Among the entrepreneur community, it has become a "fait accomplis" that newspapers are dead. Look around the blogosphere or run a newspaper search on Twitter and you'll find people reveling in the creative destruction of the media business.
I don't think newspapers and local media are dead, but clearly established newspapers have to do a lot of things differently. Well-documented problems exist at both the top and bottom line -- so newspapers have to do more with their obvious advantages in local markets and they need to do things more efficiently. That's what I'll cover in this blog -- interesting developments that help newspapers better monetize their existing local reach *and* technologies or tactics that newspapers can use to operate more efficiently.
We have spent the last six months or so talking with people at different newspapers about local online advertising. Why? We see the same trends you do -- antiquated local advertising methods like billboards, print ads, yellow pages directories, and other relics of the past no longer provide effective advertising options for a lot of local businesses. Customers are spending more and more time on social networks and mobile devices, but newspapers have little/no way of selling products that take advantage of these trends.
All of that is why we built MinutesNotice -- MinutesNotice is a new self-serve ad platform that helps newspapers and local media companies offer social, mobile advertising to local businesses. We are currently negotiating with several major newspaper groups to offer MinutesNotice in their local markets. We think these deployments will be very successful.
Working with people in the newspaper business has been very interesting over the last few months. Without getting into a lot of specific detail, allow me to generalize it this way. Newspaper people realize they need to embrace innovation to succeed in the future. They also remember that they have huge advantages in local markets where they operate. Some people consider these advantages to be a lot more permanent than others -- skeptics realize that those advantages will go away if they don't modernize and embrace new innovations. Newspapers tend to bog down when folks who believe in modernizing their business collide with stakeholders who see things differently.
If this continues, newspapers will fail to make appropriate changes until it is too late. Time's ticking.
So here's my bias:
Newspapers have to act fast and embrace experimentation. Embrace the golden rule of the Web -- iterate or die. Innovators work fast and big media does not. Big media will have to adapt or the economics of innovators will prevail.
Let's see how this all plays out.
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