The newspaper industry is failing! Oh my god, let’s all freak out and talk about it!!! The operating loss newspapers are feeling is, in some cases, around 50 million a year. That’s 50 million in the red and that’s a lot of money for a single newspaper. What’s the problem well there are a few issues to each serve as unique nails in the coffin for print media in general.
- More people are getting their news on the Internet and they’re getting it for free.
- Newspapers rely on classifieds for the bread & butter and these days, everything is on eBay, Craigslist or hundreds of other listing sites that are free or drastically cheeper to list your items and they reach a broader audience.
- Advertising dollars are shrinking and newspapers aren’t lowing prices for the spots and neither are magazines so ads just dry up.
So if you’re a newspaper and no one is putting up classifieds, and there aren’t any advertisers and not a single person to buy a copy of this paper, it makes total sense why the newspapers would be failing. In typical consumer fashion, all I freaking read about is how newspapers are failing and not a single person talks about solutions, throws out ideas or contributes something that is tangible, real and useful to these giant media companies. I’m a blogger with zero experience in the print industry and I’m going to throw out some ideas that I have. They’re probably wrong but hell, I don’t see anyone else contributing their ideas and if all of you guys are just going to sit around and write about how newspapers are dying and boo-hoo this is sad then maybe I’m on to something by actually contributing a bit of knowledge instead of picking what suit to wear to the newspaper funeral.
- Lower prices across the board. If you’re going to survive, let’s go back to the 15 cent newspaper days and I actually remember these days. It was awesome and newspapers were affordable! Isn’t the daily price like 50 cents now?
- Shrink your paper and focus your news on national headlines. Use more Associated Press or Reuters stories and spend less time paying dozens of reporters that just cover local news. Local is very important but you don’t have to make it a huge part of the paper.
- Scrap classifieds or make classifieds free with only 50 spots available. Every morning at 8AM the classifieds open and once they’re sold out, that’s it! It adds value to your readers and the Internet will actually talk about this and generate buzz for your paper.
- If anything, automate classifieds and make it web accessible. Fire the person taking classifieds manually and over the phone and make classifieds just like craigslist. Free to list online and you pay via credit card if you want to be in the print version. Automating the process can save some newspapers up to 15 salaries a year even the layout of the classifieds can be automatic.
- There’s nothing wrong with pay cuts. I’d take a pay cut just to keep my job and so will many of your employees. This is a trend lately and employees are receptive to pay cuts and pretty much expecting it.
- Automate advertisements via the web site as well. Cut your sales team and require one editor to review ads before they go to print to ensure the ads maintain the integrity of your publication but ads are cheap via the web at the start of the day or month and then go up nearing deadline and advertisers would love it if you didn’t sell an ad on today’s page A2, you would simply use whoever had that spot yesterday so advertisers have a chance of getting a day for free. That will never happen because companies will step up at the idea of getting a free day and you’ll always sell out.
These are just some opinions from a buy with a blog that doesn’t have experience in the newspaper industry but these are ideas that any of you are free to use. Why can’t others step up and come up with ideas instead of just waiting for papers to die. To start I’m going to pickup my rotary telephone and order the Sunday paper from the SF Chronicle. It’s pretty cheap just to do Sunday and this is my small commitment to keeping the newspaper alive just a little bit longer. Together we can keep real media alive because sometimes citizen journalism isn’t the best form of news.