SimsBlog

If Newspapers Cease to Be, There Will be Two Causes of Death

Last month, there was all kinds of excitement about the recovery of American newspapers.  Share prices were up and both the Atlantic and the Economist wrote fluffy, happy pieces about the state of the industry and its future.

But print executives know otherwise.  They know because in Q1 they were still looking at a 10% decline in advertising revenue as the rest of the media are showing rosy Q1 improvements of 6% to 10% and more.  As Alan Mutter put it in a recent Newsosaur post: “Make no mistake: Newspapers are still in trouble.”

I often suspect that there is a creeping defeatism among news executives – almost an acceptance of the inevitability of the end of their industry.  How else could one explain their refusal to focus on the real factors that will make or break their businesses?

It’s not about bloggers vs. journalists, websites vs. apps, advertising revenue vs. pay walls, Google News vs. copyright laws.  Those issues are merely distractions and continued focus on them is preventing the real issues from being addressed.

If news organizations cease to be, there will be two causes of death:

Cause of Death #1: Failure to recognize the necessity of Community

Ask someone under 30 what websites they visit first thing in the morning.  They’ll list a number of social networking and aggregation sites.  Most of them don’t actually visit media sites at all.  Rather, they’ve come to know that “If the news is important, it will find me”.  And, they’re unlikely to outgrow this behaviour.  That’s why according to Compete, Facebook now beats Google as a referral site to large portals such as AOL, Yahoo and MSN.

Social media is a media site’s new best friend.  In fact, a recent Hitwise study revealed that over 75% of Facebook referrals will return to print and broadcast media sites in the same week.  Twitter is the fastest growing video referrer and it’s users watch a stream for 63% longer than a Google user.

65 million Facebook users “like” something everyday.  Typepad bloggers who installed the Facebook “like” button have experienced a 50% increase in referral traffic.  (Just installed mine, I’ll let you know how it goes)

Why is social media so powerful?

Two reasons.  Trust: we don’t send our friends crap to read.  Relevance: we’re more likely to have common interests with our social network and therefore our links are more likely to be relevant.

Ah, trust and relevance.  Sound familiar? 

If a newspaper’s job is to reflect, affect and connect the community it serves, trust and relevance are what get the job done.  It’s amazing to me how at this time, with more tools available than ever to fulfill these objectives, newspapers are turning away from what made them great brands in the first place.  By refusing to listen to and engage their readers by ignoring social media, limiting comments and erecting pay walls, they are destroying trust and hastening their irrelevance.  

They are destroying the core, not protecting it.

It’s time to embrace the community.

Every section, every beat and every neighbourhood should have a community manager.  That’s a real human being, not an RSS Twitter feed with headlines.

Washington DC’s much anticipated and soon-to-launch local news site TBD.com already has 6 busy community managers.  That’s more than 10% of the total editorial team.

Media companies need to do three things: listen, listen, listen.   Who’s out there? What Facebook groups, Flickr groups, blogs and Twitter accounts already exist?  What are people saying?  Who’s leading the discussion?  What are their concerns and passions?

Listening has never been easier.  Start a TweetDeck to find all Tweets relevant to specific areas of interest.  RetweetRank will help determine the impact of existing Twitter feeds.  Twitrratr will reveal if events, people or topics are being mentioned negatively or positively.  Backtweets will help find who’s linking to the main site.

Community managers can quickly become community leaders if they engage bloggers, commenters, tweeters and Facebookers.  They need to follow influencers and people who frequently tweet on a particular topic, retweet them and then provide them with a rich mix of links (from the main site and from around the web), updates and commentary.

The Guardian isn’t wasting time worrying about whether or not bloggers are journalists or if they’re stealing content.  They’re making full text articles available to them.  That’s right, full text.  The genius bit is that the articles have ads embedded in them.  The Guardian is harnessing the power of social media to extend its reach for advertisers.

Besides distributing content, users can be drawn back to the main site with links, comments, graphics, photo galleries, polls, contests and invitations for user submissions.  Smart and frequent commenters can be invited to write an editorial.  Flickr galleries can be created for each neighbourhood and event.

