The world as it should be

Three umpires were talking before a game:
“Somes are balls and somes are strikes, and I call ‘em as I see ‘em.”
“Somes are balls and somes are strikes, and I call them as they are.”
“Somes are balls and somes are strikes, but they ain’t nothin’ til I call ‘em.

I use this little tale to get my students talking about critical thinking, scientific research, evidence and writing. But it has value beyond the classroom.

One simple parsing of the third umpire’s statement is that naming something helps create the  “isness” of that something. Calling a dandelion a flower is different from calling it a weed,  in terms of our emotional reaction toward it.

Calling the act of charging for the processing of information and data into news a “paywall”
is part of the problem. A wall naturally separates two things. Calling it a wall gives it a  negative spin. Why not call it a portal?

People used AOL for many years as a paid “portal” to both its own content and eventually to
the Internet. That ended after a while not because people refused to pay at all, but because AOL no longer offered content that could not be gotten elsewhere for free.

Despite the many people who say that the toothpaste is out of the tube, that newspapers can’t  go back to a paid web model, I think they can. Maybe. If it is done right and by a lot of papers at the same time.

They may not have a choice.

Sure, they will lose some subscribers, probably a lot of subscribers initially, but if they offer value, people will pay to get it.

People pay today for access for all sorts of cable channels they can’t get for free elsewhere. They pay for cell phones, text messaging, Netflix, and they pay for high speed Internet access, although you can get dial-up for free or virtually so. I bet most people would be willing to pay a few cents per tweet.

The issue is not so much that people WON’T pay, it’s that you have to give them something they want. Then they’ll pay.

I think that’s going to have to be the model moving forward. Give people something they want and ask them to support it by paying. Relying on CPM advertising is no longer a workable model. Corporate sponsorship along the lines of public radio and television stations might help as well.

This is going to be a painful time for newspapers, and the new version won’t look much like the old, but the creative and bold will survive if they can metamorphize from their caterpillar past into their butterfly future.

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If you need help with your newspaper design, contact me at News Design School.

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My anorexic local paper thumped down by my front door (late, as usual) Sunday morning, but I could hardly find the actual paper among the inserts. Two complete “sections” of inserts, each three times as big as the paper itself.

It is as if the Sunday newspaper carrier is a paid deliverer of inserts, and oh yeah, here are a few pages of news.

On Monday morning when I picked up the paper, it was so thin I honestly thought the carrier had left out a few sections. Nope. Just thinner than ever.

Then I thought about those inserts the day before. ROP advertising is down, but are inserts? Doesn’t seem like it in my local paper. I understand that newspapers get about $25 per thousand for the inserts. This is considerably less than they get for ROP ads, which help increase the pages in the paper.

Clearly, advertisers still want to reach newspaper subscribers, at least on Sundays. In 2007, more than $5 billion was spent on advertising inserts, according to a knowledgeable blogger. It may be lower now, but probably not much.

If the desire to spend that much money remains strong as newspaper readers are going away, what is going to happen to those insert dollars as we move toward the web? Turn inserts into web site pop-ups? That’s not going to work, but I have an idea.

The USPS is losing money. Maybe they could get into the insert delivery business on Sundays — and deliver mail as well, taking Mondays off instead — as newspapers complete their migration to the web. People could sign up or not, saving paper and trees.

Maybe some advertisers would run more Sunday ROP ads instead. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a thick Sunday morning paper again?

I hope someone will enlighten me about the economics of Sunday inserts….

After viewing a few internet marketing videos from Stompernet.com
(https://stompernet.infusionsoft.com/go/F5BD/newsds/), I wondered if any of the ideas could be applied to the newspaper business. Extra cash through better marketing might be the answer to outsourcing the repetitive tasks to free you to do the more creative, long-term work. I’m not a newspaper publisher (I don’t even play one on TV or the web), and I am sure it’s more complicated than this, but I think you’ll get the idea.

I’d sure like to understand why this wouldn’t work.

Let’s say you are a 5,000 paid-circulation weekly newspaper. Let’s also assume you want to keep your print version alive, and for this discussion, we’ll leave out rack sales, as well as fixed and operating costs and the like — numbers that would vary widely anyway. Your current paid subscription rate is $20 per year for a gross of $100,000 per year.

Now remember the key to surviving, if not thriving, in today’s market is to KEEP YOU CURRENT SUBSCRIBERS. Gaining new subscribers can still be done, but that’s an extra expense with less potential than better serving your current loyal customers. You already know they are paying customers. Make it hard for them to quit.

