Modernize Newspapers

Proposed Newspaper Resolution for 2010

Here's my proposed newspaper resolution for the next year/decade... put the best way I have ever seen:

Newspaper and local media companies need to embrace innovation by either incubating innovation or partnering with innovators.  Great developers are the key to the future.  It's the only way to stay relevant long enough for online business models to catch up.

Happy New Year everyone!

IT will set local media, newspapers free

Maybe I'm naive as someone who has built a career in the Internet, but I still don't understand a fundamental issue about local media.  IT departments at most local media companies are more often an afterthought than a strategic asset.  Local media has dealt with the Internet as a "necessary evil" instead of an opportunity for disruption.

The tech industry has examples of things that appear to be "out of left field."  Consider the case of Amazon -- originally founded as an online bookseller, they branched out into other retail products.  Then they did the unfathomable:  they launched Amazon Web Services to get into the application and data hosting/services business.  They didn't know where that business was headed, but they knew there was growth.  Google has launched a variety of experiments -- some fruitful like Google Docs and others not so successful.  But they're willingness to think expansively about their business is a major contributor to shareholder value and to serendipity that drives future growth.

I don't see similar experimentation yet in the local media business.  I am not sure if it is a lack of commitment, the lack of developer & IT business talent, or what.  But you'd think that there would be a few cases of major media companies tackling new challenges.

As a direct result, you've seen innovations from disruptors like Craigslist, match.com, eHarmony, Zillow, blogging, hyperlocal publications, Google (News) itself, and others.  None of them could take down a local media powerhouse, but collectively, they have the potential to take all the economic value once owned by the local newspaper.

So here's what I don't get...

If local media sees all this disruption coming from IT, why wouldn't local media treat IT as a STRATEGIC IMPERATIVE moving forward?

The Local Ad Sales Force of "Order Takers"

Pundits in/around the local media business have observed that local media advertising salespeople are "glorified order takers" who are not qualified, willing, or able to do anything more than sling print advertising.

Having met a few of these folks and their managers, I think it's a bit of a generalization.  Sure, a lot of people who have sold ads for many years are committed to doing business the way it has always been done.  But for every "old school" ad sales rep, there are probably 5 younger people in the organization who have the hunger to take on new products and services.

Why?  It's in some ways a generational gap.  Younger people are, by now, expert social media users unless they've been hiding under a rock for the last 4-5 years.  Many of their interactions are online.  Very few of them have the experience of getting news and information from print and not television and/or the Internet.  Remember, your 30 year old ad sales reps may have had the Internet for half their lives.

As time passes and we all experience media in new ways, we'll all gradually get more comfortable with modernized local content and advertising.  Advertisers and younger people in the ad sales force are already there.  When will you make the leap?

Merry Christmas everyone!

Evolution, not Revolution in the Newspaper Business

As we talk with partners, prospective investors, and other folks on the periphery of our business, we hear a consistent theme -- folks are skeptical of the future of the local media business.

Certainly, local media faces big challenges as we approach 2010.  Advances in the Web have taken away a number of core businesses like classifieds and personals, and a variety of new advertising opportunities have come about to dilute the importance of local media for reaching local audiences.  As such, many local media businesses are reducing staff, focusing on core competencies, and aggressively working *with* new technologies instead of against them to modernize.

One such trend that I think we'll see repeated is the move by the Dallas Morning News to reorganize around business segments.  Quoting further, "collaboration is expected to 'bring new products that consumers want to the market more rapidly.'"

Wow.  Think about that for a moment -- journalists and their management are now not just charged with producing good journalism, but also with thinking of their product more expansively and with more agility.

At one time, journalism as field was both closely guarded and sacrosanct -- it was defined as something very specific with rigid guidelines for what was and what was not permitted.  Perhaps social media, link sharing and the blogosphere have, as many have suggested, redefined journalism.

What I like about this reaction from the Dallas Morning News is that they've recognized that their product is more than just traditional journalism.  I'm sure we'll see a number of interesting advancements come out of this -- and I suspect other newsrooms will evolve similarly.

Many folks assume that the local media business is dead.  But remember, they do have great brand assets in every city.  They remain a primary and important influence in each community, and they're leading the way in keeping citizens of every local city and metropolitan area informed.  They're in flux right now, but they're going to emerge better, stronger, and much more competitive as they evolve in coming years.  Don't count them out.

Transforming Media - Part 2: Building a Technical Advantage

Last time, I presented the idea that media companies need to consider restructuring by offloading their internet business to a smaller, more agile company. Then what?

The second major piece of the restructuring puzzle is to develop a technical backbone that takes advantage of the company's strengths.

Media companies have two great advantages - local knowledge and local readership. Internet giants like Google and Yahoo are not going to develop first hand knowledge of your local area. They are in the business of organizing information, not understanding local culture. Learning what the people of Austin, Texas, like and want is not something you get from a computer. You get it by living and working in Austin.

Serving that local market in the Internet age will require different cost structures. Not everything that used to work will continue to work. Every dollar made from print adversing will not necessarily be replaced by a dollar of online advertising. In some cases, it may be a quarter, or a dime.

All hope is not lost, however. There will be new, innovative technologies that enable local businesses to connect with their customers. It started with simple banner and text ads, but innovation is not even close to stopping there.

Every twist on online advertising will require creative, quick thinkers who can develop software at breakneck paces. Some ideas will work. Most will fail. As a media company, youÕll need to place bets on new technologies early and often.

But how? Creating a strong technical team capable of cranking out advertising products at a pace more normally associated with a silicon valley startup is a massive challenge. I'd go as far as saying it's almost impossible for a large media company.

