From the printing press to digital media, the newspaper industry is no stranger to technological innovations.  Since the first rudimentary printing press was invented in China in 593 A.D., technological advancements have played a pivotal role in shaping the newspaper industry to facilitate its primary objective of gathering and disseminating  the news.  The newspaper forerunners recognized the citizen’s insatiable appetite for information and began to explore ways to meet this need.  From a historical perspective, the industry has come a long way from chiseling away on stone tablets or writing on wood blocks.  Billions of dollars have been invested in new technologies that have enabled the industry to better meet the demand.   Plato said “Necessity is the Mother of Invention”.   That necessity led to the invention and enhancements  in paper, inks, the printing press, the telegraph, radio, television, and ultimately the internet.  That need will continue and new innovations will continually be introduced to better meet the need.

For the purposes of this step, we’re going to focus on the two primary objectives of the local newspaper, gathering and disseminating or distributing the news and exploring opportunities to leverage technology.  The large city or national newspapers that have huge budgets are already integrating technology effectively and will continue to do so because they are not limited by their resources.  The local newspapers, however, are extremely limited and must embrace technological advancements as a resource that will allow them to do more with less.  It is paramount that the local newspapers recognize the huge potential readily available and in most cases is already happening and take advantage of it.  I rant all the time about a weekly newspaper being nothing more than a history book because by the time it reaches its readers, through the use of modern technology, they have already had the information for a week.  This particular business model is no longer meeting the needs of the consumer.  Hopefully if you’ve been following this series, you recognize that you have the tools at your disposal to transition from a history book to a source your consumers use to meet their need for information.

“The biggest change for news editors and journalists working in the industry today is that breaking news can be reported as it happens.” Says Ruth Belena in an article titled “How technological changes have impacted the newspaper industry”

Let’s first explore some innovative ways the local newspaper can leverage technology to gather the news.  One of the biggest resources newspapers can take advantage of is their citizens or a form of citizen journalism if you will.  Recognizing that your limited staff can’t possibly cover everything happening in a community, engage your community.  You might consider deputizing members of community like the old west.  One sheriff couldn’t round up all the bad guys, so he deputized his local citizens to assist him in making the town safe.  I’ll let you in on a little secret, they’re already there where the “news” is happening.  They’re taking  pictures, recording video and audio, they’re using social media sites to exchange information, they’re blogging and uploading their pictures and video.  Create a platform that they can easily exchange information with you.  They could potentially provide you with tips on stories and even conduct research to assist with the development of the story.  You as the editor can direct and guide them on the dos and don’ts and ultimately you have the final say on how the information is used.   Your staff has now grown exponentially for little or no cost to the newspaper.

Secondly, let’s look at how the local newspaper can leverage technology to disseminate or distribute the news. Hot technologies are readily available to assist with this function.  The iPad for example is a recent innovation that is a complete game changer.  Imagine if you’re a journalist out in the field working on a story.  You could write the first block of the story for the newspaper and then for the next seven days  you could continue to gather more information, revise, edit, and enhance the original story by adding interviews, video and audio clips while engaging your community to follow that story live.  Another way current technology could be utilized to continue to engage the readers is to create simple low cost blogs that allow updates to various stories throughout the week and even allows for your readers to posts comments engaging them even further.

According to a survey conducted by the Harrison Group and publishing service company Zinio

“Tablet users spend nearly 75% more time reading newspapers and newspaper articles and 25% more time reading books.”

It is such a game changer that a Danish newspaper showcases the iPad app and currently iPads are not sold in the country…

“How can we add unique value to each subscriber? The answer for us is not always more content. It has to include more services. We have to embrace the technological advances to build compelling user experiences. We have to put that content into context and develop a loyal customer base.”

This is an example of a newspaper in a country where the iPad isn’t even available to them yet, but they are already creating the software to enable them to use the technology to their advantage when they finally get it.  That is such forward thinking and example that our local newspapers should follow.

In summary, technology can be your savior or your demise.  When I visit editors to discuss these very topics, I realize they don’t understand this completely and are very apprehensive about making these changes.  My concern is however, if you don’t find a way to leverage technology in your daily operations, you are doomed to failure because there is no market for what you are offering.  So just start small.  I’ve demonstrated that there are numerous ways out there to adapt your current operations to come more in line with what the consumers need.  I can’t emphasize enough that if you just followed up during the week on your stories with a simple blog, this would be a huge step in leveraging technology.  So to borrow a phrase from Darwin, this is really survival of the fittest.  I am hoping you will rise to the occasion and make this necessary transition to stay fit so that you can compete.  If you recognize the role of technology in your business you can not only survive and weather the storm, but you can come out stronger than before.  Next week we’ll be discussing how to build a new business plan.  Until next time…

Happy New Year!

