Show me the money
Perhaps the most important question we (in the newspaper business) need to answer is “how do we make money?”
Databases, data aggregation, mashups and all the like are valuable to the consumer/user, and probably draw a decent amount of traffic to news web sites… but supporting that kind of content with banner ads? Or *gulp* worse yet, up sells for business directory listings?
This is where we, in the newspaper industry, are stuck. We don’t need more ways to serve content, we need better ways to make money.
Newspapers are not going to survive on pay-per-click advertising alone. It’s just not enough. What we really need to do is to re-think our business models and advertising strategies.
But we can’t ignore the core business, we have to continue churning out the daily newspaper. It’s like managing a start-up while at the same time continuing to run an established business. You have different cultures, different schedules, different strategies and different business models and in many ways, they’re actually competing against each other.
For a time, we focused on building newsrooms where print, broadcast and online could converge to create new and exciting content. But maybe it’s better to actually separate the online business from the core print business? A little healthy competition might spur some interesting innovations. Maybe then we could introduce strategic thinking and advertising together in the online newsroom.
I realize that many professionals in our industry fear what would happen if we were to cross “the line,” but that’s why we teach ethics, right? If we continue to put up a wall between editorial and advertising I’m afraid we will fail to optimize opportunities. Now is the time to be thinking of new ways to provide value to both the consumer/user and the advertiser. The definition of news is changing.
There isn’t going to one “thing” that will save us, but perhaps, overtime, there will be series of changes that will provide opportunities for newspapers in the digital age.