This blogger says community newspapers shouldn’t be compared to debt-laden metro dailies.
“It is my impression that community newspapers have done a better job connecting to audiences and advertisers. As ambitious journalists climbed ladders, jumping to the next bigger paper (I did this, too), the reporters and editors who stayed developed an trust and social capital in the community that comes across in the journalism. The same goes for the advertising, which benefits from the absence of quarterly goal pressure felt by publicly traded companies.”
The Wall Street Journal has released rules for professional conduct on social networks. The WSJ policy addresses an interesting area that many news organizations have been grappling with for a long time — what is considered appropriate conduct for journalists on new mediums like Twitter and Facebook? The first link is an Editor & Publisher story about the issue, which includes the policy. The second link is social-media blog Mashable’s commentary on the policy.
Leah Betancourt, the digital community manager at the Minneapolis Star Tribune shares some tips for journalists on how to use Twitter, the popular micro-blogging site.
Howard Owens writes that “hyperlocal” news, often-heralded as the savior of the news business, is really just community journalism — something big dailies have gotten away from lately
His description of good community journalism sounds a lot like what many small-town newspapers are doing, and have been doing for years. He writes:
“… there is something to be said for finding fervor and valor in cherishing your home town and the unique individuals that give it vitality.
“As journalists, we’ve gotten away from cherishing community — that isn’t objective enough — and it’s hurt not only democracy, but our business model.”
I can easily understand where you are coming from, having been there early in my career. Don’t give up yet! It’s easy (and fun!) to make cold calls, if you warm them up beforehand. How do you do that? By visiting your potential advertiser before making the initial sales contact and by being prepared.
The “recon mission” strategy can warm up those cold calls, enabling you to be better prepared, and ultimately more successful. On your recon mission your objective is not to make initial contact or get acquainted, your objective is to gather information, to learn more about, and further qualify your potential advertiser.
The recon mission takes place at your potential advertiser’s place of business. Visit your potential advertiser, look around and walk around, asking yourself these questions: What image is this retailer conveying? What’s the store’s appearance, inside and out? Who are the clientele? What’s the customer service like? What is the depth, variety and look of the merchandise? Is the store signage welcoming, are promotions prominently displayed and recent are advertising efforts or campaigns displayed?
As you gather your information, a picture of your potential advertiser should begin to form. During your recon mission, did you pick up some new ideas or competitive information that will help you with your other clients? Have you begun formulating what benefits your newspaper offers that will match the needs or goals of this potential advertiser?
Your answers to all of the aforementioned questions will help you plan your strategy and better prepare you for your initial meeting with your potential advertiser’s decision maker, owner or manager. Your first meeting, your cold call (and your likelihood for success) is warmer because you have some information, you know a little about what your potential advertiser wants to achieve and you have had the opportunity to at least think through some possible matches between your newspaper’s benefits and your potential advertiser’s goals. You are confident about what you will achieve during this initial meeting. Be careful; don’t be too confident, we’re not selling yet. We are still gathering information.
In preparation for your cold call, ask yourself what your objective is and what questions you are going to ask, not what you are going to tell or sell.
As you walk into your potential advertiser’s place of business ask to speak to the owner or manager. Once that person (or the key decision maker) is identified, address them by name, and introduce yourself, your newspaper, and your intentions (Good Morning, Katie. My name is ____, with ______; do you have a moment to talk about newspaper advertising?). If your prospect says no, ask when a convenient time would be (tomorrow? 2:30?), and set up a subsequent appointment before you leave. Give your potential advertiser a copy of your paper and a business card.
As your potential advertiser mentions a need (we want to reach homeowners), match it with a benefit your newspaper offers (71 percent of our readers are college-educated homeowners). Ask questions. Gather information. Remember to keep this first meeting short. Tell your potential advertiser you would like to set up a subsequent appointment to gather more information or to come back with some ideas, suggestions and recommendations (and proof) showing how your newspaper will meet his or her needs or goals, and basically be a resource to him or her.
Remember, you are building a relationship. The more information about your potential advertiser that you assemble the easier it will be to match needs and benefits. YOU are in charge of building the relationship.
This comes from Steven Bridges at Goldthwaite, a thought-provoking video, “Can Design Save the Newspaper?”
If you’re tired of the relentless drumbeat of news about the demise of newspapers and rise of the Web, read this Philadelphia columnist’s rant about the value of newspapers. Favorite quote: “Rather than integrate with the devices that people already have and use for multi-tasking — cellphones, laptops, etc. — newspapers want people to pay for a separate device where they have more control over the content and the flow of information, and they can once again demand that people pay money for the content. There already is a such a magical device, and it’s available for the low cost of just 75 cents a day or less, a lot cheaper than what you mindlessly fork over at Starbucks every morning. It’s called a printed newspaper, and every year fewer and fewer people are buying it, because they prefer the free-flowing ways of the World Wide Web.”