Think outside the newsstand,

Joe

Last week I introduced my seven step plan to save your local newspaper. This week, we’ll dive right into step number one: shifting your mindset.

And really, this is the most important step of them all. If you can’t redirect your energies towards a business model that works and leave behind all of the “legacy” thinking that has been holding you back, you won’t be able to complete the next six steps. You simply won’t be in the right state of mind.

There’s a good reason why major corporations hire “change management teams” to help them get through this type of transition. Changing your business model is hard! The good news is that once you actually take this first step, once you change the way you think about your local newspaper, the other steps will be much easier.

But as a small local newspaper, you probably don’t have the resources to hire a change management team, and so you’ll have to find an alternative way to make this happen. I definitely recommend that you hire a “change consultant” if you can, but if isn’t financially viable, there are still a lot of great resources out there that you can use to get through this transition.

First, I recommend that you read John Kotter’s classic article from the Harvard Business Review, “Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail.” This article is about fourteen years old, but it is still the standard work on organizational change management and it will take you through the entire process of changing the mindset of your organization to fit the current market conditions. I strongly recommend reading this article as it is something like a bible of change management. You can download it from HBR’s website for $6.95.

The following are the eight elements of successful change management that Kotter identifies in his article. I won’t go into detail describing them here, but this should give you a taste for what his argument consists of.

1. Establishing a Sense of Urgency
2. Forming a Powerful Guiding Coalition
3. Creating a Vision
4. Communicating the Vision
5. Empowering Others to Act on the Vision
6. Planning for and Creating Short-Term Wins
7. Consolidating Improvements and Producing Still More Change
8. Institutionalizing New Approaches

The first of these books is Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, and in it they break the process down to a smaller three-pronged attack:

1. Directing the Rider
2. Motivating the Elephant
3. Shape the Path

Their approach is slightly different from Kotter’s, but it is also very helpful. In an industry like local news that has operated in much the same way for decades, this is just the type of information that you need to make a meaningful mindset change that will help your news organization adapt to the reality of 21st century economics and information technology. And if you like this book, then you should also check out the Heath Brothers’ other work, Made to Stick, Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die.

Well, that’s it for this week. Next week, we’ll go into our next step to save your local newspaper: Become Comfortable with New Media.

Think outside the newsstand,
Joe

If you were to ask an editor for a local newspaper what type of value local news provides, you would probably get an answer along the lines of: “Quality information is an intrinsic civic good whose value cannot ever be fully measured. Our constitution’s second amendment could not stand without the aid of this indispensable value.”

And of course, our wise editor would be completely right. But at the same time, she would be missing something fundamental about the nature of local news. In addition to these lofty “values” that it supports, it also has an economic value, one that that is simply cannot survive without.

Let me illustrate this point using a quote from an excellent article by Dave Chase: titled The next step in advertising: Local media as merchants? Dave writes, “Media companies should recognize their business purpose is to connect their audience with products and services the audience desires. Without that business purpose, they can’t fulfill their editorial mission.”

This “editorial mission” is the lofty civic value that newspapers strive to produce, the one that our hypothetical editor loves to eulogize upon. But without this other value, the newspaper’s “business purpose,” they simply won’t have enough money to stay afloat. And guess what? This means that all of that wonderful civic value is going down the drain right along with the failed business. The truth is that things are not as the legacy thinkers have tried to characterize them. Local newspapers do not have some this-or-that choice between delivering journalism or making money. Rather, they can’t possibly continue to do the former (conduct journalism) if they don’t find some way to do the latter (make money).and this model is starting to become outdated

This means that newspapers need to become more proactive in using their economic value to generate revenue. In the past, this was done through advertising, and the newspapers seemed to be okay with this “hands off” approach to monetization. But unfortunately, this model will soon cease to be profitable. And the new model to take its place will be for local newspapers to directly sell products to their communities. They will be in the business of bringing quality products to their readers; products that they known that their readers will be interested in, because they understand the nature of the communities they serve. Rather than simply being payed to display ads, regardless of their relevance, they will actually sell products that they know their readers want.