Users should be encouraged to suggest stories and investigations and reporters should be assigned.  This is the philosophy behind Toronto start-up Openfile.

And for God sake, when users talk to them, community managers need to talk back!

That’s how to become relevant.  That’s how to build trust.  Hell, it might even improve the core product.

And here’s the best part.  Community drives engagement.  Engagement drives ROI for advertisers.

Which brings me to Cause of Death #2: Failure to focus on ROI.  I’ll cover that in my next post.

Why Newspapers Aren't Winning Online: Until You Believe It, They Won’t Buy It

I’m continually amazed by the work Journal Register Company CEO John Paton is doing to transform JRC into a media company that will survive well into the 21st century.  I devoted a post to him and have Tweeted about him so often, I’d be in danger of becoming president of his fan club if not for the even more frequent Tweeting from Jeff Jarvis, Jay Rosen and others.

Why are we all so enamored of John? 

It’s simple.  He believes in the digital future of the news.  He believes that in the long-run, the Internet will be good for the news industry, good for the communities he serves and good for democracy.

It’s not just John.  Alan Rusbridger at the Guardian and Jim Brady at the soon to be launched Washington DC site TBD.com believe it too. 

It's called leadership.

As Simon Sinek says in his recent must-watch TED Talk, “people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it”.  Understanding this simple truth is how great leaders inspire action.  If you communicate an authentic belief and readers share it, they will interact with your site for their own sake, because it feels right to do so.

The sad truth is, for most news organizations, “why” they are online has nothing to do with a belief in the power of this new medium.

At one time, news executives had a great "why".  They sought to reflect, affect and connect the communities they serve.  And it worked.  Their newspapers became very successful.  But somewhere along the way, the "why" changed.  The focus shifted to making money.  Lots of money.

As the world started to change around them, online became a necessary evil.  But they’ve never really believed in the Internet, or understood it.  Nor have they valued the its ability to enable community and collaboration. 

If they did, they’d be a part of it.  They’d be blogging and Twittering.  They’d be putting the digital folks in charge of the newsroom.  They’d be creating the Complete Community Connection.  They’d be looking at the iPad as a new medium, (the fifth screen after movies, TV, computers and phones), and create something new instead using it to preserve the look and feel of print.

But they’re not.  And that means they’re not doing their jobs. 

No, Paywalls do not Deepen Relationships with Readers

Oh dear.  It seems the Mainstream Media Express has made yet another stop at Cluelesstown.  Yesterday, New York Times publisher Auther Sutlzberger made the bizarre claim that charging for content is about “enhancing the emotional connection that users have with us”.

Huh?

Does he actually believe that once they move to their metered pay model that the NYT will have stronger relationships with their visitors than free sites such as Facebook, Twitter or Digg have with theirs?  Does he mean to say that my enjoyment of reading Jeff Jarvis’s BuzzMachine would increase if he only had the balls to start charging me for it?

This is just more evidence of print news execs refusing to step into the 21^st century by attempting to apply old-school rules to new media.  There is an old print belief that paid copies of newspapers are more valuable than free sheets because somehow paying for a newspaper increases it’s value in a reader’s mind and deepens their engagement.  I’ve yet to see a shred of real evidence that this was indeed the truth.  Longer and more frequent reading occasions of paid newspapers over free are likely due to ease of accessibility, quality of journalism or just plain old volume of stories and information.  But, it makes a great story to tell your advertisers when justifying this year’s rate increase.

Nothing could be further from the truth in the online world.  Great relationships come through openness and interaction.  If the NYT wants to increase the quality of their relationships with readers they need to open up comments on more than just 10 stories a day.  They need to ask for more reader participation in news gathering and analysis, step up their social marketing efforts and stop seeing the news as a one-way conversation.  When users are active members of a web community, websites get better.

It means newspapers have to work harder, change age-old habits and attitudes and take the risk that some experiments will fail. 

