the other newspaper sites in the longer list posted larger rates of growth than the likes of Google, Yahoo!, AOL News and perhaps MSNBC (52.6 percent, 52, 35 and 67, respectively.

Newspapers mostly have been slow to adapt, but increasing use of video, audio and, quite notably, interactive graphics are changing that.

But to place the word “stories” in quotation marks is a ridiculous misjudgment of what pulls the readers who do visit these sites. I’m 31 and a journalist, and I know no one who goes to a news site of any kind for social networking.

There’s a real danger in newspapers rushing to adopt whatever technology is popular at the moment. It does not make them hip. It reeks of pandering and distorts the point of social networking (which overwhelmingly is used to reconnect to friends and acquaintances).

I think people might overlook point number 2 in the post above:

“Newspapers must become digital enterprises, even if they choose to continue to print on some days or on every day of the week.”

The purpose of printing on some days or on every day is the same it always was: to supply real estate on which to sell ads.

Newspapers and journalism have had a rocky marriage. Newspapers are an advertising medium. Many more people look at advertising than read. That’s the end of the main business story.

Journalism is something completely different. Sometimes they get together. But often not.

Consider that the best journalism done before and during the Vietnam War was by I F Stone. One person in a room. The best journalism on the run up to Iraq came from the State Department Study Group. Some smart focused people in a room, with small budgets and no private intelligence. The Mandoff scam was first brought to the attention of the SEC by one person, not a journalist. At the hearing he said it took him about 20 minutes to figure out something was very fishy. Then about 2 hours to get the documentation.

Meanwhile all the newspapers were “shocked! Shocked!” as the financial system melted down. In my humble opinion, both journalism and newspapers will be much better if they agree to an amicable separation, while they sort things out.

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/04/15/one-papers-online-only-move-had-little-effect-on-web-traffic-study-says/

P.S. In your lede you want ‘flak,’ which is anti-aircraft fire. ‘Flack’ with a C is a PR guy. And you do not need quotation marks around the word stories. Stories are stories.

Thanks, Steve, I fixed those — Martin