Once again, the legacy thinkers are certain to condemn this new tactic. Why? Because it forces them to become directly involved in their means of monetization  (as opposed to just putting up an ad and then washing their hands of its content). As Dave Chase wittily notes, the news industry seems to see the separation of news and business as more guarded than the separation between church and state! And this is exactly why big players like the LA Times have gone to so much trouble to not promote their affiliate links (last week’s post). They don’t want to admit that they are running a business!

But if the news industry doesn’t face up to the facts and start changing the way they think about generating revenue, they will be doomed to fail. If you can see any other way out, go ahead and leave a comment.

Think outside the newsstand,
Joe

Photo by Marcel Germain

This is because journalists are the most important link in the news food chain. Let me explain:

I had this realization a couple of days ago while I was listening to a talk radio program. Somehow, the topic of daily routines came up, and the talk show host decided to describe his own. Each day when he wakes up, the first thing that he does is go outside and grab the daily newspaper off of his porch. Then he starts looking through it for interesting stories. After this, if he has time, he might browse the Internet for a little while, hoping to find a few more interesting stories, without a doubt also originally generated by a newspaper reporter somewhere in the world. He does this every day; and you know why? Because otherwise, he wouldn’t have anything to talk about on his show.

Now perhaps it should seem obvious, but just at that moment I realized that newspaper journalists are the backbone of talk radio, that talk radio simply cannot survive without them. Of course! As I continued listening, I thought back to the points that I made in [I Will Never Pay for "News Aggregation." Would You?] about the difference between journalism and news aggregation. I started to visualize a sort of “news food-chain” at work here in which nutrients—in the form of fresh, original stories—are passed from the beat reporters at the bottom of the food chain up to the newspapers and then up to the radio talk show hosts. But honestly, this isn’t even really just about talk radio’s dependence on newspapers, is it? The entire news reporting and aggregation system which includes local television stations, cable networks, Google news, NPR, blogs, weekly news magazines, etc. is all involved in this elaborate chain in which individual journalists—not pundits, but real every day beat reporters—are the most basic and most important link.

I think that it’s easy to forget just how essential this primary step in the process of getting news to the people is, especially when we are confronted daily  with a huge block of media coming at us from all directions that seems to have its own independent existence. We can be fooled into thinking that all of the derivative forms of news—from television, to blogs, and so on—can survive on their own. But while these media perform important services by organizing and commenting on news, they can’t survive without basic journalism, just as the higher species in the food chain can’t survive without the lower ones. Real journalism is that essential. If we don’t find a way to monetize the profession of finding and reporting on stories (journalism), the repercussions will be felt throughout the entire system, not just on the level of local news.

Think outside the newsstand,
Joe

I have a message for all of the corporate news organizations sitting in their ivory towers behind their mahogany desks:

Quit trying to convince people to pay money for content that you’ve been giving them for free for years! No one who is used to getting the news for free online is going to start giving up their hard earned money to get through a “paywall.” It’s just not going to happen. It would be better for you to simply light your articles of incorporation on fire and watch them burn. At least then we wouldn’t have to keep reading about paywalls and your stockholders wouldn’t have to go through the agony of watching the value of their investments go up in smoke while the rest of Wall Street thrives.

You don’t have to take my word for it. Just look at this excerpt from the Pew Research Center for Excellence in Journalism’s recent article, “State of the News Media 2010:”

Over all, the evidence suggests the outlook is difficult both for paywalls and for online display advertising. While most people have not been asked to pay for content, even among the most avid news consumers online, only about one in five at this point say they would be willing to pay, and this does not include less voracious news consumers. At the same time, the vast majority of those online, 8 out of 10, say they basically ignore online ads.

It simply will not work to just repurpose your same old content and then try to sell it to me! I’m just not going to buy it, and at least four out of every five avid news readers agree. Is there no one creativity left at the top of the industry?

At least, if you are going to start charging me for news, you need to find a way to actually add some value to it. You simply cannot just start charging more for the same product. People won’t stand for it. For example, look at the cell phone industry. It used to be that using a land line was the only option that people had, and there was a fair market price set on this service. Within a certain range, no one was going to pay more than that price. But then, in comes the cell phone companies who actually found a way to get people to pay more for phone service. They added the value of being able to use a telephone anywhere, even while you’re walking down the street (whether this is a good thing or not, I’ll let you decide). But what the newspaper industry is trying to do right now is akin to simply trying to charge more for the same old home phone service. People simply aren’t going to stand for it!