John Paton and editors at the Journal-Register Company are willing to give it a try.  They recently launched the Benjamin Franklin Project.  As described on MontgomeryNews.com:

The Ben Franklin Project challenges the community to come together to decide what information it would like to see covered and further encourages readers to become active members of the news gathering process by submitting tips, personal stories, photos, videos and more using tools found for free on the Internet. Part of the project's mission is to create a web and print publication for one week that uses only free tools widely available on the Internet to show residents just how easy it is to become part of the process and help participate in the creation of their local news coverage.

Which plan of action will be a bigger hit with readers and advertisers? My money’s on Paton.

Marshall McLuhan and the Inevitability of our Current Media World

I’ve just started reading a biography of a great Canadian – Marshall McLuhan – written by another great Canadian – Douglas Coupland.

Until now, I’ve found McLuhan’s writing to be somewhat impenetrable.  But with the potentially game-changing release of the iPad last weekend, I’ve been thinking about hot and cool media, leaning back vs. leaning forward and consumption vs. creation and have felt a need to give Marshall one more poke.

I was rewarded very quickly with this quote on page 10:

The next medium, whatever it is – it may be the extension of consciousness – will include television as its content, not as its environment, and will transform television into an art form.  A computer as a research and communication instrument could enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass library organization, retrieve the individual’s encyclopedic function and flip it into a private line to seedily tailor data of a salable kind.

MM 1962

Wow.  The fact that 48 years ago, Marshall McLuhan was able to predict the online world as we are now experiencing it speaks to its inevitability.  It makes attempts at creating closed environments and erecting pay walls seem all the more feeble, like trying to stop the flow of Niagara falls with a chain link fence. 

That's it.  I'm hooked.

 

A News Exec who Gets it! John Paton, new CEO of the Journal Register Company.

Last week, I had the pleasure of spending an hour on the phone with John Paton as he drove from Ohio to Michigan.  John is the newly appointed president of the Journal Register Company and up until February of this year, he was Chair and CEO of the Spanish language newspaper company, impreMedia.

The fact that a kid from public housing grew to be a prominent newspaper publisher in both Canada and the US isn’t the most amazing thing about John.  What's truly amazing is that he is a publisher who gets it.  And in my opinion, that's extraordinarily rare.

John blogs and tweets.  His eyes are wide open, he isn’t lying to himself about the state of the newspaper industry and he’s not afraid to make the tough decisions most other newspaper executives are avoiding.  And though his papers are in some of the economically hardest hit regions of the US, if anyone is going to figure out how to keep newspapers alive in the 21^st century, I’m betting it will be John.

In his December 2009 speech to the WAN conference in Hyderabad, India, John outlined the steps he took to save impreMedia during the economic downturn.  I’d give you a link, but it seems the speech has been (ominously) removed from the impreMedia site.  I have a copy of it though and it reads as a blueprint for all publishers to follow:

• An acknowledgement that media companies must work with the sea of change brought on by the digital world, not against it.
• A web first, brand first strategy.  A breaking news story will start as an SMS message, then go to the web and social media, be enhanced with video and audio and then be printed for the newspaper last.
• Smart outsourcing of non-value creating activities such as pre-press, printing and distribution.
• Investment in value creators such as editorial, marketing, reader research and technology.  Investment in editorial does not mean editorial processes don’t have to change.  John heeds Jeff Jarvis’s advice to “do what you do best and link to the rest”.  That means not sending “10 reporters to the world cup”.
• The beginnings of a newspaper-curated, hyper-local blogging network.

I think it’s safe to say that the folks at JRC can expect similar initiatives in the coming months.  Within 3 weeks of his arrival, he put his money where his mouth was by providing flip cameras for reporters.

After all the changes are done, John believes newspapers will make smaller revenues but also higher profits. The changes won’t come easily and in John’s words, there will be “blood on the floor”.  But when I hung up the phone, I felt, well, inspired.  It’s been a long time since a newspaper exec left me feeling that way. 

Edit: My original post said John was from Winnipeg.  John tells me he was born in Glasgow, then grew up in Toronto and London, Ontario.  God knows why I thought he was from Winnipeg.  This is why I'm a marketer and not a journalist.

