Core Business p.

By: George Garneau

Local news is the heart of the franchise so fix it first, say speakers at Southern newspaper publishers conference sp.

IT'S LOCAL NEWS, stupid.
That back-to-basics theme, in the form of President Clinton's campaign dictum, wove through speeches given by two leading newspaper thinkers at the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association's 90th annual convention in Boca Raton, Fla., last month.
At a time when industry leaders publicly fret about the future of newspapers, ponder new ways to deliver information and join competitors in electronic information ventures, Christine Urban, president of the newspaper consulting firm bearing her name, and Michael Gartner, part- owner of the 10,000-circulation Ames, Iowa, Daily Tribune and former president of NBC News, said newspapers may be forgetting something: their core business, the local news franchise.
They urged newspaper publishers to rededicate themselves to being the dominant source of local news and information in their markets.
At their most basic level, newspapers work because readers pay for what is in the paper and advertisers pay to reach that audience. The key to remaining successful, Urban and Gartner hammered home in very different talks, is shoring up local coverage.
"The content is what counts," Urban said, and the heart of newspapers is local news.
Identifying a "discouraging trend" away from local news, Gartner said newspaper penetration has been declining "simply because the newspapers aren't responding to the readers' needs, needs to know about what's going on locally . . . . It's easier and more glamorous to do a nine-part series on incest than it is to cover the city council meetings, but it's that day-in, day-out coverage of news that readers want and need."
In a passionate plea for newspapers to return to their roots as community-based institutions, Gartner said, "Besides being the town crier, your newspaper should be your town's soul, your town's conscience, your town's mother and your town's poet. No one else can be."
Newspapers are best equipped to provide a full spectrum of information, he said, because unlike television, which essentially has given up on local news, newspapers have the resources to scour neighborhoods, sift government files and sit through meetings.
"Yet, we are so dazzled by technology . . . and we are so consumed by budgets that I think some of us aren't spending enough time with news," Gartner said. Ability notwithstanding, newspapers aren't much better than television at covering local news, he argued.
He summarized his complaints as follows:
"I think we've gotten too far away from local news . . . spend too much time thinking about the future and not enough dealing with the present . . . have too few facts and too much opinion, too few attributions and too many adjectives . . . too many itinerant editors and publishers moving from town to town without ever developing a knowledge of their city . . . too much reliance on databases, too little on old-fashioned reporting. I think we often are too nasty in our writing, too arrogant in our dealings with those we've wronged."
A former news executive at the Wall Street Journal, Des Moines Register and Louisville Courier-Journal, Gartner said newspapers should report the kind of information "people actually talk about" and post on their refrigerator doors: school lunch menus, honor rolls, births, deaths, marriages, drunken-driving arrests, health department ratings and Little League scores.
Unfortunately, he said, dailies often cede this kind of reporting to weeklies and shoppers. According to his theory: the more interesting the information, the smaller newspapers print it, if they print it at all.
Yet, if you package the minutia attractively, "you'll have a community newspaper your community will buy and read and love ? no matter if the community is 2 million people," he said, pointing to weeklies and USA Today as proof of the value of combining facts and packaging.
Gartner made the case for the Aspen (Colo.) Times Daily, which carries the motto, "If you don't want it in the Times, don't do it."
Part of the problem, he said, is newspapers have developed huge bureaucracies, which occupy executives' time and insulate them from readers.
Consequently, many papers, especially metros, "are serving up big projects, the kinds of endeavors that keep all those deputies and assistants and associates busy editing, conferring and preparing prize entries ? and stinting on day-to-day coverage," he said.
He criticized newspapers for sending local reporters to cover distant events just for the sake of doing so while their local beats go uncovered and a wire service could do the far-away story just as well.
Hire publishers, editors and reporters who know the town, who care for it and who plan to stay, "not just pass through on their way to someplace bigger," Gartner advised.
The biggest problem with chain ownership, he declared, is not an evil force dictating editorial content from corporate headquarters and squeezing higher profit margins "but rather the constant transferring of editors and publishers from one city to the next."
