toyrobots's posterous

a maelstrom of mind + entropy

How Brand Building and Specialized Content Can Save Online News Resources

1. INTRODUCTION

It is clear, as we look around today, that the newspaper industry is in shambles. Once industry mainstays, built on the fortification of a local market, are struggling, turning to bankruptcy, and disappearing. This is not to say that people are not interested in news, in fact some might argue peoples thirst for information is more unquenchable than it was when newspapers were mightier than the sword. However our focus is more on how we got here and how newspapers can transition into the digital world without being left behind, forgotten, and ultimately failing. Our interest is only this. We will not be discussing the union politics involved, the manufacturing process, fleet management, etc, the focus is solely on the paper, the brand, and the content. We will argue that, at some point, an MBA somewhere suggested that papers cover everything. 

As our world, and I specifically mean you the reader, becomes more connected we lose sight of what was once local. Local, in itself, starts losing definition. So newspapers may have, in fact, been forced to offer up global news. In doing so however they brought on a great expense, this expense was paid for by the subscribers and the ad revenue that the subscriber base brought in. 

With broadband becoming table stakes and real-time news sources came online for free, the trouble began. Why would someone pay for batch-processed news that is a day late and dollar short? The inherent flaw for today’s print newspapers is that they deliver late news. 

In order to survive most newspapers delivered their own deathblow, unaware of it at the time. This deathblow is called syndicated content; this is offered up from Reuters and Associated Press, among others. The problem here is that the same content is being delivered to everyone. The result being that there was nothing distinctive from one paper to the next. As subscribers sank newspapers needed to cut cost and offer up more syndicated content.

With no brand integrity, papers started to drop like the stock market (in 2008), being driven into near extinction. This is not to say that there are certain technologies that may come along and save it all (see e-ink paper and perhaps tablets) but they forgot their identity. They lost it and so the users lost it to.

 

2. IT ALL LOOKS THE SAME

Once newspapers became interchangeable with one another and started offering up the same content, literally, the average consumer began abandoning them in droves. Even heavily branded newspapers such as the New York Times began having problems. If a newspaper like The New York Times is having issues you know that 99% of other newspapers are in big big trouble. Since most newspapers never even saw the internet coming, even in 2006, they never even began to have an online presence. It was no wonder that newspapers, being weighed down by their heavy manufacturing process, were headed for destruction. 

As they lost revenue they needed to let go the one thing that kept some base subscribers happy, their senior staff writers. This forced newspapers into a downward spiral as they brought in more and more syndicated content and their writing style suffered from the layoffs.

So how are newspapers to survive independently if they look the same yet depend solely on local markets for survival? It is clear that content is indeed important, ironically, so why would newspapers sacrifice so much of it in order to “survive”? They need content. They need to specialize in something. 

Since users can get their news anywhere, subscribing became a thing of the past. Users would surf the net, jumping from one source to the next, based on trends and interest. They could get their news real-time, no need to wait a day to read what happened yesterday. 

So here come the blogs, in droves, opinion and op-ed became something that anyone had a platform for. But just because there were a million blogs doesn’t mean they are any good. In fact it is very hard to actually make money relying solely on a blog. This is where the good editorialists come into play. Perhaps some that were laid off from the very newspapers they worked for, others being discovered as a natural talent and having a knack for good story telling. Blogs essentially came in at the right time, provided a crowd-sourced platform for op-ed pieces and took this away from the papers without them even noticing. Now blogs, have a huge readership, with many contributors, as well as a brand, that users search out daily to hear what they have to say. And yet the papers are still trying to hawk all the news, without any particular POV that a potential subscriber could relate to.

 

3. A BRANDLESS INDUSTRY

If all newspapers look the same then what could make them different and build up a subscriber base? 

Brand. Is it a logo? A name? Of course not, marketing execs spend billions every year trying every tactic to get you to relate to an object: so you’ll purchase it.  Newspapers had many opportunities to build a better brand but they chose to ignore it.

They needed to keep their senior staff and market them. Writers that have a brand could have been leveraged to build the newspapers image. Keeping the Mike Royko’s of journalism around is going to bring his followers to the paper, extending the reach beyond just location.

Let’s look at the design of the brand, particularly within the digital space. Most newspapers opted for a subpar experience online to deliver yesterdays news. But what if they had created a unique interface to surf the content? The beauty of news is that, by most standards, it is ripe for data visualization techniques. It seems as though it would be easy to apply Meta data to the content types and serve up content that is both useful to the user and drives them to other useful links as well. This could have been used to break the paper out of this front-page mentality and become more of a potential archive for related content and history of a subject. These days when a user becomes intrigued by a micro-blog, blog, or post they tend to go back and try to find the source and or references to support it so they can formulate their own opinion.

One paper that comes to mind with huge brand awareness is The New York Times. Here is a paper that has brand saturation on a global level. So why is it that they seem to be struggling as well? This is a good question and one that I will circle back to. But this just goes to show that having a recognizable brand is only part of the solution but not the fix itself.