Here’s a crazy idea on me for all of the geniuses at the big news conglomerates:

You’re all so excited about Apple’s new toy the iPad, and you think that its going to save your business. Unfortunately, on its own, it won’t. However, by striking up a bargain with Apple, you might just be able to learn from what the cell phone people did back in the 90s. Get Apple to give away an iPod for free as long as the customer agrees to pay for a digital news subscription for one or two years. Now if you do that, I might just consider paying for news, but only because you’ve actually added something to the bargain. On top of this you can fill out your revenue by adding in affiliate sales techniques and information marketing. (If you aren’t sure what these are, just hire one of the many new marketing whiz kids who’ve been kicking your butt lately. They should be able to help you out.)

Oh and one last thing, don’t even think about trying to restrict my use of the unit. I know that this is temping, but this is a surefire way to lose customers in the long run.

Think outside the newsstand,
Joe

This post was inspired in part by Greg Sterling’s post over at Screenwerk Titled “Newsday Readers Don’t Pay, They Go Away.” Thanks to Greg for the great ideas!

Photo by Neal Patel

A couple of days ago I realized why news organizations are having such a difficult time getting people to pay for news. It’s because, most of the time, what we are fed by the media isn’t real reporting, it’s just news aggregation. Let me explain:

I was getting ready for work in the morning and I had the TV on in the background. My local news station was presenting a story about a 19 percent jump in foreclosures in March. As the newscaster read the report, a bar graph popped onto the screen giving a graphical representation of the gloomy housing figures. Their source was a “RealtyTrac” survey performed in April. All in all, the report took about thirty seconds and then it was over.

Just a few minutes later, the national morning news show came on. And their top story was—no surprise here—a summary of the RealtyTrac survey. Essentially, they gave the same exact report as the local news had given. Sure, the wording was a little different, and the report was slightly longer, but it contained the same basic information, gathered from the same source.

As soon as I got into my car to go to work I turned on my local NPR station (WBUR Boston, which is great by the way) and, surprise surprise, they were rehashing the same exact report, a few words changed, but the same basic facts from the same source. I think that I mumbled to myself something like, “This isn’t journalism. It’s just ‘news reading’.” I couldn’t think of any other term for what I was hearing. It’s no surprise that no one wants to pay for this stuff; the “reporters” don’t actually add any value to what they are reporting on. They are just repeating what has already been said.

If I were to put up a blog post titled “Forclosure Actions Spike Despite Federal Aid” summarizing the same story, would that make me a journalist? I think most of you would argue that it certainly would not! And yet, this is exactly the kind of thing that many people in the industry are arguing we should pay for.

Out of curiosity, I decided to do some research and find out where this story actually originated from. It turns out that “Disclosure Actions Spike Despite Federal Aid” was a Reuters story written by Lynn Adler, the one real journalist in this chain of repetition. Surely, all of the other organizations in this chain paid for access to this story, but in the end, there was only one real journalist involved. So congratulations to Lynn Adler on her excellent work. She’s the only person who actually produced something worth paying for.

But here’s where the plot thickens. After my morning workload, I got back into the car to head out to lunch. The same exact story was on WBUR’s “Here and Now” once again. It started out just the same as the others. Jane Clayson was in for Robin Young that day and she began by repeating the same facts that I’d already heard three times that day. I could practically mouth each of the words as she read them:

“RealtyTrac reports the number of homes lost to foreclosure soared by 35 percent in the first quarter of 2010, compared to last year. That’s the largest increase in five years.” Etc. etc. I was just about ready to switch to another station.

But then, Jane did something different. She took the story further by conducting an interview with Stella Hopkins of the Charlotte Observer. She had taken the time to develop a piercing set of questions in order to use this interview to take the story to the next level. “Ah ha!” I thought. “I’ve found another journalist!”

The only parts of this process worth paying for are those conducted by the original journalist, Lynn Adler, and by Jane Clayson who made a real attempt to expand the story. Everyone else was just taking part in “news aggregation,” which is something that I don’t pay for, and will NEVER pay for.

What do you think? Am I right, or am I full of it? Leave a comment to let me know.

Think outside the newsstand,
Joe

image by AMagill

I’m frustrated these days. Here’s why:

My three sons—ages twenty-one, eighteen, and fifteen—don’t use email. I’ll send them emails about a family event a week ahead of time and not get a response until afterward. At first, I just thought that maybe my kids were blowing me off (this can happen to parents of teens and young adults), but then I began to notice a pattern arise out of this madness. So like any good citizen, I decided to perform a “scientific” test.

