How to Use the Web to Prevent Remaining Print Readers From Fleeing As much as media companies tend to focus on how to serve younger people (generally with digital strategies), let's not forget the older crowd. They have a transition to make, and newspaper publishers, especially, need to help them out -- or kiss them goodbye. Here's why.
By
Steve Outing
(April 27, 2009) -- As much as media companies tend to focus on how to serve younger people (generally with digital strategies), let's not forget the older crowd. They have a transition to make, and newspaper publishers, especially, need to help them out -- or kiss them goodbye. Here's why.
Each year the University of Colorado holds its World Affairs Conference, with free lectures and panel discussions by leaders in many fields. I attended some sessions while it was running in Boulder recently, including one called “Nationalize the Newspapers?”
This was not your typical journalism or media conference panel, where most of the room is filled with people who know as much about the topic, or more, than the panel members. This crowd included quite a few seniors (think gray and balding, not students in their final year) from the community, presumably concerned by the declining size and quality of their local newspapers -- and fear of losing more of them, following the recent closure of the Rocky Mountain News in Denver.
One older gentleman during the Q&A session was particularly alarmed about the prospect of newspapers shutting down completely, or publishing in print on fewer days of the week. “What about those of us who don’t use the Internet or don’t want to?” he asked. “How are we supposed to get our local news?” Another scoffed at the idea of “citizen journalism” and feared that it would be a poor substitute for professional reporting; I’m certain he didn’t really understand that the term represents something that supplements and complements pro journalism.
Now, I’ve been an advocate and enthusiast for digital media since I left the print newspaper world as a career in late 1993. I’ve long predicted that the day will come when print would begin to die out as consumers adopted online and mobile as their preferred method of news consumption (and participation).
That’s starting to happen in earnest in some metro areas of the U.S., and Denver-Boulder is one of them. Boulder’s newspaper, the Daily Camera, has been getting thinner and thinner for some time, slowly shedding staff to cover its smaller budgets and thus declining in quality. The Rocky shut down completely, leaving The Denver Post as the metro area’s sole big daily. Like nearly all other metro dailies, the Post is weaker and smaller than in recent years, and the departed Rocky was generally considered to be the most aggressive of the two when it came to investigative reporting.
While those seniors still have daily newspaper print editions to read in Boulder and Denver, in a growing number of cities we’ll begin seeing more print cutbacks by big dailies. I believe that in the next few years, the dominant “newspaper” in many major cities will be reduced to a single weekend print edition, plus 24/7 online and mobile news (a la the Christian Science Monitor’s new publishing scheme) covering the rest of the week. At some later time, this is likely to happen to smaller-town newspapers as well.
Seniors about to become 'mad as hell!'
So, about those gray-haired folks who don’t love and use the Internet the way I do (yes, I have gray hair, too):
* They’re noticing the quality decline in the print newspapers they receive. As newspaper editorial staffs get cut further and there’s less depth in editorial coverage, they will begin to get fed up and cancel their long-running home subscriptions. * They will switch to alternative media for their news, but it’s unlikely to be the Internet or smartphones. It’s logical to predict an increasing reliance by seniors on public radio news, and of course TV. * Newspaper companies should care about seniors; after all, with the average age of newspaper readers in the mid 50s, seniors play a big role in keeping the industry going by sticking to print (and paying for it), while younger people abandon it or don’t start the print newspaper reading habit at all.
The solution to this problem is simple, yet I don’t see many newspaper companies deploying it: Start training remaining print readers to make the transition to savvy online and mobile news services. Begin the process of convincing older readers that the “brand” of the newspaper and what it offers is much more than the thinning print edition that lands on their driveways. I believe they’ll be more forgiving if you can convince them that the money they continue to pay the “newspaper company” gets them a lot more than just the thinning paper edition.
And if, as I predict, more metro papers don’t just cut back on the size of their print editions but actually stop printing and/or delivering on some days of the week, publishers will want a contingency plan so that their remaining older customers don’t bail out in disgust and stop supplying the newspaper company with subscription and street-sales revenue.
An easy transition
I really don’t want to get stereotypical, because not all seniors are like the guy at that CU panel. There’s no doubt that a small segment of seniors will start to rely on newly purchased smartphones like the iPhone for news, and some will buy Kindle e-readers rather than paper books and even start reading (and paying for) newspaper and magazine subscriptions for the device. But I suspect the majority will cling to the old ways.
One way to offer a not-too-threatening transition to older print customers is to offer a digital-replica edition. For example, the San Francisco Chronicle has added the e-edition for $99 a year. It’s advertised as an “Exact digital replica of the San Francisco Chronicle,” with the added advantages of search, access to archives, and “it’s Green.”
Digital-replica editions have been around for a long time, and I’ve been a critic of them. My thinking had been: 1. The Web site is a better reading experience on a computer; 2. The digital editions will bring in a tiny amount of revenue.
But I’ve changed my mind now that newspapers’ situation has changed for the far worse. If, say, the Chronicle decides it has been losing too much money and must switch to publishing print editions only a couple days a week and publish online-only the rest, then print loyalists could purchase a subscription to the e-reader edition for the non-print days. They’ll still have to transition to using a computer to read the Chronicle, but the format will at least be familiar to them.
