How do Newspapers Stay Relevant and Survive?
This week, John Berry penned a very interesting and thought-provoking piece for the Baltimore City Paper titled, “Press Release, The Sun’s Ever-Shrinking Newsroom Isn’t Good News For Baltimore“. In this piece Berry takes us through the last 10-20 years of staff cutbacks, branch closures, and formatting changes that have occurred at the Baltimore Sun. Berry makes many great points and shows why every major city needs a credible, well-researched, daily news periodical.
The vast majority of Baltimore citizens can agree with this. We need professional, full-time journalists to cover our city and bring all of the stories into the public eye. What Berry doesn’t discuss, and what many newspaper executives around the country are no doubt struggling with, is how do newspapers remain relevant and increase readership in the 21st century? How do newspapers grow and remain profitable so they can afford to hire and retain these journalists and run a paper that people want to read?
Advertisers are the major revenue stream for any newspaper. As all of us know, there has been an explosion of new media options over the past 5-10 years. Where advertisers used to only have to choose from TV, radio, magazines, and newspapers, their choices have been compounded exponentially by the options available on the web, mobile, and other digital platforms. Newspapers have been hit especially hard by the web and the accountability and tracking it offers.
What most newspapers have done is to try to replace the dollars they’ve lost in print with online advertising dollars. The problem with this strategy thus far is that those online dollars have not even come close to what newspapers were used to receiving for print ads. So how does the Baltimore Sun, or any regional newspaper for that matter, go about increasing their online advertising revenue and building a new business model?
First, the web of 2008 should be especially exciting for journalists and news organizations. News stories now have the opportunity to be spread, shared, and acted upon at an incredible rate. The Baltimore Sun needs to stop thinking like a newspaper and start thinking like a web property.
A web property like BaltimoreSun.com makes the majority of their advertising revenue through display ads that run alongside their content. They sell display ads on a CPM basis (cost per thousand impressions). This means that in order to increase revenue they can, A) increase the CPMs they charge, or B) increase the number of impressions or page views they receive. Let’s focus on B, increasing impressions.
As you can see from the above Compete.com graph, traffic to BaltimoreSun.com has increased a bit over 50% in the past year. That’s not bad, but with barely over 1,000,000 unique visitors a month, there is a serious cap on the amount of advertising revenue that can come from the site at this point.
The first and simplest step The Baltimore Sun should take in increasing their traffic is implementing a search engine marketing campaign. I was pretty sure that the Sun wasn’t engaging in any SEM, but a few quick Google searches this morning confirmed that. While the Baltimore Sun has great content on subjects like Michael Phelps, the Baltimore Ravens, and today’s front page story about developers in East Baltimore, unless you came directly to BaltimoreSun.com, you’d never know it. Go ahead and Google any of those items, you will not see a Sun ad. SEM is a cost-effective way to drive traffic and should be used to promoted every story featured on BaltimoreSun.com
Newspapers should also be more involved with social media. What the world of blogs and sites like Digg and Twitter need is actual news stories for their members to discuss. Without breaking news or strong editorial, people have nothing to share, comment on or argue about. TechCrunch blogger Michael Arrington uses Twitter quite well to share each and every one of TC’s blog posts to an audience that really cares about them. As of this moment, he has 23,631 people who have specifically signed up to follow Arrington and get updates any time he posts a new story. This is an example of something small that newspaper sites can do to start becoming more engaged with their readers and add new readers.
In addition to distributing content more effectively, a newspaper must remain focused on providing the excellent content itself. One of the major advantages of having seasoned, full-time journalists is that they have the time and ability to investigate and build excellent stories. These are the kinds of stories that will help re-establish The Baltimore Sun as the best source of information. There is so much noise on the web today that now, more than ever, the sites with the best content will be the ones that thrive.
The main point I’m trying to make, and what I think Berry was saying, is that it is critical that there be a serious news organization to cover every major city. Even in the day of ‘citizen journalism’ Baltimore needs professional, full-time journalists working to investigate and uncover major stories. So it is critical not just for the Baltimore Sun, but also for the health of our city, that they find a way to remain relevant.