Local Media: The Magic Combination that Means More Trouble for Newspapers

It seems to me that 2010 is going to be the year the game changed for online local. 

The right factors are finally converging:  quality local content, awesome mobile devices, and local advertising services.   It’s getting much easier to envision what the tapestry of local media and advertising will look like in just a few short years.

And for that reason, I say to the newspaper execs of the world:  please stop fussing about with pay walls and get serious about online local.

Let’s look at what they’re facing.

Content

Yes, there are thousands of excellent local bloggers out there.  But online local is not just about independents anymore.  Big money is being spent on local websites.  And the new tapestry is a mix of professional and amateur, old and new.

Examiner.com is now in 240 major local markets in North America with plans for continued expansion.  In fact, they recently announced that they hope to increase the number of “Examiners” (local contributors with specific interests or areas of knowledge) from 30,000 to 85,000 by the end of the year.  The site brands itself as the “insider source for everything local”.

NPR also has plans to delve further into online local.  Prong 1 of Vivian Schiller’s 3-pronged strategy is “A focus on local”.  In April, Schiller told MediaBistro that there is “a big gaping hole to serve Americans local coverage”.  Why local?  Schiller says “Because our unique offering is the fact that we are local.  The stations know their communities.  There’s different demographics.  There’s different sensibilities”.

BusinessInsider reported this week that AOL’s Patch.com will increase their number of sites from 30 to something in the 100’s in 2010.  Patch hires professional journalists.  AOL’s careers site has 53 job openings at Patch, mostly editorial positions.  (I believe there is huge potential for Patch to drive ROI for local advertisers by utilizing AOL’s network of 80+ other sites, but that ‘s another blog post.)

And then there’s the much anticipated and yet to be named Jim Brady project at Allbritton.  Jim is hiring 50 of the digital world’s best journalists (including Steve Buttry, a big favourite of mine), to go head-to-head with the Washington Post.  If Jim is successful, his site will spawn many imitators across North America.  (I had lunch with him last month.  I think it’s going to be terrific.  And he promises to give it a name soon.)

Last, but certainly not least, the Guardian in the UK is getting in on the act with the launch of their Leeds site earlier this week.

Awesome Devices

An iPad not only allows you to take the Internet with you wherever you go, but unlike a dumb-old lap-top, it actually knows where you are.  It’s connected to your community.  So is an iPhone, Blackberry or a Nexis One.  If the job of local media is to reflect, affect and connect the community, things just got a lot more interesting.

Not only is there now more local content, devices are able to target that content, along with advertisements to consumers with greater accuracy, creating greater relevancy and likely, greater ROI for advertisers.

I’d say something about Google Buzz here, but frankly, I’m still on the fence…

Advertising

An August 2009 Kelsey Group survey revealed that 77% of small and medium sized businesses are using online media (compared to 69% using traditional media).  However, a Nielsen study found that half of small businesses spend less than 10% of their marketing budgets online. 

Why haven’t more local advertisers spent more on the web?

I think it’s because it’s just been two damn hard.  Too hard for local businesses to buy online ads and too hard for local websites to sell online ads.  

Advertisers have had to manage a complex dance of multiple ads across multiple sites, calculating multiple ROI’s and working with multiple sales reps.  For publishers, the problem has been finding a profitable business model. Sales reps often encounter high-maintenance, unknowledgeable clients who lack websites and online creative.  The cost of sale becomes prohibitive in a high service, high volume, low revenue environment such as online local media. 

But it’s starting to get easier.

Take PaperG’s PlaceLocal product.  Enter a business name and it will pull images, reviews and other information from the web and create an online ad for the advertiser.  Automatically.  Cool.  The time and cost of creating online ads has been one of the major stumbling blocks preventing local websites from acquiring new advertisers, or generating sufficient profit from the ones they have.

Mark Potts is doing his part to make things easier with GrowthSpur.  As he told BusinessWeek, the platform will help enable “citizen ad sales” as publishers will be able to sell ads onto each other’s sites.  GrowthSpur will also provide much needed sales training.

