This is a presentation by Mike Obert, managing partner-sales for Open Look Business Solutions based in Richardson, at the TCCJ Revenue Workshop via Zoom on Aug. 14.
TCCJ Revenue Workshop: Making Money in the “New Normal”
9 a.m.
Welcome and introductions
Kathryn Jones and Dan Malone
TCCJ Co-directors, live from the Texan News broadcast studio at
Tarleton State University in Stephenville
“Re-Igniting the Post-Covid Sales Conversation With Advertisers”
Ryan Dohrn
Media sales consultant/ad coach and host of “Ad Sales Nation” podcast
COVID-19 was devastating for most local and regional business owners. So, how do we as sales pros sympathize, but get back to that much-needed marketing conversation? Media sales coach Ryan Dohrn will share 7 ways to re-ignite the conversation with style, ideas, and realistic expectations. From handling objections like COVID has killed our business to the objection of I am too busy now to explaining the “marketing bump” to email templates to perfect post-COVID prospecting times to revised pricing options. Come prepared to laugh and learn from a media sales pro that still sells today and has touched over half a billion dollars in ad sales over his 30-year career.
10 a.m.
“New Strategies for a New Time”
Kevin James
Director of Special Projects Sales
Moser Community Media, LLC (Brenham)
Kevin will share “out of the box” success stories during this “new normal.” He describes himself as a “positive, upbeat, ‘make lemons out of lemonade’ kind of salesperson and leader,” so Kevin’s presentation will focus on creative ways to engage customers and make deals at a time when so many traditional advertisers face economic challenges themselves.
11 a.m.
“The New Normal of Selling”
Mike Obert
Managing Partner – Sales
Open-Look.com, Richardson, Texas
When so many people are working remotely, traditional workdays are upside down. For sales people, that means having a fluid schedule throughout the day to work in your hours of prospecting and maintaining existing clients. It also means looking for new means to reach readers on behalf of advertisers. Mike will discuss how to use video and leverage social media in the new normal of selling.
Noon
“A Year for the Record Books – What’s Working? What’s Not?”
Moderated by Dan Malone and Kathryn Jones
TCCJ Co-directors
The pandemic and statewide lockdown of businesses crashed local economies and put intense new pressures on community journalism outlets and their bottom lines. Newspapers saw website traffic increase, but traditional ad sales plummet. Some were able to secure federal Paycheck Protection Program loans, but that money ran out fast. Some were able to get new grants offered by Facebook and other sources. Some had to cut frequency of print publication. Many had to scramble and find creative ways to survive. Attendees are invited to share their stories about what worked, what did not, and how their business models are changing.
Speaker Biographies
Ryan Dohrn
Ryan is the founder of media sales strategy firm Brain Swell Media and the creator of the 360 Ad Sales System taught to over 20,000 media sales professionals in 7 countries. Ryan works with over 200 newspapers per year and has a deep passion for the community newspaper business. Ryan’s 30-year media sales and marketing career includes leadership roles at PennWell Publishing, Morris Publishing, Disney/ABC TV and The NY Times Company. He is an Emmy Award winner, business book author and has been featured in USA Today and on Forbes.com.
Kevin James
Hailing from Greenville, Texas, the son of a newspaper pressman and a mother who faithfully read her hometown newspaper daily, Kevin has printer’s ink flowing in his veins. He joined MCM in January 2014 as Director of Special Projects, Digital, and Sales Training, and heads up a groupwide VIP initiative.
Although Kevin was heavily involved in his elementary, junior high and high school newspapers, he began his “official” newspaper career as a retail sales rep with the Rockwall Texas Journal-Success in 1993.
In 1997, Kevin was recruited to an advertising account executive opportunity with The Dallas Morning News, working print and digital advertising and focusing on the travel and tourism, real estate, faith-based accounts and automotive segments. After marrying an “Okie,” in 2003 he accepted a position with The Daily Oklahoman/NewsOK.com in Oklahoma City as a digital advertising specialist, developing their first-ever million-dollar digital sales territory.