But what internet media companies can do (that most do very poorly today) is build a technical framework into which they can plug innovative products created by partners, whether those parters are Internet giants like Google, or 2 guys in a San Jose basement.

Some keys to successfully creating a flexible technical backdrop for a local media company:

• Forget about building websites and design. Extremely talented web-oriented graphic designers can be outsourced project by project. You'll get high quality, fresh designs without the overhead of full time employees.
• Concentrate on the boring stuff. The back-end systems are what matter. The goal is to make it simple and easy for your advertising and content product partners to integrate with your websites.
• Hire Internet people, not media people. Make no mistake - this technical transformation is not trivial - you will need lots of people on the cutting edge of technology to pull it off. Find a way to get them on board. Learn what motivates them and let them run. Hint - it's not money or ping pong tables.
• Single sign-on. It's a requirement - don't just ignore it and pretend it isn't. Nobody wants to sign into your newspaper website, and then also sign up with a different username for one of your partner's sites (which, by the way, might look just like yours). It's confusing, unnecessary, and a difficult problem to solve. But solve it.
• Manage your data. User lists and contact info will be fragmented throughout your organization if you follow this strategy. Things like opt-in status, unsubscribes, and mailing lists will be a nightmare to integrate manually. Automate this data integration. Again, it's a challenging task, but it has to be done. Data is too important and valuable to keep sectioned off in silos because "the system" couldn't handle it properly.
• Remove hurdles with flexible technology. Suppose an advertising product vendor wants to ask a consumer to sign up for a newsletter on your newspaper's signup page. Not only should this be possible, but the end result should be a disciplined flow of data, not a haphazard collection of incongruent lists. The answer to a request like this should always be "Yes, you can do that, but here are rules.",  not "The system can't do that." or "yeah, but we'd have to keep separate lists".
• Provide an API. Any reasonably competent software developer should be able to figure out how to build a product that integrates with your platform without talking to anyone at your company. That includes, signup, authentication, payment, permissions, unsubscribes - the whole nine yards.

The theme here is to be the glue that collects and stores the content and information that makes a media company valuable and outsource the details of the rapidly changing internet marketing world. If you do this, you will be able to create a process of rapid experimentation without having to bet the company on any one technology development effort.

It's going to be challenging, but whoever does this well will build a winning media company in the years to come.

Is Local the next bubble?

With today's announcement of Gowalla's $8.4 million Series B investment, I think you can qualify "local" as the new "black" in the tech field. 

Clearly the opportunities are significant -- the newspaper business is being modernized, old business models are failing and being replaced by new ones, advertising is becoming increasingly mobile and social, and the long tail of local services has not yet been modernized & put online to the point that it will in coming years. 

Mobile GPS is spawning location-based services that will likely be a critical part of the portfolio of products and services for the tech giants moving forward.

So the trend continues -- who knows what is next?  All I know is that it is an interesting place to be, and it's where the action is at the end of 2009.  We're having a great time with it at Notice Technologies, and we'll have some very interesting things to announce at the start of 2010!

Transforming Media: Part 1 -- Financing Creative Destruction

The future of the news industry, both print and television, is online. That doesn’t mean that people will not consume news while sitting on the couch or at the breakfast table. But that news may be displayed on a TV-like display or a digital print device like Amazon’s Kindle - not on paper or broadcast TV.

Traditional print and broadcast television will soon be relegated to the past. The writing is on the wall. You need not look any further than the financial statements of the major newspapers to see that this transformation is underway. Subscription revenues are falling, and internet ad revenue is a growing percentage of total ad revenue.

There is also good news in those financial statements. Internet revenues are today only a small percentage of total newspaper revenues. The lion’s share of the “creative destruction” is still ahead of us - and local media companies are sitting in a perfect spot to take advantage of that fact. But how?

Online advertising is an immature industry and changes rapidly. Old line media companies, often saddled with debt, do not. That has to change, and there are two components to that change - corporate transformation, and technical focus.

Many major media companies have lots of debt. With hard assets like printing operations and broadcast infrastructure, this debt makes sense. It maximizes the return on investment, and traditional print and broadcast media have been stable enough to support fairly aggressive financial leverage. That is about to change.

The online world is laden with risk - it is rapidly changing and unstable. This is not a good time to build up debt. Flexibility is the key to success.

So what is a media company to do? One strategy would be to spin off Internet related assets into a debt-free company. This is great for the newly created Internet media company- you get a smaller, more risk tolerant organization that is primed for growth into the new Internet media industry.

But what of the other side? The old broadcast and print company, now stripped of it’s higher growth Internet components, will be left with all of the pre-split debt. Unfortunately, this company will have to be managed as if it were going to disappear (or at least shrink dramatically). That means aggressive payment of debt and reduction of workforce as the market shrinks. It will be painful, but it’s the only choice. The alternative is bankruptcy and eventual liquidation.

Fortunately, there is still time for this. Broadcast and print are still producing significant revenues. There is still hope for an orderly contraction of a traditional media company, debt and all. I do not believe this window will remain open for very long. The more traditional advertising revenues decrease, the less likely it will be that a split like this will be viable. Once that window closes, it will be gone for good. Keeping the businesses together would exact a toll on the online business unit as it would be forced to operate in a print-dominated world as the company would be forced to cling to a declining  print-heavy revenue stream just to survive. 

The important concept here is to take the small and growing piece of the media business and put it into an environment where it can thrive while the option is still on the table.

Coming up next - part two of the transformation: building a technical backbone.