In addition to GrowthSpur, networks such as CityGrid by City Search, Reach Local, Local.com and Addiply are all trying to make it easier for small businesses to begin advertising online.  If they succeed, the revenue potential is enormous. 

Now.  How will newspapers respond?

I hope they will separate their print and digital organizations and operate their websites like lean, mean, start-up machines.  I hope they will enable a team of smart, excited digital staffers to create the Complete Community Connection like the one that Steve Buttry will surely introduce at the new Allbritton site. I hope they will see the iPad as a tool for delivering more context to readers and ROI for advertisers instead of a great way to finally make users pay for content.  I hope they will form a local ad network such as GrowthSpur and hire expert digital sales staffers to make it hum. 

But I fear they will do none of those things.  I fear they will hinder themselves with their large, expensive infrastructures and traditions. 

You know what I mean.  Print staff selling online ads, old media notions of staff roles, (i.e. one role, no multi-taskers) and how they should be paid, a fear of voices and opinions from outside the newsroom…

Ugh.  It’s depressing.  I hope someone proves me wrong.

 

Keep the Print Guys Away From the iPad App

 Don’t worry. I’m not going to bore you with a long-winded post detailing my thoughts on the iPad.  I’ll just say that yes, I believe it’s a game-changer because it will hyper-personalize the experience a person has when interacting with media and change the times and places at which they do so.

But that’s not why I’m writing this post.  I’m writing to beg Editors and Publishers to keep the print guys away from the iPad app development process.

God knows, they will want to get involved.  After all, in the eyes of many a print staffer, the digital folks have already screwed everything up.  They gave it all away for free, let Google, Arianna and Tina “steal” content and diminished the authority of professional journalism by encouraging readers to comment on articles and expecting writers to respond.   Print guys believe the digital guys broke the print model through carelessness and overly optimistic, dreamy-eyed decision-making.

But the iPad could be a different story.

The format and shape of the iPad feels comfortable and familiar to print guys.  And for that reason, they will think they know how to design for it despite having little or no digital product experience. They will want to lay out pages the way they do in a newspaper or magazine.  They will want to charge per article or figure out a subscription model that can be included in their ABC numbers.  They will want to keep reader interaction, community and linking to a minimum.

In short, they will kill any chances of real innovation.  Don’t let them do it. 

Get a couple great developers, a product manager, a smart ad sales person and some enthusiastic digital editors and designers and send them away for a few weeks.  Don’t give them any rules.  See what they come back with.  It will likely be something you could never have thought of.   And, it just might blow your socks off.

Lots of Smart People, No Simple Answers

Last week, I went on a dream tour for media geeks.  I had 10 meetings in New York and Washington DC with some of our industry’s best thinkers.

I met with leading academics at CUNY and NYU, very smart people at large media companies (IAC, AOL and Bloomberg) and more smart people at start-ups (SeeClickFix, GrowthSpur, Daylife and Allbritton’s yet to be named “Jim Brady Project”.)

Here’s what I learned:

• No one feels good about the future of most newspapers and television networks.

• All agree that content curation will remain a key strategy for smart editors.

• No one can agree on which sites and models are going to succeed though Jim Brady’s new project for Allbritton (parent company of Politico) and Mark Potts’ GrowthSpur are generating a lot of excitement and curiosity.

• All acknowledge that existing revenue models aren’t working.

• Many think that the best opportunity for revenue is in local advertising.

• Others think that there is opportunity in national advertising, though the model will be built around sponsorships, events, vertical creation and content integration.

• All agree that mobile will continue to grow in importance, but no one had solid plans for monetizing it.

• Two people told me I should leave the media business entirely and try PR or perhaps managing a corporate website. (ouch!)

No simple answers indeed.

2 Big Myths that are Killing Newspapers

The Big Newsroom Myth: Reporters and editors don’t need to understand how the business works.

Earlier this month, I tweeted this Robert Picard blog post about how "The Biggest Mistake of Journalism Professionalism" is how journalists “spent nearly a century denying responsibility and involvement in business decisions”.

