Like gardening, or gold mining, at one time

 

Six men are gathered on the front deck of the The Crusher, the first newspaper in Fremont (Cripple Creek, Teller County), Colorado. Oakley Spell, a young boy, holds a bundle of newspapers under his arm; a sign on the log building reads: "The Crusher." The Crusher was the Teller County ancestor of the following three papers I managed at the time: Ute Pass Courier in Woodland Park, the Gold Rush in Cripple Creek and the Extra in Teller County, all ASP Westward LP weeklies in Colorado.
 Date: 1891 W. H. Jackson sample album. Colorado Book IV. no. 33
Creator: Jackson, William Henry, 1843-1942. 

Watching your garden,
and newspaper, grow

From September 2006 editon of Newspapers & Technology
By Rob Carrigan, robcarrigan1@gmail.com 

Managing newspapers is like managing a garden.
You really can’t make things grow; you can only try to establish and maintain conditions that help the various plants take off and hopefully produce.
You need to watch where you position specific varieties in your pre-planning or the pumpkins will cross with the squash, and the corn will block the sun that the beans need.
Likewise, with a newspaper, you don’t want your TMC shopper choking the main news product to death.
Not too long ago, a publisher could simply scratch a shallow hole in the dirt, drop some seed money into it, make sure it received plenty of water and maybe spread a little manure over it now and then.

With a little hard work and luck, that same publisher would be able to reap a substantial harvest. Today, with all the new fertilizers and other technology flying around, making the right choices to grow a newspaper is that much more complicated.

Free versus paid
Take, for example, the “free versus paid” discussion, which is somewhat akin to “volunteer” seeding versus planting.
Because of churn ratios and other factors relating to the cost of circulation sales, some metro dailies are now paying more to maintain paid circulation than it would cost them to give everyone in a market a free paper. And they are losing the war as paid circulation continues to lose ground.
At the same time, readers, and more importantly, advertisers, are becoming less impressed with paid circulation, especially when some of the best things in life now are free.
In the words of Craig McMullin, executive director for the Association of Free Community Papers, “Give people something they need free and create an audience and the advertisers will pay the freight.”
But that is not the complete answer for newspapers.
Our competitors have also figured that out. The business models of Craigslist, Google and to some extent, eBay, all are based on the same principle.

Redefining roles
Additionally, even as newspapers redefine their marketing, the role of journalism itself is being recrafted.
Dan Gillmor’s recent book, “We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People,” explores that possibility.
“Technology has given us the communications toolkit that allows anyone to become a journalist at little cost... Nothing like this has ever been remotely possible before.” Gillmor wrote.
To Gillmor, news is no longer a lecture in which the media tells you what the news is. Instead, it’s a conversation, with blurred lines between producers and consumers of that news.

Embracing change
Gillmor’s suggestion: Media needs to embrace those changes by encouraging readers to become a big part of the process. Facilitate event blogs that let readers contribute and become a part of the coverage, he says. Ask for and post readers’ information, pictures and audio so they become extensions of limited staffs and resources.
Today, a person with a cell phone or other digital device might be able to produce the photos or audio clips nearly as easy as the major players in the news business.
The bright spot? The news industry’s traditional weeding function will help it survive.
After all, with all the citizen reporting and info gathering taking place in the democratization of the news, it’s more necessary than ever for a good editor to take the hoe to those pesky mistakes, misinformation, hoaxes, spin doctoring and other weeds that can render the garden plot useless.

At the time of this writing, Rob Carrigan specialized in prepress systems for weekly newspapers. He was the publisher of the Ute Pass Courier in Woodland Park, the Gold Rush in Cripple Creek and the Extra in Teller County, all ASP Westward LP weeklies in Colorado. He can be reached by e-mail at robcarrigan1@gmail.com

Love paper business so much, couldn't make the change

Newspapers in the information business?

This post first appeared in Newspapers & Technology in January, 2007.

By Rob Carrigan, robcarrigan1@gmail.com

I don’t know how many times in the last year I’ve heard someone with their feet mired in the traditional ink-on-paper newspaper business try to argue that he is really in the information business.

Some of those characters even believe it. But the cement around their ankles and thought processes keeps them slogging away with the old models and methods while the world changes quickly around them.

Tim McGuire, editor and senior vice president of the (Minneapolis) Star Tribune, is quoted on the subject in “The Art of Leadership in News Organizations” by Shelby Coffey III.

“Many people have heard the old story about railroads and how they should have realized they were in the transportation business in the same way newspapers ought to realize they are in the information business,” according to McGuire. “I heard someone else say a few years ago that in fact the railroad people knew they needed to be in the transportation business. They just loved the railroads so much they couldn’t make the change. There is a lot of that in our business.” Indeed there is.

Under attack

From adapted news cycles, changing views in objective journalism, and generally trying to come up with new ways of paying the bills, traditional newspapers quite correctly feel like the business is under attack.

And what is the natural reaction when under attack? Usually, hunker down in a hole and keep your head down. But if it doesn’t look like that is going to work, maybe it is time to try a counter-attack, or, alternatively, come out of the hole with all guns blazing.

In a world of instant feedback and precise, automated ad targeting — a lot of us waited far too long before coming out of that hole with guns blazing.

It is a bit like the scene in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” where the whole Bolivian army is waiting.

“The losers are likely to be those companies that try to make money by pouring old-media wine into the new Web bottles,” notes Business 2.0 magazine in its March edition. “The winners will be the players that invent new ways to tap into what the Web brings to the party; instant feedback, instant analysis, and the collective wisdom of a billion users.”

Advertisers and the agencies that represent them have become much more savvy in finding out what works and what doesn’t — in a very short amount of time — and they vote with their wallets.

We have gone way past the days when someone could say, “Half of my advertising works like a charm and half does me absolutely no good, but the trouble is, I’m not sure which half is which.”

For example, ad agency Ogilvy & Mather now uses a software optimizer that runs 5,000 to 10,000 calculations every time it evaluates how well an ad campaign is working.

Dynamic results

With that data, the agency is able to pull non-performing ads right away or adapt the campaigns on the fly. And some advertising vendors on the Web have gone to a pay-for-performance program in which publishers only get paid for advertising if it sells product or creates verifiable results in the form of leads or an order.

Imagine if newspapers went to such a system.

The unfortunate truth of the matter is that newspapers, with a few exceptions, don’t even do a very good job of keeping track of their own vast stores of information, much less data tracking readers and how they use the information provided.

For that reason, I think a lot of the rhetoric about being in the information business is perhaps just wishful thinking.

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