Having in many cases wrecked their businesses by putting profits before growth, newspapers in the USA need to innovate to save themselves from oblivion.

In Sydney a second year to address the PANPA Future Forum, INMA chief executive Earl Wilkinson spent a few minutes looking at where they had gone wrong, and many more outlining solutions.

From the golden age of the 1980s, newspapers’ popularity with investors had waned as cost-cutting increased to maintain high profit margins. “We told them they needed to go for demonstrable growth, but they mostly chose the other way, with disastrous consequences,” says Wilkinson.

In 2011, he advocates an urgent change, and explained how newspapers around were already implementing it. He told of:

• the 50/50 project in which staff on 23,000-circulation Norwegian daily ‘Fredrikstad Blad’ pushed rapid digital growth by resigning and reapplying for print/digital jobs. While print revenues are unchanged, digital now accounts for 20 per cent of revenues.

• ‘El Columbian’ In Columbia moved from a ‘no’ culture to an ECOlab initiative in which interdisciplinary teams for projects are shielded from routine. Criteria and specific, measurable and timely, Wilkinson says.

• In Norway, Schibsted had established a brand academy which teaches newspaper executives how to build and manage brands.

• A transformation project at Postmedia Network in Canada put cross-functional teams on 23 transformation projects covering digital, cultural and brand-orientated areas.

Culture, Wilkinson says, trumps strategy,.

And he contrasts cost structures which, in print see 95 per cent of print labour and overheads are allocated, and only five per cent for ‘everything else’, while digital cultures share overheads 50/50 with an allocation which allows innovation, marketing, research and speed… a willingness to fail and ‘go on the offensive’.

“What we have is too many print people touching digital, and not enough digital people touching print,” he says.

Wilkinson says that innovation doesn’t always go with traditional ownership cultures: In the US, the Journal Register Company reports to banks, the UK’s ‘Guardian’ and Canada’s ‘Toronto Star’ belong to trusts, and Deseret Media is part of the Mormon Church. And he contrasts ‘the Google way’ – speed over perfection; low-cost innovation; and the placing of many small bets as it addresses massive changes in media and technology in the next 18 months – with traditional industry attitudes.

In a targetted strategy, the ‘Toronto Star’ cut 70 newsroom jobs but doubled the number of investigative reporters, outsourced retail and classified advertising sales and prepress to focus on major customers and agencies and increase its marketing spend. With diversification of revenue streams, the expansion of digital communities and new business development, the publisher cut reliance on print advertising from 80 per cent to 40 per cent.

Wilkinson quotes consultant Jim Chisholm that newspapers are losing readers, “not because we don’t write for them, but because we don’t speak to them and we don’t invest in understanding them”.

Gen Y members, for example, “don’t see the value of a print edition”: They prefer screen access and don’t value original content or objectivity highly.

In a world of new business models for newspapers, he cited standouts including:

• The ‘Christian Science Monitor’ (USA) which killed its print daily to focus on a web-first policy, launching instead a 75,000-circulation weekly magazine and a paid daily e-newsletter. Web traffic had tripled in the year to 2010, he says.

• Conversion of the ‘London Evening Standard’ from paid to free had seen the closure of two other afternoon dailies, its declining 200,000 circulation switch to a 700,000 distribution, and was expected to put the paper in profit by next year.

• A packaged, miniaturised version of the UK ‘Independent’ called ‘i’ sold for 20 per cent of the cost had soared to a circulation of 175,000, beating the sales of its parent and cannibalising them by 3000-5000.

• The Arizona ‘Republic’ had launched a branded business-to-business division;

• De Persgroep in Belgium had abandoned traditional advertising formats to go for pricing based on impact and return on investment.

• ‘Extra Bladed’ in Denmark had launched a ‘bullseye’ game, selling 96,000 game categories based on newspaper sections and scoring a 30 per cent share of the knowledge games market. Sales rose by ten per cent on each campaign day.

• In Singapore, ‘The New Paper’ had partnered with a bar owner to create a branded sports bar for football-crazed youngsters. The no-cost promotion baited subscription campaigns and brought advertiser participation.

Wilkinson encourages a fresh look at what readers and advertisers expect from newspaper publishers.

In Australia, News Limited ethnographic research had found that while there was no decline in demand for news, print had become less relevant in routines, and a shift in platform preference had taken place.

Newspaper represented a brand promise, and asked what they were doing while browsing the web or an app, participants answered ‘reading the newspaper’.

Wilkinson observed that INMA had changed its name from ‘newspaper marketing’ to ‘news media’… “maybe that was a mistake,” he said.



On social media, Wilkinson urges publishers to “find your device” and figure out how it is social. “Social media is about relationships with devices secondary;” he says. “It can’t be ‘set and forget’... there has to be a perceived personal touch, and content should be shared equally between insights, conversation and general announcements.”

Wilkinson says explosive growth is expected in smartphones and tablets in the next three years: “Individually, the two trends are big; combined, they’re transformative”.

One market leader is the ‘Chicago Tribune’, which is training 1000 employees to use Twitter effectively.



Wilkinson says sales integration “must happen”, with a move to providing solutions and responses, moving advertiser conversations beyond rates and discounts. Publishers need to deliver target-rich environments with high-engagement content; relevant data and actionable audiences.

Additionally, publishers can provide value-added services for small and medium business advertisers… build website and apps, provide QR codes, social media and mobile sites.

And again, he provided examples: The 1100 Broadway agency of ‘The Tennessean’; mobile sites and promotions for dealer advertisers of Freedom’s ‘Orange County Register’ and ‘Victorville Daily Press’; Facebook pages for a customer of Press Enterprise, all in the USA.

Newspapers have moved from being a destination purchase to highly discretionary, and publishers need to recreate demand for their products. A focus on what they sell needs to turn from content to ‘convenience and delight’; from news, but ways of helping improve people’s lives. “We need to transport hearts and minds to a world of discovery,” he says.

• This is an edited version of a presentation to the PANPA Future Forum in Sydney in August.