Leah Betancourt of the Minneapolis Star Tribune has some advice on Mashable for journalists on how to best use social media. Her piece summarizes several policies that have been set by major metros, but also offers some practical tips that might be useful for to community journalists.
Month: June 2009
The Newport Daily News is trying an interesting experiment in online news. They’re using a tiered subscription model, with the most expensive tier being a $345-a-year electronic edition.
Alan Mutter (the same person who’s pitching an industry-owned ad venture) has an interesting analysis of newspapers’ cost structure on his blog, Reflections of a Newsosaur, and points out that changing that cost structure could be the key to the industry’s comeback. Mutter is advocating a hybrid printed product that involves targeted, niche products combined with innovative online products. His plan is certainly easier to implement for small, community newspapers.
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Advertising spending down 12%
Compared to the first quarter of 2008, advertising spending is down 12 percent, according to Nielsen. That’s a decrease of $3.8 billion, the company reported today. Local newspapers are down 14.3 percent, according to the company’s findings.
Editor & Publisher’s Fitz & Jen are reporting on a report from Moody’s Investors Service that takes newspapers to task over their cost structures. The report notes that 70 percent of newspaper costs are tied up in printing — not the best cost structure in the online era.
Ann Handley has an great how-to about using journalistic writing skills on Twitter. “… news journalism works best when it’s simple and direct, at least in the story’s lead sentences. And simplicity (and other tenets of good journalism — like brevity, and clarity, and immediacy) are now cornerstones of how many businesses, brands and individuals communicate on Twitter,” she writes.
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Print ad sales down almost 30 percent
Statistics just posted on the NAA website show that print ad sales were down 27.9 percent in the first quarter of this year. Online sales fell 13.4 percent.
But the worse news was what happened to classifieds, where sales fell an astounding 42.3 percent.
Newspaper ad sales for last year were off by 16.6 percent, which the NAA said was the worse 12 months in the recorded history of the industry.
This story from American Journalism Review shows how some have a desire for news about the communities they live in that can’t be met by most metro news organizations. “Larger dailies, which are closing down and/or going to online versions, will not cover the news, community events and announcements of small towns,” the paper’s editor says. “We have to do it ourselves. It is the only way we’ll stay informed and connected. Whether it is in print or online, community journalism is still of value.”
The NAA reported this week that the Dallas Morning News’ high school sports Website, HS GameTime, now averages nearly 2 million pageviews a month. Visit the site and look at it as a treasure trove of ideas for what you could be doing for the high schools in your readership area. Football season is just around the corner, and now is a great time to tool up a Website that can draw all kinds of fan interest – and advertising dollars. GameTime generates so much traffic because it offers what no newspaper has the news hole to do – stats, scores and schedules, standings, rankings, videos, slide shows, and the like. Plus, they let readers submit photos and videos of their teams. To that, you should add videos of your band at halftime, cheerleaders doing their routines, and photos and videos of what’s happening in the stands and on the bench during the games – all the off-action stuff that we never have room for in the paper but people love to see.
Who’s the audience for this type of coverage? Athletes and their parents, band members and their parents, cheerleaders and their parents, other family and friends, local sports fans, high school kids who’d never even think of picking up your paper, and so on. Build this site, and they will come. And when they come, advertisers will, too.
Rafe Needleman’s piece on Google’s business practices it quite interesting. He dissects the many industries Google has touched, and shows that journalism isn’t the only industry that has had the rug pulled out from under it by the Internet. On Needleman’s list: journalism (of course), telecommunications, computer operating systems, e-mail and advertising.