Bill Doskoch, (@billdinto), a much-respected Twitter friend, pushed back.  “What bearing does that have on the avg reporter’s job?” 

This thinking has been pervasive in the newspaper industry for a very long time.  There is a belief that journalists should be free of knowledge of the business side so that they can carry out their reporting with integrity and objectivity free of pressure from the advertising department to report favourably about their customers.  Journalists should be above it.

I get it.

But the more I think about it, the more I realize how damaging this thinking has been to the newspaper industry.

It infantilizes the newsroom.  “Don’t talk to the kids about money – it might upset them or worse, corrupt them”.  And, it creates a state of willful ignorance, the last thing you’d want reporters to be.  Surely a mature, intelligent group of people can understand that we must report with integrity and that we work in a business that must make money.

The result of this siloed newsroom is that a large chunk of the organization has no real understanding of how the business works.   

And it’s a problem. 

Innovation in large organizations often comes from the bottom up.  That’s why Google allows company time for personal projects and has “office hours” where any employee can approach management with proposals.

A lack of business understanding leads to poor product development efforts.  Editorial recommends (or worse produces) sections and features that advertising can’t sell.  I must have seen 10 different gardening magazine proposals in my time.  (Hint: we live in Canada, we have 4 months of warm weather/year)  And then there was that fishing magazine proposal….

But far worse, it’s resulted in the failure of newsrooms to create a sense of urgency when the web emerged.  Had the newsroom really understood what it meant when the very profitable classifieds started going away, or how new capabilities in customer analytics was creating a focus on advertising return on investment and changing how advertisers were planning their budgets, there may have been earlier moves to understand the online world and to succeed in it.

But let’s not let the advertising department off the hook!

The Big Advertising Department Myth: We sell eyeballs

Not really.

Eyeballs are about mass and placement in the form reader demographics, circulation numbers, lines, columns, colour and position requests.  

What advertising departments actually sell is connection and context that lead to sales results.

Had they been thinking about their product as a connection between buyers and sellers, they would have seen the devastation that online classifieds would bring a lot earlier and taken steps to win in that space. 

They would have also seen that in the online world, their audiences are relatively small and flighty and that in that world, they are not nearly as good at providing those connections as they were in print.

Had advertising departments been thinking about context, they would have known that it creates greater user engagement and advertising click through rates.  They would have seen the explosion of online content due to blogs and niche sites that focus on narrower and narrower content areas and realized that they would need to create more of their own verticals.

Had they been thinking about connection and context, they too would have seen that the instant accountability and return on investment provided by search advertising makes it the ultimate solution.  Advertisers can now target ads directly to people who are actively searching for their products and services.  They would have seen that this would change the advertising game forever.  Maybe they would have realized that it isn’t all about banners and big boxes and that most traditional print advertising sales reps aren’t qualified to sell online advertising in such a complex environment.

These myths caused newspapers to sit back and do nothing while their world was changing.

Perhaps the biggest myth of all is commonly heard in newsrooms and advertising departments alike: That the newspaper has to survive.  It just has to.

7 New Years Resolutions News Execs Should be Making in 2010

I should be in the gym right now instead of writing this blog post.  Like most people, I suck at keeping my New Years resolutions.  That doesn’t stop me from telling other people what I think theirs should be.

So here they are, the 7 New Years resolutions newspaper execs should be making in 2010.  I've saved the hardest one for last.

Resolution 1:  We will talk to our advertisers.

Sounds simple enough, but you’d be surprised how little communication there is between newspaper executives and the people who pay the bills.  In talking to advertisers directly, instead of through the sales team (if you actually bother to do that), news execs will learn that advertisers are completely focused on return on their advertising investment and that the more they know about what drives ROI, the less likely they are to be advertising in a general news environment.

Another interesting thing about advertisers is that the smart ones often know your readers better than you do. Marketers know that it is better to study who a person is rather than ask them what they want.  It’s their job to know their consumers.  They spend a lot of time and money understanding the interests, lifestyes, needs (and yes, purchasing behaviour) of consumers during various stages of their lifecycle.