Moving to Austin 2010 for personal/family reasons, Kevin accepted a multi-media executive position with Cox Media Group/ The Austin American-Statesman where he earned several awards and honors. In 2012 he was recruited to rebuild a major and key accounts territory with Hearst Media/San Antonio Express-News.
In 2013, Kevin was recruited by Stephens Media Corporate Division in Las Vegas, Nevada, as a digital sales consultant/catalyst for their training and sales efforts for their papers nationwide. Kevin worked with such papers as The Las Vegas Review Journal; The Daily World in Aberdeen, Washington; The Sherman Herald-Democrat in Sherman, Texas; The Examiner-Enterprise in Bartlesville, OK; and the Ashboro Courier-Tribune in Ashboro, North Carolina.
Kevin also has served as advertising directors for two local Texas papers – his hometown newspaper, The Greenville Herald Banner (2001), and The Williamson County Sun in Georgetown (2011-2012).
Mike Obert
Mike began his publishing career in 1992 and has specialized in monetizing magazines through ad sales, distribution and other creative revenue streams. In 2009, Mike began developing offshore publishing solutions for a US-based niche media company out of the Philippines. In three short years, Mike noticed a void in the industry and lack of reliable outsourced options for all publishers, which ignited the vision to create Open Look.
In 2012, Mike and partners formed Open Look, turning void into opportunity. Two years later, Mike created a neighborhood network of community publications that is directly mailed and driven by ad sales. Currently, Mike drives the direction and innovation of Open Look, ensuring the services remain valuable and relevant for the ever-evolving niche media industry.
The annual Summer Revenue Workshop conducted by the Texas Center for Community Journalism has been moved to a virtual format for Friday, Aug. 14. It will no longer be held in person at the Hangar Hotel Conference Center in Fredericksburg due to the spread of COVID-19 throughout Texas. However, we’re planning an excellent workshop that you can tune into online. It also will be recorded and archived on the TCCJ website.
This year’s timely theme is “Making Money in the ‘New Normal.’”
As businesses reopen, it’s time to get back to sales conversations. But when so many people are working remotely, their days are upside down. The pandemic and statewide lockdown of businesses crashed local economies and put intense new pressures on community journalism outlets and their bottom lines. Newspapers saw website traffic increase, but traditional ad sales plummet. Some were able to secure federal Paycheck Protection Program loans, that money ran out fast. Some were able to get new grants offered by Facebook and other sources. Some had to cut frequency of print publication. Many had to scramble and find creative ways to survive.
To address these concerns, the line-up of speakers will include Kevin James, director of Special Projects Sales, Moser Community Media, LLC (Brenham); Mike Obert of Open-Look.com in Richardson; and via Skype, Ryan Dohrn, media sales consultant/coach and host of “Ad Sales Nation” podcast. They and TCCJ Co-directors Dan Malone and Kathryn Jones Malone will share insights and advice on new strategies for selling in the “new normal,” latest trends in digital traffic and online ad sales; social media vs. digital revenues, and alternative sources of revenue.
The workshop will end with an open discussion about some of the creative products and strategies Texas newspapers and their websites have used in this extraordinary time of change. Please share what you’ve tried that worked, what didn’t, and how business models are changing. We can all learn from each other. Email Kathryn front or inside pages, advertising, promotions or links to pages: [email protected].
Details:
WHERE: We’re looking at video conferencing options.
WHEN: Friday, Aug. 14; times TBA
COST: FREE. Just fill out the registration form below so we can send you information about the workshop and how to sign on.
REGISTER HERE: Please fill out the registration form. If more than one person from a news organization plans to attend, please register individually.
Question: My school district is claiming that it’s restricting public comment to agenda items due to the recent law (they were previously allowing any comments). This seems like a gross misrepresentation of a change designed to guarantee a right rather than restrict it. Is my understanding correct?
Answer: Looks like your school district is reading the update to the Open Meetings Act in a very literal way that undermines the purpose of the revision in the 2019 legislative session.