There has been a flood of articles on the whole “hyperlocal” phenomenon of community journalism on the Web. If you want to read one good – and fairly short – article on what this means, see this one
Traffic at newspaper Websites up 10 percent in the last quarter, according to Editor & Publisher
One of our functions here at the Center is to be “surrogate readers” for Texas community journalists. Keeping up with the fast-changing world of community journalism has never been harder, especially since pretty much everyone now wants in on the act: Even The New York Times is doing community journalism, the number of Internet-only startups is growing by the day, and community journalism is now the “hot” area in mass communications.
But you have a paper to put out, and a Website to maintain. A few of you may even have a life.
So we’ll help you keep up with what folk around the nation are saying about our field — about community journalism specifically and the wider world of newspapers and news Websites in general.
Let’s get started.
Adweek reports that the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has rolled out a new “Unplug. It’s Sunday” campaign to promote the traditional Sunday newspaper as a refuge from the constant buzzing and beeping of smart phones, instant messages and e-mail that marks the modern workweek.
AJC‘s campaign, which runs until the end of the year and will cost more than $1 million, coincides with a recent redesign of the paper.
The marketing guru who designed the campaign put it this way: “It’s about how to reposition the newspaper. We came up with the idea as a counterpoint to the digital cacophony that exists in everyone’s lives. Sunday is the day to relax and do something different than you do the rest of the week.”
Two TV spots show the hectic whirl of the digital workweek, complete with ringing cell phones, instant messenger notifications, conference calls and TV screens filled with digital crawls. The ads then show a couple relaxing on their sofa and reading the paper. A voiceover says, “Unplug. It’s Sunday. Discover the new, totally redesigned AJC Sunday.”
The paper’s weekday and Saturday print circulation has dropped nearly 20 percent in the past year, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. The Sunday edition did better, falling about 7 percent to 462,000. Six weeks ago, the paper cut 30 percent of its news staff.
The new marketing effort reflects the dilemma so many newspapers face. There is a shift in reading patterns, away from print editions toward Websites. But newspapers make far less from their Web readers — at least at this point — than from their print editions.
If you’d like to see the commercials for the new campaign, go here.
It sounds fascinating. Sort of like the beer commercials that aren’t selling the brew, but the good times you can have with friends when you drink it. Or the car company that isn’t selling a car, but the image you will project when you drive it. The AJC is not selling a newspaper, but a throwback to simpler times.
Major metro to debut “citizen journalism”
You have probably been using people in your community for some time as writers — people who don’t work for you, people who haven’t been trained a journalists.
So guess what? Major metros have now discovered that folk not on the regular payroll can add significantly to their news coverage. They even have a name for it: citizen journalism. I did a Google search on “citizen journalism” this morning; it yielded 4.17 million hits.
One of the latest players in this game is The Washington Times. Their citizen journalism project will debut next week. It will feature one full print page every day of news stories written by average citizens in local communities surrounding Washington, D.C.
The Times‘ citizen journalism efforts will focus on six communities within the larger Washington area: academia on Monday, the Maryland and Virginia suburbs on Tuesday, the District on Wednesday, local military bases on Thursday, faith communities on Friday and the charitable and the public service community on Sunday.
The citizen journalists’ work will be showcased in the A-section as an additional page of metro coverage and will provide a natural complement to the work of the newspaper’s reporters and editors.
Each citizen journalist is provided a set of rules for their reporting and newswriting, as well as copies of The Times‘ policies governing ethics, anonymous sources and other journalistic standards.
If you’re interested in further developing citizen journalism in your paper, you should read Steve Outing’s article, “The 11 Layers of Citizen Journalism,” in Poynter Online. Outing’s article prominently mentions Bluffton Today, the South Carolina newspaper whose staff the Center brought in for one of our Web workshops last year.
If you read Outing and you want to know more, get Jack Driscoll’s book Couch Potatoes Sprout: The Rise of Online Community Journalism. This is no philosophical examination of media trends – it shows how real groups of people, including senior citizens, all without a background in journalism, have put together their own successful online newspapers. Don’t let this trend sneak up on you – it may well be a significant part of all our futures.
WSJ editor offers advice on paid content
Zachary Seward wrote a piece for the Nieman Lab at Harvard where he passed along some tips for charging for online content. The ideas were those of Alan Murray, executive editor of the Wall Street Journal Online. Some of those ideas are worth repeating:
- The best model is a mix of paid and free content. Don’t just assume your only options are all paid content vs. no paid content.
- You can’t charge for exclusives that will just be repeated elsewhere. Murray explained, “If it’s a big news story, if we report a takeover and — we could hold that behind the pay wall, but if we do, Business Week or someone else will simply write a story saying ‘The Wall Street Journal is reporting x,’ and they’ll get all the traffic. Why would we do that?” So they drop the pay wall, “and take the traffic ourselves, thank you very much,” Murray said.
- Don’t charge for the most popular content on your site. Items with broad appeal are better used to build traffic that can be turned into advertising revenue.
- Content behind a pay wall should appeal to niches. For example, a local newspaper could consider charging for coverage of high school sports. “To the people who want to read it,” he said, “they really want to read it because maybe their kids are involved. Maybe they’re willing to pay for that or maybe there’s a photography service that’s connected to that where you can download pictures of your kids or of the game. But only if you’re a subscriber.”