N.Y. Times' SF Edition Plays Inside-Out Game
Tired of playing defense and readying itself for offense,
the New York Times’ formal announcement of its San Francisco “edition” this
week shows us how a world is moving and how the Times and Wall Street Journal (which also will offer an SF edition soon) are taking their battle to a city near you.
In this case, it’s a new inside-out world.
Forever it seems, the U.S. has press has been dominated by
metros. This vast country of 300 million only supports three national dailies,
and one of those, USA Today, is largely supported by the hospitality industry
and business travel.
The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal built national
(and budding global) franchises, but make minor inroads in any single city,
five percent or less of print market share in most places. They’ve served an intelligentsia.
It was the metro daily that brought us our worlds. Yes,
local, but also heavily national and international news, all sports news,
business news, movies, TV and entertainment. They picked and chose what we
needed to know about the world and we bought the package for decades.
The metros picked out a few Times and/or Journal stories,
among other “wires” and put them in the package.
What we see in the Times’ regional push is now inside out. We bring you the world, the Times is
saying, and now, we’ll bring you
some local, too. After, all, local is important, but it’s just a (small) part
of what you want to know about the world everyday.It’s a smart strategy, one born out of the Times’ new
understanding of potential unlocked by the web and one born out of the
cratering of the metro press. Why and why now?
- The metro
press seemed like an impregnable castle. It assembled a mass audience, a
mass market, and the barriers to compete against – those castle walls of
printing presses, distribution systems, ad sales forces and huge newsrooms –
told competitors: “Don’t even try.” Internet competition exposed cracks. The
recession is forcing a downsizing of the industry by a third or more has now
left the castles’ flanks open. In the Bay Area, the Mercury News flank is wide open, having seen a newsroom of 400 in 2000 now cut to 125. The Chronicle's loss in staff are similarly dramatic. Why not start with the Bay Area, a highly educated, affluent, now under-served market?
- Web
economics provided a new path to start-ups and get-biggers. Into the
openings are rushing a variety of competitors. In the San Francisco Bay Area, that means such forces as KQED
public radio, Warren Hellman’s new start-up (both we believe to allied with the
new New York Times’ push), emerging broadcast-based websites and others. Across
the country, we see dozens of start-ups, awakening public radio stations, and
TV broadcasters seeing that assembling a half-dozen to a dozen to a few dozen
people and creating a digitally-based news organization is now possible.
Foundations have become enablers, as they see civic conversation drained of its
fundamental food, news.
- The
Times’ new edition now gives something more to print subscribers – more
regional pages on Friday and Sunday to start. That’s as part a retention
strategy – remind me why I should keep paying more and more for this print edition,
when I can get the Times free online? – as it is a new print customer one. Hold
onto to those print customers as long as you can, and each year the ad revenue
helps you make that digital transformation.
- The Times’
can now play with a more complete inside-out idea – bringing its online
customers the whole world. It can deliver reports from Afghanistan, Jerusalem
and Belfast and your local and
hyper-local news. It just needs good local editors and good local partnerships
to do the latter. Imagine the Times’ Global Edition
toggle button getting a new buddy: Local Edition, tuned to a mix of national
and your local news.
Overall, this a is new level of
competition, and competition’s good, right? That’s what we believe in U.S., we keep telling ourselves.
For the metro dailies, this new competition
is another reminder that coming out of the recession won’t bring them back to
the challenging, but still profitable, times of 2006-2007. These are new times
with new competitors. Recovery will brings lots of competitors out of the
woodwork. As the Detroit papers retrenched in home delivery, the Journal made
noises about expanding its Detroit presence and doing what the Times has announced in the Bay Area. So
expect these two increasingly head-to-head competitors, the Times and the
Journal, to map the U.S. and decide where to go when. In addition, in the recent Bloomberg/Washington Post announcement, we see the further re-writing of the national/local rules. Bloomberg says to daily newspapers, which have rapidly retreated from business news coverage, we'll be your business section online. (And, of course, in beefing up with Business Week, it adds more heft.)
What we're seeing is the onset of a new set of re-knitting edited packages of news. News publishers, and editors, are trying to find new formulas to bring readers back from the ping-ponging effect of Yahoo News, Google News and the like, saying, stay on our site, we'll bring you a better package of news, drawn from the best sources. Expect to see lots of combos and re-combinations as experiments multiply in 2010.
For metros, the gauntlet is thrown down:
You say you’re local, prove it.
Metros have cut back on their nation/world reports in print, and often online, re-orienting their diminished staffs more toward local. Yet, to readers, it seems like they keep losing things and gain little new in return. Now, we see the Dallas Morning News setting out in a new direction as publisher Jim Moroney has signaled an aggressive strategy and doing local with more gusto. In Seattle, Miami and Charlotte, aided by Knight Foundation match-making and money, metros are figuring out how to partner with good local, reporting-oriented blogs as well. All metros will have to move aggressively, figuring out the formulas that cause readers to pause and see their brands in new light.
Otherwise, this new unexpected competition of the global (Times, Journal) re-combining with the other local (public radio, start-ups, broadcasters) will pull away readers and advertisers just as metros have re-gaining some small optimism for the coming year.
Curious times as we enter the next decade.
out?