We’re talking about HB 2840, which requires government bodies to allow people to comment on agenda items. Yes, the purpose of that was to allow more comments, not fewer, but another section of the revision says the government “may adopt reasonable rules regarding the public’s right to address the body … including rules that limit the total amount of time that a member of the public may address the body on a given item.” The intent of that was to keep the public from wasting time or basically shutting down a session by talking endlessly – not to eliminate public comment time outside of agenda items altogether.
Here’s the bill text: https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/86R/billtext/html/HB02840S.htm
I’d read that to mean that “people may not speak on anything but agenda items” (as your school district seems to be doing) is not a “reasonable rule” under the law. That would at least be up for interpretation by the AG, and may be worth challenging the ISD on. The Texas Municipal League reads the bill as permitting but not requiring government bodies to allow open comment, as long as the body isn’t restricting public criticism of the body (another passage in the OMA revision). Read this from TML counsel Zindia Thomas, who I respect on open records/meetings matters as acting in good faith on interpreting these things, rather than being reflexively defensive of her organization’s members: https://www.tml.org/DocumentCenter/View/1237/HB-2840-Public-Comment-on-Agenda-Items
In short, I’d suggest asking your school district to return to allowing an open comment session on non-agenda items, arguing that dismissing public comment altogether is not a “reasonable rule” under the HB 2840 revisions. It may at least be worth seeing if the AG would issue a letter opinion on it. It may also be a call to the AG hotline on open meetings, 512-478-6736.
I am entering my second decade at the helm of the Whitesboro News-Record.
Granted, I’ve left a few brief times and come back, but all roads have led us back here. This January will mark the 11th anniversary of my first being named the editor and a lot has changed for me in that time.
We have one more child than we did back then and the twin babies we had back then aren’t babies anymore.
I managed to earn a master’s degree along the way.
We were able to buy a house.
I am the only face in this office that was here when I first started more than 10 years ago.
Time marches on.
I thumb through the archives each week and see the faces of people we’ve lost over the past 10 years. I was blessed to have known them all.
I think ahead another 10 years and choke up at the number of beloved community members we hold dear today who won’t be there with us then.
The community newspaper does a few things: We report on births. We report on graduations. We report on marriages. We report on deaths. We report on all the highlights in a person’s life. We tell the stories of the people with whom we share our corner of the planet.
We do all these things together with you. We live, love, grieve and grow together, as a community.
It is these connections that keep me in this business.
It is these relationships I hold so dear. Life is short and we must cherish each other.
I was reminded of this last Wednesday when the police scanner reported a seven-car accident on Hwy. 377.
It was pouring rain and we hadn’t gone to print yet. I knew what I needed to do.
I’ve covered too many of these scenes, but never one quite like this. It was dark, and wet, and cold. There was wreckage everywhere and I couldn’t make sense of it.
Over the years I’ve developed a habit when walking onto an accident scene where I know someone has lost their life.
I find a first responder I know well— a familiar face— and I ask, “Is it anyone we know?”
Too often, it is.
This is where the lines of objectivity in responsible journalism can get skewed by emotion.
And this was the case last week. There was a man declared dead as a result of this massive pile-up. I found out later I knew him.
Albeit, years ago, but I knew him.
He was a high school boss. I hauled hay for him and fed his cows on occasion.
I even once sold him a piece of furniture I had built.
It’s times like these covering the news in your community hits home.
It’s certainly not the first time it’s happened either.
As community journalists, we sometimes must report events that are the absolute low points in someone’s life. And it is often people we know.
I hesitate to offer examples about each and every one of these experiences in the course of my career— in the spirit of not reliving them, but they are plentiful and they are hard to deal with.
This job can leave you feeling physically beaten at the end of a day.
The degree of tragedy in which you encountered with a given story can correlate to this beating.
I have been left feeling like I’ve literally been kicked in the gut more than once.
Maybe I internalize the pain of others too much. Maybe I feel guilty about having to make news of their sorrow.
Maybe I wish all news was good news.
Last Wednesday was one of these times.
After we put the paper to bed that night, I couldn’t rest my thoughts.
