Serving Those Who Don't Read the Print Edition

By: E&P Staff A few months ago, I wrote about dropping my long-held print subscription to my local newspaper, ending a reading habit that dated back to my childhood. That column resulted in a fair bit of criticism getting hurled my way, most of it from people in the newspaper business who seemed to think that I had committed a heresy.

Of course, what I did is what many before me have already done, and what many more will do subsequently: Shift the platform for getting news from print to more modern digital forms.

And it's not only because new technology provides an excellent -- many would say better -- alternative to the old printed form. There are environmental concerns about supporting a product that consumes precious resources: trees for the product and oil for delivery. Continuing to receive printed newspapers delivered by pollution-spewing delivery vehicles when an environmentally friendly digital alternative is available is also a moral choice that a growing number of people will make in the years ahead, as the Green movement continues to gain momentum.

What my newspaper critics were complaining about, of course, was that people like me are undercutting their journalistic capabilities by reducing their companies' revenues before they've figured out how to replace lost print revenues with comparable digital revenues.

So I want to follow up that column with a more positive one, and offer some ideas for serving the growing number of people like me -- those who used to read print editions of newspapers but have switched to digital media for their news -- as well as people who have never read newspapers but still have needs for local news and information.

An (odd?) idea: Raise the price
Before I dive into those ideas, there's a related element of the issue to address. The Poynter Institute's Rick Edmonds recently wrote about the idea of raising the price of newspaper print subscriptions as a way to generate more revenue. ("What Should a Newspaper Cost?.") He pointed out that the newsstand price of 50 cents (typical in the U.S.) is much lower than in Europe, and broached the idea that publishers should raise it (and home-subscription prices) to improve their bottom lines.

While I'm not sure I'm ready to endorse that idea outright, I do think it's worth considering. Many futurists predict that in the years ahead print editions will still exist, but they'll be consumed only by older, more affluent audiences willing to pay the price (and, I'll add, those who are not as comfortable or enamored with digital technology). I think that's spot-on. So raising prices well may result in losing some price-sensitive subscribers and single-copy buyers, but I think those will be lost in time anyway. Those people willing to stick with the print edition longer term are likely to be less price-sensitive; they'll stick around as customers whether you keep print prices cheap or raise them by a reasonable amount. Don't go crazy with print price increases and you may be OK. And be ready with digital alternatives so that you can continue to serve people who decide to dump print.

But back to serving people in your community who are not your customers. Let's look at both your former print customers (people like me) and those who will become your ex-customers in the next couple years, as well as people who have never been your customers.

Show me the news
Those of us who've given up the newspaper print edition haven't changed all that much. We still want news -- just in a format that's more relevant to our lives in the age of the broadband Internet and mobile connectivity. We haven't given up on newspapers; we've given up on the traditional platform. Former print-edition readers still want the news delivered to them, so newspaper publishers need to put more effort into developing useful digital delivery services.

Recently, I learned about a large tornado that was forming not far from where I live through an e-mail news alert from my local newspaper. That's great, though I rarely receive such alerts from this paper. And it doesn't offer many other ways to receive its news digitally -- other than the ubiquitous daily e-mail newsletter (which offers limited customization) and a limited number of RSS feeds. That's fairly typical in the newspaper industry today.

I believe there are a several ways upon which can be improved:

1. The paper should have a phone headline-alert service, so that I get major breaking news on my cell phone. The service should be customizable, so that I can choose a level of news that I wish to receive this way. Perhaps I only want headline alerts on my phone that are of the highest news priority. Or maybe I can tolerate more messages via cell phone and choose to receive several alerts a day for the top stories. As more and more people upgrade to smartphones like Apple's iPhone, they'll want to receive more news via this mobile channel.

2. E-mail news subscriptions offered by most newspapers are, frankly, pretty limited and lame at this point. I'd like to see them become more sophisticated. Offer the aforementioned priority threshold, so that subscribers can decide how much they want to get. Allow customization, so that a sports fan's e-mail puts sports news at the top, if that's what he/she wants. Support keyword selection of topics, and/or provide a lengthy list of topics that readers can choose to subscribe. Support including specific columnists or reporters in the e-mail deliveries. Let the subscriber select when to receive the customized e-newsletter (which might be multiple times a day for serious news junkies).

