Newspapers Need a Galileo

Former Rocky Mountain News publisher John Temple has a great post about a recent depressing meeting of newspaper leaders, and their strategy for future success. The trouble is that most of their suggestions maybe made sense maybe 10 years ago, but now they just look out of touch. This quote nicely sums up his key points:

“The first mantra of the newspaper business, according to API, seems to be, ‘By god, the users will pay, because we say what we have to offer is valuable.’ The second seems to be, ‘If anybody messes with our stuff, we’ll force them to pay.’ And the third might be: ‘Businesses that are paying us should pay us more.’ ”

Here’s my take after five years of innovation from the ground floor at what is considered a very good, forward-looking newspaper. Their suggestions are depressing because they’re too little too late to save what once was. The last chance to start any of this was five years ago at best, which is not surprising since even the best newspapers have been operating under 10 to 30-year-old assumptions.

But I haven’t completely given up. Putting my optimist’s hat on for a second, I do think there is lots of opportunity for local journalism and media. It has nothing to do with technology, and all about branding, distribution and marketing.

In my opinion, the worst assumption of all has been that people prefer one big brand to meet all their information needs. This takes the root of current newspaper problems beyond a simple “print vs. online” issue, and straight to the core value of the product (or for those who have them, products) you offer.

It’s not that different from the geocentric view of the universe that Galileo correctly identified as false, but the Catholic Church fought until the bitter end. Likewise, newspapers, and many large media companies, still assume that they are at the center of the local universe, when in fact they’re really planets spinning around suns which orbit galaxies. They still have an important role, but until they realize that they’re one part of a larger system they’re operating out of an illusion.

Ask your friends and family where they go first for news, and you’ll learn that it’s usually via a portal like Yahoo, through search, or through a news search aggregator like Google News. And after that, blogs and “microblogs” like Twitter. In most cases, the news on those sites is really links, often deep into sites to read just one story. After they read a story on one site, they hit the Home button on their browser to go back to the portal, search engine or blog of their choice.

This to me indicates that people prefer choice to a “walled garden,” which is also why I think the thick client-based AOL and MSN services ultimately failed and were repositioned or shut down. Thus, whether your medium is in print or Web or mobile or magazine stands (and these days it needs to be in all of those and more), you need to have your brands out there where your audience is.

In this context, keeping everything walled inside your single daily newspaper, or even your newspaper Web site, is futile. The only winning content strategy with a future is niche publishing, and if you’re lucky a network of niche audiences that you can advertise to across all media. To continue the scientific analogy, you need to make your content readily available and desirable on every planet in your solar system.

This of course means that the big daily newspaper brand as we think of it today is gone in most peoples’ minds. In its place is a very large, but increasingly focused, niche product. That’s what newspapers, news organizations and companies that own them need to be thinking most about. Everything else is ancillary.