I took pen to notebook and jotted down a few words:
“And just like that, the emergency scanner goes off. Seven car pile-up on the highway. At least one deceased. Calling for the jaws of life. Not enough ambulances available. Bystanders pitching in. Performing CPR. And the community newspaper is there to document it all. The hard work of heroes and the sorrow of families. Seven lives changed forever and at least one life ended. I’ve been doing this a long time and it will never be easy.”
That last sentence got me.
“Will this ever be easy?” I asked myself.
Almost immediately I answered myself, “It can’t be easy. I can’t let it become easy.”
The day this becomes easy is the day I’ve lost empathy for people in times of sorrow. The day we lose empathy is the day we need to be doing something else. We can’t serve our communities properly without proper empathy.
No matter your line of work, no matter your passion — we all have an effect on the people we serve. Our community. Our tribe.
No matter your work, you serve. We were put here to serve others.
The day we lose our empathy is the day we cease to serve.
Don’t lose your empathy. Service is not supposed to be easy.
In explaining my work, I sometimes say that there are thousands of really good journalists in rural America, but all too often they are the only person in their newsroom that fits that description. They suffer from the isolation of rurality, with fewer opportunities than urbanites to rub shoulders and exchange ideas with their professional peers.
That observation applies to independent rural publishers, too. They may attend state newspaper meetings, but there’s nothing like the National Newspaper Association convention, where editors and publishers from New England, the North Woods, the Great Plains, the Corn Belt, the Deep South, the Intermountain West, the Pacific Coast and other regions exchange ideas. That’s especially important for the approximately one-third of weekly newspapers not owned by groups, which can be sources of ideas (and instruction). Get them together, and the love to help each other.
This was on display at the Great Ideas Exchange at the National Newspaper Association’s annual convention in Milwaukee Oct. 3. There were too many ideas to share in this limited space, but here are some themes and standouts:
Engagement with the audience is a key task these days, and some circulation ideas at the session were good examples. The Lancaster News in South Carolina delivers to funeral homes 10 copies of the paper for distribution to families and friends who want a copy of an obituary. With a sponsor, the copies count as paid circulation.
The paper also gives all its yearly subscribers a page of coupons (usually $5 each) worth a total of $25, and is trying to get to $50, the price of a one-year-subscription, Publisher Susan Rowell said. The promotion has converted a lot of sox-month subscribers, and “You do something for your loyal customers just to keep ‘em,” she said.
Effective engagement means taking every opportunity to build loyalty, and that includes people in the newsroom.
The North Scott Press of Eldridge, Iowa, asks subjects of its stories, “Where do you read the paper?” That indirect approach is better than asking if they subscribe or buy it regularly. If their answer indicates that they don’t, the next question is “Would you like to receive it at home?” and offer a three-month free trial, Publisher Bill Tubbs says. The staffer making the contact gets $3 for a free trial and $7 for a paid subscription.
Many newspapers have made magazines and directories good revenue sources. The Echo Press in Alexandria, Minnesota, produces a Churches of Douglas County magazine every other year, charges $50 for a listing and gives each church 10 copies. Some papers provide membership lists that the paper uses to solicit sponsorships, Publisher Jody Hanson said. “It’s a really good reference guide,” she said, adding that some churches initially declined to participate, but now say “Don’t ever do it without us.”
The Echo Press also hires a Santa Claus for three hours after school, asks parents to bring a food item to donate to the needy, takes photos of Santa with the kids, provides a link to the pictures and prints them in a holiday-greetings section with kids’ letters to Santa.
Hanson also had a good idea for the typical “progress edition” many papers publish in winter when ads are slow: Along with features on businesses, list building permits and related reports from local governments, which are documentary evidence of community development.
Lettie Lister of the Black Hills Pioneer in Spearfish, South Dakota, said she was told
told that “progress sections were dead,” but theirs attracts many non-regular advertisers. It’s not called a progress edition, but “Our Towns,” which sounds like something that people will keep a long time, adding to its ad value.
The Pioneer marked its 140th anniversary by mining its historic archives in the last quarter of the 19th century, starting with reports of the battle at Little Big Horn. The paper did a feature every Saturday, then a compilation without ads but a $10 price tag.
