Still a Profit Mystery to Newspapers p.

By: Mark Fitzgerald

Audiotex is drawing large numbers of callers but some newspapers are disappointed with its impact on ad revenue
ONCE AGAIN AT an industry gathering, audiotex pioneers came with a lot of big numbers to talk about.
For instance, 89,000 attempts to reach the Kansas City (Mo.) Star's StarTouch voice recording of baseball star George Brett batting his 3,000th hit.
Or 26,000 calls for the Sacramento (Calif.) Bee's brand-new BeeFax services. Or nearly 100,000 calls ? at 35? each ? in the first 15 weeks of the Palm Beach (Fla.) Post's innovative 511 phone service.
Yet once again, this time at the recent Nexpo in New Orleans, the executives seemed not to know just what these impressive call volumes portend for the future of voice services and newspapers.
In remarks that could have served as a voice data communications keynote, the Baltimore Sun's Scott Whiteside began by saying, "Some of what I am going to say is worthless, frankly. And some is very accurate and important. The problem is I don't know which is which.
"It is even unclear whether the phone and the fax have a future at all," said Whiteside, vice president for strategic planning and advanced systems at the Sun.
"Fax and audiotex may be just temporary platforms," he said. "As small as they are now, they may be smaller in the future."
Certainly, audiotex already has failed to deliver ad revenue for newspapers, argued Eric Douglas, director of marketing and strategic planning for the Bee.
"The audiotex experience has been widely a disappointment," Douglas said.
For one thing, he said, audiences are "tuning out the ads" on audiotex, mostly, Douglas adds, because the ads are awful.
For another, advertisers have become suspicious about audiotex's ability to deliver the promised demographics.
Douglas noted that two major advertisers on the Bee's BeeLine service ? Jenny Craig Weight Loss Centers and PacTel Cellular ? dropped out after aggressive advertising campaigns "because they couldn't link gains to audiotex."
"Even when the advertisers are on audiotex, they are not seeing the results," he said.
This experience has led Douglas and other newspaper voice service experts to conclude that audiotex and other voice services work best when they are firmly tied to print.
At the Star, that has meant generating recordings as fast as the news develops.
When Red Barber died, for instance, a box by the obituary directed callers to a recording of the sportscaster doing a baseball game play-by-play. The Star also uses its system as a news source, successfully soliciting scores of stories on such topics as bad bosses or female war veterans.
StarTouch receives about 10,000 calls a day and is on track to generate about $200,000 in revenue this year ? enough, the paper says, to about break even.
The link with print persuaded the Bee to go to fax, Douglas said.
"If audiotex works best when tied to print, then why not tie it to its own print device, which is the fax?" he said.
Buoyed by research showing that fully 45% of subscribers had access to a fax at home or at work, the paper introduced BeeFax April 1 with 100 different fax products.
While the paper anticipated an audience of about 4,000 delivered faxes a month, Douglas said, in April, the volume was 13,000. In May, the number doubled to 26,000, he said.
Advertising has followed the big numbers, Douglas reported.
Pep Boys, the auto parts chain, signed a contract for $11,000 a month, with ads both on fax and audiotex lines. BeeFax is one example of what the Sun's Whiteside calls "branding" newspaper voice data or telephone products.
The link between voice and print may even survive paid calls, argues the Post's director of new ventures, Dan Shorter.
"I may be crazy to say this, but I think we can get some print advertising out of this. With a minimum amount of effort, we have already sold advertising so far ? new advertising," Shorter said.
Shorter called the 511 project "a two-year R&D [research and development] experiment" that is not dependent on making money.