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Say it: The revolution will not be twitterized
Published on 12/03/09
by Zac Echola
I’m a little shocked, though not surprised, by the cheerleading of these 10 ways newspapers are using social media to save the industry.
Few, if any, of the things listed will save the industry.
Let me start by defining “save the industry.”
Newspapers are a poor distribution method in comparison to digital distribution, though they are not unprofitable. However, they do not support large enough margins to overcome the massive debt most newspaper companies took on before the bottom completely fell out. Let me say that again. Newspapers are still profitable business, but the profits they generate can not pay the banks back. Blame the banks for handing out huge loans to newspaper executives who expected to sustain profit margins well over 15 percent. But blame doesn’t save anything.
The Internet will not save newspapers. So, suggesting that the Seattle P-I or Rocky Mountain News or any other former newspaper company go online-only is not helpful. Going online-only doesn’t magically make bankruptcy and the loans that lead to bankruptcy go away. If it were that simple, newspapers would make more than a handful of dollars from digital revenue and probably wouldn’t be in this big of a mess to begin with, since margins can run considerably higher for online media.
The newspapers that will eventually die in the coming months and years will do so under the weight of their debt, their bravado and their inabilty to adapt to rapid changes in the market. But let me say this again, the Internet won’t save the newspaper. It cannot support the cost of distributing the newspaper in its current form.
“Saving the industry” is not a matter of redefining journalism. It is a matter of recapturing lost revenue. Journalism isn’t necessarily broken. It is still an incredibly cheap way to deliver warm bodies to advertisers. But the core business of newspapers is not journalism. It is advertising. What’s killing newspapers isn’t an over abundance of information on the Web, it’s that the huge piles of advertising revenue evaporated from newspapers and they neglected building a solid business foundation online.
It was not an overnight thing. The bottom didn’t fall out because the recession hit. The bottom fell out because, for years, newspapers didn’t respond to the craigslists, the Monsters and the eBays of the world. Upwords of half their revenue slipped away as they sat by and watched. They focused too heavily on “hyper-local” without understanding what that actually meant. Instead of building huge networks of granular advertising, building on the reach of each Web site, they walled themselves off, they spent much of their energy focused on replicating online what worked for print. The display ad mentality, the overzealous protection of the “core” print product and the shameless lack of foresight and innovation, day after day, month after month, year after year, put most newspapers in a horrible position for turning a large and sustainable profit online.
It might be too late to save the industry. However, I think there’s still a glimmer of hope, though it dims every moment wasted on micropayments and absurdly drawn out conversations of whether or not allow comments on the site (flip a fucking coin already).
That hope doesn’t come from twitter. It doesn’t come from APIs or live blogging. It doesn’t come from attempts to attract more readers online or false hope in the Amazon Kindle or Google as saviors. Many news sites already have plenty of traffic. Lack of traffic or want of news is not the problem here. The problem is that the industry hasn’t properly figured out how to profit from that traffic. This is not an audience problem. This is not a journalism problem. This is entirely a business problem. Our problem has been that we’re entirely focused on the wrong damn thing.
The newspaper business has never been in the journalism business. Journalism is a means to an end (an end that unfortunately may no longer support the luxury of “wasteful” spending on bureaus and months long investigations that turn up little to no news). The true core business is not newspaper production and distribution, it’s advertising.
If you want to save the industry, do it by focusing on things that will generate revenue. If people aren’t buying run-of-site display ads online, it’s because they’re ineffectual and expensive. Newspapers need to stop managing dwindling client lists and start actively seeking out new advertisers. To do that, they need to have the products in place to target new advertisers, to increase the reach of their network and the right technology to segment their audience.
They need data. I’m still surprised that so many news sites haven’t bothered to tap into the wealth of user information available through Facebook Connect. Instead they’re spending their time creating pages within Facebook that merely link to their sites full of ineffectual advertising, if they have any advertising at all. Or worse, spending gobs of time and money reinventing the wheel by building hyper-local social networks from scratch.
I have a few posts in the works that deeply address targeting new advertisers, increasing reach and segmenting audience. They’ll all go up over the next few days.
The end. Or is it?
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