A newspaper’s big anniversaries can be celebrated with a section that also celebrates lesser anniversaries of other businesses, said Peggy Scott of the Leader in Festus, Missouri. It marked its 20th and 25th anniversaries and chose the most compelling stories of other businesses, with no repeats between the two.
Don’t run a bunch of extra photos without considering opportunities for a sponsored page, spread or even a section, said Mary Huber of the Archbold (Ohio) Buckeye. Local schools have many events that lend themselves to this: athletics, theatrical presentations, science fairs and so on.
Local festivals are natural opportunities for special sections, but the Grant County Herald in Minnesota takes up a few notches with a $100 treasure hunt for a hidden “newsbox” with a coin, promoted with a spread of ads with clues to its location. Almost every advertiser participates. The last clue is posted at the Herald office during the festival, and dozens of people line up to get it.
Bill Ostendorf of Creative Circle Media Solutions urged publishers to do a total-market-circulation edition once or twice a year: “Advertising more than pays for it, and it’s a really god promotional thing” for circulation.
I added that my institute encourages newspapers to include a health and wellness section in its TMC editions; our research shows that people need and want health information, and are more likely to subscribe to the newspaper if they know it regularly has such information. Also, most health-care providers have a budget for advertising, and newspapers are leaving a lot of that money on the table.
One of the session’s more interesting ideas came from Dick Seibel of the Silver City (New Mexico) Daily Press and Independent. In New Mexico, each county has a lobbying day during legislative sessions, and his Grant County has long had one of the more ostentatious. The paper does a special section about the county’s attractions and its legislative priorities, printing 3,000 extra copies that are distributed to legislators and other officials and around the capital of Santa Fe. Seibel said the project reinforces the importance of the newspaper to movers and shakers. And that’s what makes this idea worth mentioning. Wish we could have included them all!
I know this may seem ironic coming from a newsman, but does the news make you feel good on a regular basis?
Television news broadcasts can be depressing. Your social media feed can be worse.
Admittedly, some news in your community newspaper can bring you down from time to time as well.
More and more often, people may feel more afraid, angry, cynical, and hopeless after watching the evening news.
Broadcast news has developed over the years to compete with entertainment for TV ratings.
Back in the days of Walter Cronkite, the evening news was a loss leader.
CBS made money on “I Love Lucy,” not the “Evening News.”
Not anymore. Network news is a cash cow these days.
As a result, they tend to sensationalize danger and wrongdoing, evoking fears of corruption and impending doom.
Media nerds like me learned in graduate school about the negative effects this has on society. But the implications for everyday people are worth discussing. A communications writer, George Gerbner, coined a phrase for this: “Mean World Syndrome.” It deals with the impact watching television has on how we see the world.
The Mean World Syndrome goes one step further, describing the perception that the world is more dangerous than it really is, based on what’s shown in mass media.
There are thousands of studies that suggest a strong connection between television watching and aggression.
Over the decades, much has been done to shield children from violence on television, but some say that is missing the point. Instead of focusing on ways to hide the violence, some question the ways in which the violence is portrayed.
Violence on television and video games can normalize aggressive behavior and make viewers become desensitized.
Gerbner said the mind then becomes “militarized.”
The more dangerous the news shows the world to be, the more we believe them. We become fearful and anxious, depend more on authority, and take other precautionary measures.
“Growing up in a violence-laden culture breeds aggressiveness in some and desensitization, insecurity, mistrust, and anger in most. Punitive and vindictive action against dark forces in a mean world is made to look appealing, especially when presented as quick, decisive, and enhancing our sense of control and security,“ Gerbner once said.
Sound familiar?
He wrote that back in the 1970s.
Where, then, have we come now?
Did you know that crime is at a 30-year low in this country?
We are safer than we’ve ever been.
In every category: murders, rapes, drug use… every category… crime is down.
You couldn’t tell it by watching the 10 o’clock news.
The average newscast is about 26 minutes. There are about six minutes for weather and five for sports.
That leaves the station 19 minutes to grab and keep your attention.
The advertising is more effective that way.