I wrote the following email on Friday March 26th at 1:46 pm which stated:

Subject: This is a test to see if you use email.

Dear Kids,

If you respond to this email, I will pay you $20 cash.

Love, Dad

By offering a cash reward, I could be assured that my results would not be spoiled by laziness on the part of the reader. And the results where just as I expected: the younger the kid, the slower the response.

My twenty-one-year old responded in just over an hour via his Black Berry at 2:57 with “That would be great thanks.” I saw him pulling into my driveway a couple days later as I was heading out to work and slipped the twenty through his driver side window.

My eighteen-year-old responded four and a half days later with “I do read my email once a week so pay up.”

As for the fifteen-year-old, I have yet to hear from him as of the writing of this post. However, I did overhear my oldest son telling him that he could make a “quick twenty bucks” if he was willing to split it fifty-fifty.

Email is fading quickly from use among the generation of “millenials,” people born between roughly 1984 and 2000. These kids and young adults simply don’t use email anymore. Notice that even my oldest son, who responded quickly, did so from his Black Berry, not actually via email. And these millenials are the people who we will be marketing local news to in the near future. This being the case, it is important to understand just how quickly the technology gap between them and traditional media is forming. Even “new media” like email are fading from use.

How can we reach people with local news who prefer to use media which are not one, but two or three, technological generations ahead of the old medium of print?

Now I know that my methods in this inquiry were not completely up to scientific standards, so I decided to create an expanded test using the free Survey Monkey tool. (No, I’m not offering $20 to anyone in the world who responds to my emails, sorry.) But this time, I catered the test specifically to questions regarding news and the consumption of information.

The survey contains just four short questions:

1) Do you subscribe to a newspaper?  Yes or no.
2) In the past month, How many times have you read a newspaper?
3) How old are you?
4) How do you get information about current events?

I geared the survey specifically towards millenials, so that the oldest option for question number three is “25 years old.” After creating the survey, I asked my three sons to post it on each of their facebook pages. I’m planning on waiting a couple of weeks for the data to stream in. But as soon as this happens, I’ll publish the results of the survey so that we can all see if they are consistent with what I’ve found so far.

One last note: my wife was upset that I didn’t send her an email with a cash reward. (I knew that she would read it since she’s not a millenial.) However, I can give her the credit for coming up with the great title for this post.

Think outside the newsstand,
Joe

Dear New York Times,

I recently read a blog post over at editorsweblog.org about your “hyperlocal efforts.” It cites your recent collaboration with Fwix in order to conglomerate news about particular local areas into a massive “local” news database, all from the comfort of your corporate ivory tower. Using Fwix’s software, you would gather all of the published news stories about each town or neighborhood and gather them all in one place. And honestly, Fwix has done some really great work here and I really admire their products, so please don’t take this letter as a knock against them.

There’s just one problem: “Conglomeration” has nothing to do with real local journalism! You’re not actually creating local journalism, you’re just cataloging what is already there. With all due respect, this is no more than a bad attempt at finding a silver bullet solution to the local news problem. All that you’ve done is use Fwix’s excellent ingenuity to throw together a bunch of articles using a software algorithm.

The value of local news go so much deeper than this. Hyper local is about actually being in touch with a community, something that only people who actually live in that community can do. You can’t do hyper local remotely. You need real local news organizations who actually know their communities to do this kind of work. These are the local newspapers in American communities who send their reporters onto the streets every day to report on what is happening and to foster a sense of connectedness within the community. Only a local organization can do this, not a computer algorithm alone, no matter how helpful it may be.

Local news is already working; its already doing what it does better than the New York Times ever could. The only problem is that local news agencies need to find a way to actually monetize this very special relationship that they have with their communities so that both can continue to thrive. And luckily, this is the easy part. The community is already there, and people already rely on local newspapers. We just have to figure out how they can make enough money to continue and thrive, and this is the mission behind Civic Edition.

So no, New York Times, your new hyper local focus is not local at all, unless by local you mean native to the 28th floor of your corporate office on 8th avenue in New York City. Despite what you may think to the contrary, real local news is still a necessity for the people who live and work in small towns and in non-centralized boroughs in major cities.  You can’t save local news by transporting it away from the communities where it is actually observed and reported on.

Think outside the newsstand,
Joe

Photo by Vidiot

There’s really no denying it. Sure, we may still be reading books for awhile, and even magazines. But eventually, all of these models are going to go digital, and in fact, they already are. And while the time frame for this change is unsure, one thing is certain: the more frequent and ephemeral the publication, the sooner it will be eliminated from paper distribution. This means that out of books, journals, magazines, and newspapers, the daily news is going to be the first model to go completely digital.