Gartner also urged newspaper managers to find staffers who represent different neighborhoods as well as different racial and ethnic groups. He said that at many large papers, news staffers live in the same part of town, a fact that affects coverage "in a bad way."
When he called for an end to "big-city writing," which he described as a journalistic "cheap shot" marked by sneering tone and packed with loaded adjectives, Gartner spoke from painful experience.
More than 500 news stories in February and March reported how he quit NBC News after a furor resulted from a network magazine show's broadcast of a rigged crash during a report about General Motors products. No more than five reporters bothered to call his direct line at NBC or listed home phones in New York and Iowa, he said.
He urged reporters to write facts ? instances illustrating why is he "prickly" or "arrogant" ? and let readers decide for themselves instead of repeating those adjectives picked up from other news stories on databases.
Gartner called electronic databases "two-edged swords." They are great
research tools, he said, "but you shouldn't let your reporters use them as a substitute for actual reporting . . . . Just because it's in a data bank doesn't mean it's true."
He admitted that NBC was "not straight" with viewers because it failed to disclose that igniters were used in the crash test and that testers had ties to people who sue GM. But NBC's second mistake ? one that newspapers often make ? was refusing to listen to GM's complaints, Gartner said. The automaker eventually sued NBC because of the broadcast; the case was settled.
Gartner said "arrogance, ignorance and legal fears" prevent many editors from dealing with legitimate complaints.
In her talk about improving financial performance, Urban suggested that newspapers may be paying the price of being too slow to adapt to the dramatic changes affecting all aspects of life. "I wonder whether enough changes have been made in the core product to reshape the performance curve," she said. "What I fear most is that we are losing our edge."
Only by taking risks can newspapers turn the financial curve upward. Unless newspapers change to meet evolving customer needs, Urban warned, a host of "category killers" is eager to siphon revenues from and perhaps force "draconian changes" at newspapers.
She addressed how newspapers can restore profit margins to the 20%-and-above levels of the 1970s and '80s, from an average in the low teens now.
Part of the problem, she said, is newspapers have lost sight of themselves as a platform to reach people and lost the sense of why people buy newspapers.
In an effort to retain readers while launching themed sections to attract niche audiences, "we're not doing any one of them very well," Urban said.
Instead of trying to build a world-class entertainment tabloid section, she said, newspapers would be wiser to raise their local news coverage to world-class status.
"There should be nobody in your market who outperforms you on local news," Urban said. "That's the way to get readers, not by sprinkling magic dust on the entertainment section."
Newspapers would be served better if they gave up trying to attract non-readers and focused on the burgeoning ranks of former readers, 37% of whom say they prefer other information sources. Smaller numbers of former readers cite bad service, lack of time to read and the high cost of newspapers.
Newspapers, Urban said, are "ignoring the folks who used to read us."
The strategy of building a broad-based readership is good business, she noted. Statistics show that in Europe, the higher the newspaper readership, the bigger share that newspapers have of total advertising.
She called on newspaper managements to invest in rebuilding their core product soon or face the consequences because the marketplace shows no mercy for those who arrive second.
If editorial plans do not include investment in the product, "management is missing the boat in getting back former readers," Urban warned.
Because no amount of niche products or target marketing can prop up a business when its core product is failing, she said, the first order of business should be the core business; growth should be second.
Urban made the following suggestions:
? Invest for growth, not to prop up declining products.
? Invest in new products, either line extensions such as specialized publications or line explosions such as electronic products, or expand by diversifying.
She pointed to Time Inc. and computer publisher International Data Group, each of which publishes related magazines, to show that newspapers have room to grow.
Suggesting that like them, newspapers "mine the core product," Urban asked, "If we are so good at local news, how come we don't do it in two or three forms?"
Newspapers are "far too reactive," she said, and often don't know what they are doing when responding to competition.
She advised managers to set goals; keep track of where the money is coming from; trace their share of available advertising, which, though a "mystery" to many papers, is as fundamental a barometer as market penetration; and learn what people, including readers, advertisers, the public, employees and shareholders, think of them.