If you increased your subscription rate by a mere 5 percent, that would mean an increase of a buck for your readers, but $5,000 to you, with no increase in costs beyond your marketing materials to sell the increase to your subscribers. Think you could outsource a few of those weekly mundane activities you are bogged down in with a little extra cash, leaving you time to focus on growing your circulation?

But wait, there’s more — as they say on those TV ads.

Let’s say you increase your subscription rate by $3, still a small amount over the course of a year for your readers. Some of you are probably already sweating over the thought of raising your subscription costs by 15 percent. Why, it’s madness, you may be thinking.

But that’s $15,000 extra gross revenue, so it’s worth kicking around. Let’s do a little more math. Let’s say that a few of your readers get ticked off and cancel. How many readers would you have to lose to break even, to be back at your starting point of $100,000 in revenue?

A hundred? Three hundred? How about losing 650, or 13 percent of your subscribers and be no worse off than before you raised the price! (Actually you could lose 652 subscriptions, but let’s round it off.) One could argue that many of those were likely about to quit the paper anyway through churn, but that’s not the point.

Do you honestly think that you would lose 13 percent of your subscribers over $3, the cost of one tall (small) latte at Starbucks per year? (Which, come to think of it, might be a good marketing line….)

The key is to spend some effort in showing the TOTAL VALUE of subscribing to your paper in your marketing materials. There are a few ways you can do this, and much of this you probably have already thought of. So consider these reminders.

1. Would you be willing to spend $23 to get a GUARANTEED return of $52? All a reader would have to do is save a buck a week on average from using the coupons and sales information in your paper. You could point out how easy that is to do and that after a few months for the average reader, the paper is FREE for the rest of the year. You can’t beat free. BUT YOU MUST point that out in your marketing messages. Don’t make your readers do the math for you. One free 2-for-1 coupon for a box of cereal alone could be worth more than $2! You should also point how your paper also can save readers TIME, which translates to money in their world, too.

2. Point out ways you are better than your competition — better local content, more names and faces, guaranteed satisfaction or their money back (all of it!), superior customer support, and so on. The idea is to show the VALUE of a subscription, the UNIQUE content or access to content that you provide, in such a way that saying no would obviously be a bad decision.

3. Then, be sure to give them that little bit extra. Give subscribers ADDED value by tossing in some extras, such as having a mailing list that sends out shopping tips or coupons and specials a day early, so they can beat non-subscribers to the deals. You could build a campaign to sell this idea to local businesses, too, which may very well interest them greatly. You could use the scarcity tactic here on your subscribers, by saying the list will be limited and you better hurry to get your spot in the group. ACT NOW! LIMITED AVAILABILITY! These are attention getters.

Use an autoresponder program tied to your web site to send out constant e-mails with links to free items, sales, coupons, interesting news, breaking news (here is where you could use Twitter) and more. This is that EXTRA VALUE I talked about. I use AWeber. It is pretty cheap, and I am quite happy with it.

You can easily create free forums for special interest groups, like young mothers, frugal folks, home gardeners,etc. Don’t overlook goodies you can make available to the subscribers portion of your web site, which I think should be cordoned off from the free part of your site. Despite some research to the contrary, I think you need to make at least part of your web site available only to subscribers. Again, you just have to make your total offer too good to pass up. People are used to paying for cable content, aren’t they?

Speaking of Twitter, it’s hot right now, and your young target market is all over it. It takes almost no time to use and learn and you can provide another (FREE!) service for your readers. More value!

You are really going to have to get your ad staff and your editorial staff working in harmony to get optimum return — and I know that dropping the ever-thinner veil between advertising and editorial is a scary thought to many. But it’s time to modify the old ways of thinking. If the ad staff had an idea of what special packages you were presenting in the coming weeks or months, perhaps they could more easily sell ad space. Think SYNERGY. You can do that and keep the newsroom “clean,” too.

Check out this article for more: tinyurl.com/cxa85v

One more thing the web site can add besides community is more content, which you can get for free from what are called Private Label Rights and Master Reseller Rights web sites. You could use this content in your print product or on your web site and you could even sell some of the content as e-books to your subscribers for a small fee (or give them away as bonuses for renewals) and create more interest in your site and a little more revenue. It’s really quite easy. An intern or part-time high schooler could process the content for very little expense. (Did I say the content would be FREE?) (CORREX: You may have to pay a small fee for someone to do the gathering for you, but it is worth it!)

