Law 12 – Mind the Gaps

In the hurly-burly of digital content innovation and monetization, it’s hard to figure out what things are, so we try to find apt comparisons. With the new Next Issue digital newsstand, let’s think Netflix or Pandora or Spotify as the closest cousins. Next Issue, the offspring of five prosperous parents (Time Inc., Conde Nast, Hearst, Meredith, and News Corp.), launched last night what I think will be a model-changing product for publishers. In short, the Next Issue kiosk idea is transformative — though we’ll have to see how quickly customers take to its unknown brand.

The 100-product-a-year model is a much-needed growth model. We can see how it fits nicely with all-access subscriptions, and together we have two interconnected Lego blocks of a new sustainable news model. We have two essential parts of a crossover model (“The Newsonomics of Crossover”) that I detailed here a few weeks ago. The big, hairy challenges of accelerating print ad loss and onerous legacy costs remain, but at least we’ve got a couple of building blocks we didn’t have two years ago.

The 39-minute Daisey piece did what dozens of previous stories on Foxconn’s massive manufacturing of our Apple (and other) wonders hadn’t accomplished: It captured listeners’ imaginations. Why? Daisey turned our portable pleasures to guilty ones. Then, within two weeks, The New York Times began publishing a series on Apple, China, job creation, and Foxconn. Where Daisey made Americans care anew, the Times did what it does best: It hammered at the Foxconn record, detailing it with exhaustive reporting and all the data it could uncover.

First published at Nieman Journalism Lab We watch a conveyor belt of passing numbers, moving faster and faster. A few stand out and capture our imagination. The passing of print advertising in the U.S. has caught everyone’s attention in the last month (though we saw that passage in the U.K. two years ago). The gap [...]

For now, let’s boil it down the how to 5 P’s:

People: As in customers. Few newspapers — probably a dozen or fewer in the U.S. — know their combined print and digital audiences as a single audience. It takes a lot of technology moving to get a single, whole view of a customer, matching the subscriber database with the digital registration database to get a holistic view. Without that view, it’s tough to operate a modern, somewhat digital/somewhat print business — and maximize the value of new pay propositions. The New York Times, the Star Tribune, and the Commercial Appeal are among those who do, and papers as small as The Day are getting there.
Product: This is a simple question of content. How much strong local coverage are readers missing after a half decade of staff cuts? The better a news organization covers its community, the more it can dare to charge and still get customer traction. Some papers may simply have already cut too much.
Presentation: Consumers — us — understand the all-access pitch. News (and magazine) publishers have to make it real. That means real ready-for-the-tablet (and smartphone) products, app-based and HTML5. Replica-plus products will satisfy paying readers less and less over time — and won’t compete with Flipboard-esque experiences.
Pricing: Enough said. Newspaper (and magazine) pricing has been fairly dumb over the years, a follow-the-leader, seat-of-the-pants exercise. Playing with the value equation, print and digital, requires both testing and matching of new value to new price.
Promotion: More than just marketing, the new promotion makes better psychological sense of the all-access proposition to older and newer (and younger) customers