3. Offer headline alert services for other online services and platforms that people may use. Twitter, for example, is increasingly popular, and a growing number of newspapers and other news outlets are publishing Twitter headline feeds that anyone can "follow." This can be an effective news-dissemination tool, but only if there's a degree of customization possible. A Twitter users following your headline-news feed will tire of it if the feed pumps out dozens of messages a day, and most of them aren't of interest to the Twitter follower. But offered with some personalization features, it can be a great way to drive people to the newspaper website.

4. Scrape the rest of the local web and include it in the customizable delivery services above. This is where, currently, newspapers frequently fall short. There are gigabytes of news and information produced by others within your community -- independent bloggers, other media outlets, government agencies, community groups, non-profits, sports leagues, etc. -- that people in your town care about. A service that points them to external content that's relevant to their interests can be a valuable service.

5. Don't forget about classifieds. A customizable alert service (for whatever digital channel the user chooses) should let subscribers know when products or services that they're seeking turn up. But take a hint from No. 4 above: Newspaper classifieds are no longer as relevant in the age of Craigslist, et al, so think about creating a service that searches across multiple online classifieds venues as well as the newspaper's classifieds.

6. Delivery of merchant deals and discounts is another service that I'd love to see. Let me customize what I'm interested in and receive offers from local businesses. That will be a great addition to the delivery services I've described above.

Paying for it
The ideas above will go far in keeping former print subscribers well informed of what's going on in their community, and plugged in to local business offers that are relevant to them. Indeed, they'll probably know more than if they only read the print edition of the newspaper.

But how should newspaper publishers fund these kinds of digital services (and the overall news operation, in light of lost print revenues)? Well, if the digital services are good and useful enough, I think you can persuade people to pay a reasonable amount for them. While all the content that's described above can be found for free on the newspaper's Web site and on external websites, there's a big convenience factor for what I've outlined here. I think you can charge for some of these services, and people like me will pay for them. Paying for convenience is more likely to be a successful strategy than paying for the content.

After all, I dropped my newspaper print subscription because that medium no longer works for me. Right now, I receive my local paper's daily e-mails with top headlines (free), and I frequent its Web site to stay current on local news (also free). But if the paper offered me a premium service that did a great job of aggregating and filtering local news and information according to my preferences, I'd pay a reasonable fee for that.

An approach worth exploring is to offer different grades of service, including a free level. This is standard operating procedure for many web companies, so there's precedent; you can learn from those who have gone before you with this approach. A free version might include intrusive advertising and fewer customization features, for example. Customized discounts delivered from local merchants might be a feature that's only available to those who pay.

About the fees: I used to pay a couple hundred bucks a year for my print subscription to the local newspaper. The paper is not going to get that much money from me for digital services, frankly, but I'll definitely pay a few bucks a month for a digital information filtering and delivery service that offers high convenience value by saving me from searching for news and information that's relevant to me. Many people will have no tolerance for paying at all, of course, but that's why you have an ad-supported, reduced-feature free version.

In case you're thinking that I'm advocating a system that's something like the New York Times' old TimesSelect service, I'm not. That paid-subscription service walled off selected "premium" content; only paying subscribers could see it. What I'm talking about is charging for convenience and information tools; content is free for anyone willing to seek it out, supported by advertising.

Consider that the markets for these services are not only your former customers who no longer want print, but also people who have never been readers of the newspaper. Just because these are people who have relied on TV, radio, and the Web for news till now does not mean that they will not use a service by a newspaper company if it gives them good value.

Most newspapers as yet have not reached their potential for serving non-newspaper readers. As the industry's prospect quickly slide further and further downhill, I will suggest that the focus in the next couple of years must shift much more toward serving those for whom print is an outdated medium. I've presented just a few preliminary ideas; much more is possible.

Who at your newspaper company is in charge of this important effort?