When 15 minutes of the newscast is doom and gloom, leaving only two minutes, after commercials, for something positive — what is the mind supposed to think?
I’ve been guilty of this too.
As a newsman, I know what sells newspapers. A terrible car wreck or controversy at the school board meeting wins every time.
It is what it is.
But we err on the side of positive whenever possible.
I don’t think the TV guys do that as much.
At the end of the day, you are responsible for the media you consume. If you take in violence, you will be in a violent mood and that is not good.
We need to keep up with the world around us, but take it with a grain a salt. For every story about a violent crime, there are thousands of stories about communities coming together.
Seek out those stories.
Seek out the good stuff. There is always more good than there is bad.
Darrell Royal was famous for his formula for winning football: You gotta dance with the one what brung you. In football, you have to keep doing what made you good in the first place. If you were undefeated by running the ball, you keep running it in the playoffs.
And that concept works for newspapers, too.
The doom-and-gloom crowd always focus on the “paper” part of the newspaper compound. Paper is a dying medium, they say. And they may be right. But if we’re going to succeed, we have to focus on the first part of that compound – the one what brung us. And that is news.
Newspapers aren’t popular because they’re printed on paper. They grew to popularity because they gave people the news they wanted. Local events. Names. Faces. Calendars. Sports. Opinion. Pictures. Information.
And guess what? Scholarly research confirms what we have always known. A Northwestern University study last year showed that regular reader habit and strong coverage of local news were the key factors in keeping subscribers. But they wondered … was that also true for small news outlets?
So they did a follow-up study on 12 small news outlets. Not surprisingly, they found that the same local news emphasis that causes people to read metros also sends them to your newspaper.
One of the things they found was that the more frequently subscribers connect with you, the more likely they are to hold on to their subscription. Large newspapers realize that even publishing daily isn’t enough, so they have rolled out a number of newsletters to make their brand more valuable for readers.
The takeaway for community newspapers: We have a hot commodity – news. But we can’t just deliver that on paper once a week. We have to be the go-to medium for news in the community every day. At TCCJ, we used to say that you could be a weekly in print but you had to be a daily online. That seems short-sighted now. We can’t just put news up daily on our website – we have to use social media and newsletters to get that news in front of our readers.
Websites assume that readers come to them. But social media and newsletters don’t wait for readers to come to them – they go to the readers.
We still have a commodity readers want. We just have to get the news – branded with our name – in front of readers, and do it more often.
If you’re reading a community newspaper, chances are you are reading what seems to be a dying story format: an unbiased account of the news.
A president who has been overly critical of journalism has driven newspeople on the national level to disregard time-honored canons of objectivity. In years past, we would have reported what a president said or did, and what others said about him. Now many think they have to put a label on the newsmaker – calling the president a racist instead of just reporting his words and actions and letting the reader decide whether that represented racism.
But what about readers? Does it matter to them?
Surveys say it does:
- A recent Knight Foundation study reported that 66 percent of Americans said most news media do not do a good job of separating fact from opinion. Back in 1984, 42 percent held that view.
- On a media trust scale with scores ranging from a low of zero to a high of 100, the average American scores a 37.
- Unfortunately, media trust has itself become a partisan issue, with Democrats largely trusting the media and Republicans distrusting the media.
The recent flurry of news mergers and buyouts also concerns the public. More than 9 in 10 Americans in a Gallup survey are very (68 percent) or somewhat (26 percent) concerned that corporate views would influence coverage if a large company purchased their local news organization.
When you talk with readers about these issues, remember that they don’t see the media landscape like we journalists do. They look at newspapers, TV news, online news and other outlets and just see journalism. We see hard news, news analysis, news advocacy, infotainment and lots more.
So tell your readers that you’re committed to presenting the news fairly and objectively – to airing all important sides of stories. And that no matter what they may see on MSNBC or Fox or some national newspaper or news show, your newspaper is committed to the best traditions of objectivity, neutrality and fairness.
An old definition of public relations is “doing right and telling people about it.” At community newspapers, we’re committed to doing right. But we need to be more about the business of telling people about it.