And who are your readers?  Yup.  Consumers.  Knowing them better could change your content strategy.

Resolution 2: We will not rely on banners and big boxes for our online ad revenue.

Two words – ad blindness.  My theory is that this is a much bigger problem online than in print due to the templated nature of most websites.  When you see the same layout on page after page, you’re more likely to start ignoring the ads.  Dismally declining click-through rates support this theory.

Online advertising needs to become a lot smarter.  There needs to be more cooperation between advertiser, sales rep and editorial department so that custom advertising products such as sponsorships, content integration, events and exclusive access promotions can be created.

Resolution 3: We will create vertical sites.

Context drives engagement.  Engagement drives ROI for advertisers.  It’s such a simple formula.  Don’t let content farms like AOL’s robo-content management system and Demand Media win in this space. 

Use your data.  Analyze audience and revenue trends in your market and then build vertical sites to serve them.  Create high quality environments that readers love and advertisers love more by including a mix of news, information, data, listings, maps, advertising and e-commerce.

Resolution 4: We will become the Complete Community Connection in our town or city.

I’ve written about my love of Steve Buttry’s Complete Community Connection before.  I think it is the best hope for newspapers to begin to win in the online space.

In Steve’s words:

“For consumers, we will be their essential connection to community life – news, information, commerce, social life.  Like many Internet users turn first to Google, whatever their need, we want Eastern Iowans to turn first to Gazette Communications, whatever their need.  For businesses, we will be their essential connection to customers, often making the sale and collecting the money.  We will become the Complete Community Connection. 

Resolution 5: We will start blogging and Twittering.

Don’t tell me you’re too busy.  Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian does it.  Kai Keikmann, head of Bild does it.  Arianna and Tina do it.  It’s now a basic requirement of your job.  When anyone with a keyboard can be a publisher, you can no longer afford to hide behind your (dwindling) staff.

Listen to your audience and just like your advertisers, they will tell you important things you didn’t know.

And, appoint a community manager if you don’t have one.  It’s 2010 for God sake!

Resolution 6: We will not erect pay walls where we are not providing unique value.

Think very carefully about the value you are supplying and how easily it could be replicated by a lower cost organization.  Yes, I know, it works for the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times.  That’s because financial sites provide value that is difficult to replicate and directly impacts a user’s wallet.  It doesn’t hurt that the audience for financial sites are wealthier than the population at large and work for organizations that pay their subscriptions for them.

Where’s your value?  Put up a pay wall without finding it and you will assure your own quick demise while enabling new competitors to enter the market.

Resolution 7: We will get comfortable with being uncomfortable. 

Integrating your print and online organizations feels good.  It looks good on paper.  It makes you look like a take-charge leader whose eyes are on the future as your feet are planted firmly in the needs of today.  It keeps the print people from feeling that they are forgotten, left to manage decline as their skill sets become obsolete.  It makes the digital people miserable, but who cares about them?  They think they’re smarter than everyone else and that’s really annoying.  Besides, they’ll get used to it soon enough.

Know what else feels good?  E-readers.  They allow you to essentially duplicate the print experience online in a controlled, closed environment that looks an awful lot like our traditional printed product but with videos and photo galleries.  And, there’s no need to link to other sites or allow readers to comment or interact with us in any way.  Perfect.  Never mind that that’s not really how people use electronic media.

Ooh, and it’s also comfortable to tie most of your online revenue to classified advertising and then tie that to print revenue.  You can call it “leveraging our core assets”.

There’s just one problem with comfortable solutions.  In the online world, chances are, if a solution makes you feel comfortable and in control, it’s probably not radical enough to work.

That’s why in Q3, online revenue at newspapers fell 17% from 2008 when the online advertising industry as a whole fell by only 5.4%.

That’s also why when the online industry as a whole saw the beginnings of an advertising recovery with a Q309 increase of 1.7% over Q209, newspaper online advertising still declined 4.6%.

Stop trying to feel comfortable.  You are not in a comfortable situation.