Job One: Building the New News(paper) Hybrid
Important Details: Think “hybrid” today and you think Toyota Prius, the first part-gasoline, part-electric car to become a certified success, a model. We put out of our minds the dozens of part-this, part-that vehicles that proceeded it, and ended up quietly in the dustbin of history. Those models, too, took lots of work, and lots of experimentation. They consumed years of trial and error.
Now, news media is repeating that experience, trying to perfect workable hybrid models that will prove to be hits with readers and advertisers. We’re pre-Prius, though, wandering in the early wilderness.
Ironically, Michigan — the home of the US auto industry — is now becoming the epicenter of hybrid news experimentation as well.
This week, the Gannett-owned Detroit Free Press and MediaNews-owned Detroit News, embarked on a bold hybrid model. As of Monday, the newspaper companies, their business operations managed singly under a joint operating agreement, have cut back home delivery to three days a week. They each offer a slimmed down newsstand edition the other days (Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Saturdays) of the week, and daily e-editions facsimile versions for subscribers. Dave Hunke, head of the business operations, plainly acknowledges that the seven-day-a-week print model was unsustainable in Detroit. Rather than opting for cut after cut, the Detroit model tries a two-prong hybrid:
- immediately and substantially reduce short-term costs, through physical production and distribution savings; and
- ramp up digital operations, accelerating the movement of readers and advertisers already underway.
As the Detroit papers try their hybrid, four Newhouse (formerly Booth chain) Michigan dailies are revving up other hybrid strategies:
- The Ann Arbor News made the biggest splash, grandly announcing its own demise and “online-only” rebirth, then noted in a release the news of two print editions plus a total market circulation product each week.
- Three Newhouse papers simultaneously said they are moving from seven-day dailies to three-day dailies in Flint, Saginaw and Bay City. They also promised lots of web-first and web special content.
- Three other Newhouse dailies (Grand Rapids Press, Kalamazoo Gazette and The Muskegon Chronicle) said they’d keep a seven-day schedule, but scale back wages and benefits for employees.
All in all, the changes amount to a wholesale downsizing of the newspapering in the US’s eighth biggest state, home to about 10 million people.
The moves also showed the difficulty of hybridization. What’s the difference between Ann Arbor’s online-only thrust (with two print editions) and Flint’s three-day-a-week newspaper, with a greater online push? It may well be one of intention, as Ann Arbor’s new publisher and editor aim to start from the ground up, while the other papers peel back print and juice up online.
These changes join more than six dozen other changes in US daily frequency announced in the last year. We can expect more in the months to follow as the fifth US daily publisher, the Sun-Times Media Group in Chicago, declared bankruptcy this week, and all companies, in or out of bankruptcy, contend with the same cost/revenue crunch pressures.
Gannett made its own announcement this week in the business of trying to decide what goes where in publishing these days. It appointed Tara Connell vice-president of ContentOne, its new division aimed, in part, at seeking “new ways to use our content across multiple platforms and in multiple venues as our customers’ media consumption habits change.”
Implications: 2009 clearly marks a turning point for the new Hybrid Age of News(papers), but it is just that, a turning point. Just as hybrids actually took years in the making, it’s worth noting that the US newspaper industry has already experienced a 43% decline in newsprint usage (2003-2008), as it was building up its digital businesses.
Now it’s a race to see who gets the most right the quickest. Hearst is experimenting with its new online-only SeattlePI.com, as Gannett and MediaNews try to learn on the fly in Detroit, and Newhouse maintains a Michigan hothouse of its own.
The key on the business side: holding on to as much as print ad revenue as possible while significantly reducing costs. Newspapers must quickly find a new balance between mass and niche print, with competitive pricing, to keep a strong proportion of their current revenues. They must anticipate a small consumer recovery, and be ready to serve their ad customers nimbly.
You can hear the confusion in ad buyers’ reactions as they try to fathom the changes unfolding before them. Getting and staying close to the ad buyer customer, giving meaning to the consultative sales mantra, is a must. As newspapers lengthen their tether to print, they must act increasingly like digital ad sellers, and that means fully embracing search, social, and video advertising and testing more greatly the changed risk/reware propositions inherent in pay-for-performance ad models.
On the news side, the goals are mushier. Newspaper editors are figuring out how much to blog/how much to story-write, and what the difference in style means. How much to reach out to really reach out to the best community bloggers, and how to integrate or segregate them on site. How much to link to “competitive” local online news sites, something newspapers are loathe to do in print, but which is a web standard. With staff cut way back, how much AP content is it smart to use and claim as your own.
The biggest danger, and the one that has afflicted newspapers since the web’s infancy: a half-hearted embrace of what makes the web different than print, with limp aggregation and community reach-out efforts. As new AnnArbor.com editor Tony Dearing puts it, optimistically, in a recent Q and A, “Look at what we’re doing in Michigan – there is a different strategy in Grand Rapids, in Flint, Detroit, Seattle, Denver – everybody’s trying something different. We made a pretty conscious decision early on, that we were going to start completely new from the ground up….Somewhere in this company, we had to start completely fresh, and say if you were going to start a media organization purely out of nothing, what would you do? What would it look like? How would you do that? The decision was made, once you started looking at it, that the place to do that was Ann Arbor – that it was the best market we had. Definitely the conscious decision was we’re starting something completely new here – we’re not transitioning, we’re not reorganizing, we’re going to start from the ground up and build a news organization for today.”
As newspapers plumb the new hybrids, they’ll find they have lots of companies. We’ve got start-ups like Politico, known for its online savvy, but which collects more than half of its revenue from a print newspaper delivered on and around Capitol Hill. We’ve got drives like the new NBC Local division, which has newly harnessed its owned-and-operated websites and is experimenting with the next generation of broadcast/online hybrids. And, just last month, the hoary NewsHour from the Public Broadcasting System launched its new website, aiming to take advantage of the depth the web offers its TV and radio audiences. That’s a hybrid for the Buick generation. Differently stroked engines for different folks, as hybrids proliferate.