I picked up a printed copy of Sunday’s newspaper this past weekend. I was doing some varnishing and needed to protect against drips.
This brings up the Mega-Conference I attended in Las Vegas last month. At the Monday morning early bird session, the speaker opened with these two questions: How many of you did not check your smartphone or tablet this morning? In a crowd of probably 300 people, not one hand went up.
How many of you read a printed newspaper this morning? Less than half a dozen hands went up. The speaker commented, ‘‘and this is a group of newspaper people.’’ And followed with the comment, “you are your readers.” And then proceeded to talk about advertising.
It was another session, midday Tuesday, that has had me thinking ever since. Bill Day of Frank N. Magid and David Arkin of Gatehouse presented a study of 5000 print-newspaper readers. The study was limited to, and this is very important, current print-newspaper readers and past print-newspaper readers who might return to reading the print newspaper. Bill was very careful to explain that this did not include anyone who would never read a printed newspaper, nor anyone who said that they could not be convinced to return to reading a printed newspaper.
The study is important because the magic number presented in the early Monday morning advertising session was 18 per cent. That was the percentage of revenue that a newspaper should set as its target revenue from digital. Personally, I was a bit thunderstruck at how low this number is. We as an industry, and I as a vendor, have been putting our hearts and souls into digital. In a study I did recently speaking to newspapers, target percentages were generally close to double this, with a number of newspapers assuring me that they would cross 50 per cent digital revenue not too long from now. But here was that number. The Mega-Conference combines three North American newspaper organisations into one conference, and the goal is 18 per cent.
Most newspapers were not at 18 per cent. This means that most of the newspapers in that room, and at that conference, were still taking more than 80 per cent of their money from print. Bill Day made the point, and will talk about it if you call him on the phone, that print has a very long tail. I asked Bill in a phone conversation to characterise the demographics of print newspaper readers, especially since they are the people who support the newspaper venture.
Bill is a professional, Bill has a client, Bill uses Western scientific methods. On facts that are easy and irrefutable, Bill’s answers to me were clear and concise: Print readers tend to be better educated, and wealthier than the population at large. And older. How much older, I asked. The answer here became one of amazing imprecision. I pushed and asked, a couple of standard deviations older? Still not much of an answer from Bill, but when I asked the $64,000 question, would it be fair to say that there are no new people coming into this group, and when they die off that’s the end? Perhaps Bill was tired of me pushing him, but he answered with one word, ‘‘yes.’’ And then, ‘‘but this is more than 20 years off.’’
So what do print-newspaper readers and former print-newspaper readers want? They want a newspaper that looks and acts like a newspaper. They want quality reporting. They do want to read about national and international news in their local newspaper but not just wire service stories. And they want the weather on the front page. The strongest thing to come through was that they want quality. In the states, it has long been gospel that you need a big picture above the fold. The research showed that the size of the picture needs to be related to the quality of the picture, not a picture for picture’s sake. I wonder, could we sum this up by saying, respect your readers?
Bill Day is a fascinating resource, a very good confident, practised speaker with a very deep newspaper background – he’s one of us, not an outside academic – who speaks of analogous industries that we might model: Broadcast television, whose model is built on giving away the product, and the pornography industry as described in a Harvard study.
Among the panelists on the early morning Monday session was Terry Ward, the chief operating officer of KPC Media in the Indianapolis area. Terry is building revenue, not only digital, but print. When I spoke with Terry I asked him how he was doing this. Terry has a multipronged approach, which includes properly setting print-revenue expectations for the salespeople, and then allowing them to go meet those goals. (You can read many things into those words). KPC moved to an ad agency model, but most importantly returned to the basics. In two words: quality and commitment.
Terry and I spoke about the newspaper brand, and expanding the brand. I’ve written about newspapers taking their brand into places that are very far away from traditional newspaper reporting. Newspapers here in the states, in Europe and in South America have been very successful following this model. But Terry views it very differently. Newspapers have a relationship with their readers and their advertising customers. It is one built on strong, deep trust. The brand must be worthy of the trust, and that is how to build on the brand.
According to Terry, local advertisers look to their newspaper as the trusted partner to reach their customers. Using an ad agency model, Terry builds on this trust by placing his customers on the printed page, and in the digital space with his company’s own brands and allied partners. To look at KPC’s commitment to quality, visit InFortWayne.com.
At the stand I was on, attendees spoke not only about our product offerings, but about the industry and their hopes and views. I’ve been on the engineering side of the house for the past three years and this was the first national conference I’ve attended since 2010. The attendees have changed. After being the youngest guy in the room for 25 years, I was older than 85-90 per cent of the attendees. This is very good. A generational change needed to happen if our industry is going to survive.
Everyone who visited the stand, and everyone I spoke to at the receptions was upbeat. They knew how they were going to be successful. But then, unlike the previous generation who sailed calm waters and expected a 35 per cent margin, this generation only knows our industry in turmoil. These turbulent waters are what they’ve learned to navigate.
But still I’m left uneasy by what I’ve learned. Any percentage increase in print revenue needs to be matched by four times that percentage growth in digital to bring in the same number of dollars. The future is digital, it is not print, so future planning naturally must be for digital. But I wonder, are we incapable of concentrating on two goals at once?
• Newspaper systems industry veteran John Juliano writes regularly for GXpress Magazine. He is North American vice president of business development at Miles 33. Contact him at john@jjcs.com