All this also adds value for your subscribers. A few weeks into your new marketing campaign you may even see MORE new subscribers at that higher price than you lose, because of the value you have added at little or no cost.

BOTTOM LINE: Add value. Redesign for busy readers. Add easy content. Market your uniqueness and value. Bump the cost a bit to increase net revenue to cover minimal extra costs. Hit your recent unsubscribers hard with marketing materials/phone calls. Sell, sell, sell. Be the best. Be indispensable.

“But I don’t have the time.”

I hear this all the time from my colleagues in the newspaper business. I heard it from the eight people who found the time to take the News Design School survey (thank you!). The main reason, they all said, they didn’t use the free NDS services was lack of time.

I asked about using the NDS Forum, reading the blogs, testing the tips, using the special (and free) Valentine’s Day info and graphics package. The answer, almost in one chorus: didn’t have the time, too busy, yada yada. The other members, the ones who didn’t answer, probably didn’t have the time! 
GOT TIME TO GAS UP?

If you are driving around town doing errands and you note that you are low on fuel, do you avoid gassing up because you “don’t have the time to stop?” I didn’t think so. To me, that’s the same logic as when people say they don’t have the time to work on bettering their business.

If you want to build your business and increase your revenue you absolutely must spend some time each day working on the long-term goals you know are important, albeit not urgent. As Stephen R. Covey says in his “First Things First,” we spend too much time doing unimportant things that are presented as urgent, so we think they are IMPORTANT. We allow urgency, which is really false importance, to rule our work day. We are caught up in the daily grind….of the trivial, or administrivia as I like to call it.

THE IMPORTANT VS. THE URGENT

If you allow these “urgent” needs to rule your day, you’ll never get the truly important work done, which comes across as NOT urgent. It needs to be done, because it will help your business, but you never seem to find the time.

Sound familiar?

YOUR ACTION ITEMS:

1. (You knew this was coming) Use News Design School and members of our community as resources and also give of yourself to the community. The site and its members have a lot of expertise that, if shared more often, would help everyone. The rising tide floats all boats. Share tips and pages, ask questions, give suggestions.

2. Create time by systematizing your work processes. On a small notepad you can keep on your person, jot down what you do every day for one week. Break down the steps and decide what steps are simple enough to be done by someone else. Delegate. Even a one-person shop can delegate by outsourcing, saving time for the important work. I do it. You can, too.

3. Create templates for your pages — so that when it’s time for production, all you are doing is replacing placeholder copy with your new story or headline. Create story and story/photo modules in an InDesign library and simply drag them on a page if the idea of full-page templates is intimidating. This approach is especially good on those plug-n-play inside pages with lots of ads. This will save you a tremendous amount of time during production, time you can better use for creative approaches on your front page and other “showpiece” pages, as well as for business-building activities.

4. Take 15-20 minutes at the start of each day by prioritizing what you will work on that day. Be sure to remember that after covering the TRULY urgent, write down at least one important, but not urgent task on your list among the top three tasks. THEN DO IT. NO EXCUSES.

5. By working smarter you save time to do what is more important and probably what you enjoy more than grinding through the day-to-day administrivia of your job, and that is: growing your business.

P.S. Here is an interesting article with some advertising/editorial content ideas: http://tinyurl.com/cxa85v

As I sat in on the deathwatch of my investments, watching as the Dow continued its downtick and my plans for retirement stretched into the evermore distant future, I realized that this could be the death knell for a number of newspapers. Sure enough, the next day The Wall Street Journal reported that the Star-Trib in Minneapolis was facing financial difficulties because credit was going to be hard to get and it was going to cost them more.

Even good newspapers, like the Strib, are in trouble. Businesses also will likely advertise less as consumers tighten their belts and spend less. So: less revenue in the face of increasing costs can mean only one thing: the b-word. We are likely to see more newspapers bite the dust.

What is sad about this is that I was beginning to believe that better newspaper web sites were finally figuring out a business model that would bring enough advertising revenue from the web site to make an honest go of it.

If you want to work on some of this, check out News Design School.

Now I believe that we are in for more bad news from media companies. Even those papers that have embraced the web and created interactive, social-media web sites will have a hard time fighting through this economic rough patch. Still, the papers that are jumping on the web with both feet will be better positioned to survive. Are you one of those?