Of course, that means that a small team still has to produce “print edition” pages seven days a week to support the digital-replica edition, but that’s a manageable production task on days when the presses don’t roll. In situations like that in Detroit, where the Free Press and the News now publish seven days of print editions, but home-deliver them only on three days, an e-edition eases the pain for print loyalists, and keeps more of them paying (it is hoped) to get the news.
Use the print edition as a training vehicle
E-editions won’t solve the problem completely for older readers, of course. The goal should be to ease older readers into the future (or perhaps rather I should say, the present).
An obvious but overlooked strategy is to use the print edition of the daily newspaper (while it’s still daily) to promote extra content available online or on mobile devices -- video, audio interviews, searchable databases, etc. -- in the print edition. As print editions get thinner, it’s essential to hold on to paying print subscribers by offering them more than they hold in their hands, and guiding them to accessing it in a simple way.
I was saddened, on a recent trip to the San Francisco Bay Area, to pick up copies of the recently redesigned Chronicle print edition. Rather than aggressively promote online and mobile content and really try to get print readers to get online for more, the “new” printed Chronicle is doing what most other big metro dailies do: add just a few “refers” to Web content or its mobile services. The redesigned paper, to my eyes, was meant to continue to serve print loyalists, with minimal effort to redirect their habits to digital.
Print designers must change their thinking and design paper editions to reflect the totality of what a “newspaper company” produces. Failure to do so means that as a newspaper’s print-edition quality declines, longtime paying customers are more likely to decide that paying is no longer worth it.
Link, link, link!
This should be obvious, but I still see few newspapers doing it. Nearly every piece of content in a newspaper print edition could (in my view, should) have a published URL for additional information.
* A news story includes a URL to additional content online (e.g., database supporting the article), and a URL to go to the Web and submit a comment or join a discussion. * A photo could have a URL pointing print readers to an online photo gallery or more photos of the news event. * A classified ad could have a URL leading to more info including photos and video from the advertiser; or a mobile-phone code that delivers the ad to the reader’s phone with additional information like a map to the seller’s location and photos.
Repeated often enough and routinely, even print loyalists will start to get the idea: “Go online once in a while, because we’ve got much more for you!”
And, of course, printed URLs or codes must be short and simple. A boilerplate info box on page 2 could explain the basics of how to use a printed URL or mobile code, for those who’ve been left behind by the digital revolution but need to catch up.
Never too old to learn
Another obvious tactic for transitioning older readers is to offer to educate them. Run public seminars on, for instance, “How to use your iPhone to keep up with the news.” Or “How to get the news on the days we don’t publish or deliver the print edition any longer.” Use the events also to sell subscriptions to e-editions or mobile services.
For that matter, run regular short features in the print edition on how to use the Web and mobile devices to get news and interact with the newspaper’s journalists and other readers. The tech-savvy can ignore this little feature, but it’s a great service to those who are being “forced” to give up print news and must learn the new ways of getting news.
Reader's Digest?
To the Internet-savvy news consumer, the Web is a cornucopia of news from a worldwide set of sources, from the old credible news brands to various other news sources including bloggers. It’s all available with a few clicks, and nearly all free.
But to newspapers’ remaining print readers who are not yet smitten with digital news, they miss out by limiting themselves to the sources that the printed newspaper chooses to use: staff, freelancers, wire services, syndicates, etc. Print-edition editors can publish excerpts and URLs to content from other online sources, “curating” the best that’s available online and pointing print readers to it. That’s a great service (identifying the best of the day’s dizzying amount of content available online) that enhances the value of the print edition, teaches the Internet skeptics the value of the online world, and perhaps will keep people paying for the print edition a while longer.
In the decade and a half since I left the print newspaper world and went to the digital side of news, I haven’t given as much thought to print readers, frankly. I’ve been more interested in figuring out how to serve news consumers with online and mobile services in the best way, and how to transition news publishers’ business models for a vastly different terrain.
For those readers with little interest in digital news who wished to stick with the old ways and weren’t willing to give up the print experience, fine; they could continue on with old habits and ignore the digital media world.
But that’s changing, as newspapers go through a crisis that will kill more of them, and transform the survivors into companies that are digital-centric and have lesser print products. Print readers are being affected, and in some cities are forced to change their news-consumption habits by newspaper closures, or opt to change as the quality of their daily newspaper declines noticeably.
The newspaper industry doesn’t have to let them go. But publishers need to take an active role in educating the people who for now continue to provide much of the revenue that newspapers live on and give businesses a reason to continue spending money on print-edition advertising.
Only by guiding the print loyalists to complementary online and mobile services offered by the publisher can newspaper print editions survive for a longer time. To expect them to continue to pay for a product that continues to shrink in size, influence and quality is folly. Offer them more, or watch them slip away.
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E-mail Steve Outing at steveouting@gmail.com. To comment to E&P, e-mail us at gmitchell@editorandpublisher.com.
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How to Use the Web to Prevent Remaining Print Readers From Fleeing