This is because it simply does not make sense to go through the entire production process to produce a bundle of paper that someone will spend one to two hours reading. Just think about it. First, a lumber company has to go out into the forest and cut down a massive number of trees. Then, these must be painstakingly loaded onto giant trucks requiring excessive amounts of fuel and taken to a mill where more energy is required to grind the wood up and turn it into pulp, involving a long series of steps that most of us have never taken the time to think about, much less fully understand. But even once the trees have been converted to paper, this paper must be loaded onto another truck, requiring more carbon-based fuel, and then taken to a printing location where it is loaded into a multi-million dollar hunk of iron (with a huge carbon foot print, no doubt) and finally printed—of course requiring tons of ink, which has it’s own convoluted production process. (I’ll leave out the environmental and monetary cost behind actually bundling up the newspapers and paying people in automobiles to drive around and distribute them to your doorstep.)

And why do we do all of this? Just so we can spend a few minutes a day reading a newspaper? Someone may read a book more than once and put it on his or her shelf for years, and even a magazine may float around the house for a week or two, but as soon as a newspaper has been looked through for an hour or less, it goes straight into the recycling bin. At my house, I sometimes miss a day, and am forced to recycle a newspaper that I haven’t even read yet!

It’s clear that the market will not put up with this waste forever. It’s simply not profitable, and hence cannot last. And furthermore, there’s not much reason for us to want it to. News is far more accessible in an electronic format. The only problem that we face is finding a way to lose this wasteful distribution model without throwing out journalism with it. We must keep the actual business of finding and reporting information alive, even as the world inevitably moves toward the digital age.

A recent skit on The Daily Show made this dilemma painfully clear. They sent a couple of “reporters” to the New York Times and gleefully pointed out that both the Dredge Report and the Huffington Post are more profitable than this classic paper, despite the fact that they do little to no actual investigative journalism. This was presented as quite funny on the show, but when you step back and think about it, it’s actually frightening. The market is currently rewarding blogs better than investigative reporting from a major paper—all the more reason why journalism needs to find a new distribution model, and fast.

Think Outside the Newsstand,
Joe

You heard it here first!

Political pundits and financial officials are now telling us that the recession is coming to a close. They say that the worst is over and that businesses are going to start making money again soon. It is inevitable that the local newspaper industry will latch onto this news and assume that with this upturn in the economy, all of the industry’s woes will begin to fade away. In fact, I guarantee that articles will be published in the next few months (if not sooner) claiming that local newspapers are now stabilized and safe from harm. Owners will start meeting up at industry conventions and patting each other on the back in congratulations for their salvation. And what’s more, I think that the industry will, in fact, see a slight increase in ad revenue as the greater economy starts to pick itself up and brush the dust off its ankles.

But don’t believe for even one second that any of this means that the local newspaper industry is headed for a major turn around. There are multiple reasons why the industry has been in decline, and the recession is only one of them. In fact, the recession is only a minor worry for newspapers compared to the more systematic problem: the fact that a huge demographic of people who used to look in the classifieds for a job, in the personals for a date, and in the real estate ads for a home; now go to monster.com, craiglist, and zillow for these services. Even as a turn around in the economy provides temporary relief by way of improved ad revenues, local newspapers will still continue to bleed readers. The overall trend is still a steep downward slope; this temporary change is only a brief plateau.

The small increase in ad revenue that local newspapers can expect in 2010 cannot then be taken as a sign that the old legacy model is still working. Rather, the local newspaper industry needs to take this brief opportunity to start formulating a plan to stem the bleeding. This means concentrating on the ways that local newspapers serve their communities, which would be impossible for giants like craigslist to compete with. Local newspapers have a built in community that is naturally more in tune with local issues than any globally based social network could ever hope to be. But they need to adapt to the new ways that people access information and connect with one another to continue fulfilling their traditional community based functions.

The worst thing that local newspapers can do right now is to simply ignore the fundamental changes taking place in media and attempt to rely solely on the upcoming minor improvements in ad revenue for their salvation. These new profits are fool’s gold, and should be taken for what they are: temporary. Sure, any extra profit should be welcomed, but we should not let it distract us from what our primary question still needs to be: what would the local newspaper industry look like if it where invented today?

Think Outside the Newsstand,

Joe