 

5. INTEREST THROUGH SPECIALIZED CONTENT 

So let’s look at the other end of the spectrum: creating a recognizable brand is one thing but in the end their needs to be content that can truly deliver. While AP and others may have a lock on global content, though it could be argued that guerilla style blog news journalism is beginning to lay claim into this space as well, it time for newspapers to look at a specific content category and grow from there. Target a selection of consumers and then start building. The best way to do this is to brand your content / company as something specific. Provide content with a focus, or spin it through a lens of your brand. 

When I first started this project I felt strongly that hyper-localized content was the way to do this. But the more I thought about it, and after reading articles on neighborhood newspapers that are dropping like flies I realized that this isn’t the answer. Since we live in such a global world the interest for local content is limited. It should be a part of the content you deliver but to limit it  is highly risky. Ironically blogs, with a ton less overhead, have begun to own this space: using crowdsourcing to get content from their readers, for free. Yet again blogs have come in and spun newspapers content as their own, in the digital space, and have done it better.

So let’s look at The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, The Economist to name a few. These papers appear to be flourishing and most have taken the step, successfully, to charge for their content. What makes it so valuable? No one else is providing it. This business focused content is highly specialized to each of these brands. The Wall Street Journal providing thought-provoking reflection on yesterday’s business news, the Financial Times is doing this on a global level, and the Economist is doing this through the lens of editorial and opinion writing.

None of these news organizations changed what they did to start with; they have always provided this specialized content. So can a paper, which is going under, suddenly turn around and start delivering new content?

 

4. BUILDING A BRAND

Newsweek awhile back was a magazine that focused on “macro news”. It covered little celebrity bites of info that users could consumer easily; very similar to Time and U.S. News. Less than a year ago Newsweek completely rebranded themselves due to sliding subscription sales and declining ad revenue: editor Jon Meachem said this, “You can keep doing what you have been doing all the time and march nobly off a cliff or you can adapt and change." 

Newsweek has a 5-year plan to turn around their sinking ship. Instead of going after a mass market they are focusing towards the $100k+ reader with simple and thought-provoking news articles. They even stated during their rebranding that they understand readers won’t get the news from them first but what they expect to bring the reader is insightful editorials and in-depth reporting within a more focused lens. Now Newsweek is going head-to-head with The Economist and the New Yorker: who have both fared well during these trying times.

Is it just print that’s affected by the news industry downturn? No, this question is purely rhetorical of course. Let’s take a look at CNN. This news source once dominated the cable news stations, it was not until Neilson, one fateful day, decided to start rating the cable news channels that this all changed. At the same time we saw all these networks start looking for the largest audience to gain the largest sum in advertising dollars. With this they needed to dumb-down the content and start reporting on celebrity gossip stories to do so. Since then CNN’s ratings continue their downward spiral. At one point, in the past, it was the reporter that mattered the most, the anchor created an entire brand around them to help boost profits for the network and such. But these days the traditional anchor seems to have fallen to the wayside, perhaps because they are so controlled by the property and contracts that pay them. I digress though.

I can’t say that CNN is doing particularly well within the cable space but they have been trying to step up their online presence with a newly branded experience. I’m speaking about NewsPulse beta. This unique (and somewhat flawed) user experience is the first step into providing news in different ways. Imagine what it will be like when news resources figure out that they can use location based infographics with live newsfeeds from users and others: the amount of data visualization to help the users navigate is endless. But at least they are taking a stab at it and branding it. Ideally, as this experience grows, users will seek out CNN.com for their news.

So what about The New York Times? They seem to have a powerful brand, an affluent subscriber base. Why are they struggling so much?

6. BRANDED CONTENT

The New York Times does have brand recognition however it is suffering from a loss of identity as well. They seem to have lost track of their target audience as they tried to increase ad revenue during the recession. So while not having a brand is devastating to a business, just having one isn’t enough. The New York Times has overhauled their website a dozen times over the years but they have yet to put out a decent POC (proof of concept) that streams real-time content to the end users while boosting their archives for reference. Again just moving your offline presence into the digital space is not enough, re Amazon Kindle for example. As the display technologies get smarter by introducing NUI interface, touch, for relational content; the content providers will need to get smarter about how they present their data.

The New York Times has been adamant in placing blame elsewhere, saying that Google News is scraping their articles and essentially stealing their ad based revenue. But this is a new century here people and data mining, aggregation has become standard. Trying to protect your content is one thing, but if you had an experience that was unique, that users would search out, then the conversation wouldn’t end at Google News. Users would search the site out because they like the way the information is presented and the find it a useful tool in their arsenal..

So what do I mean by branded content? This is really a mix of the two points I have been talking about with the grey filled in. The newspaper industry needs to bring back their brand. Their brand will be within the writers they hire, the articles they provide, and the experience. The next point is that the content needs to be focused. It needs to reach a particular target audience. When it comes to straight news, mass market appeal will be handled by the micro-blogs, blogs, and aggregators. Most people do not want to read anymore, sadly. So you must pull back your reach and provide a POV with a brand presence. Ideally part of this branded experience would be defined by the presentation of the content, the interface itself. Embracing ‘cutting edge’ technologies, such as the tablet, will help the newspaper industry reestablish itself in people’s minds. So when users see a piece of breaking news from a micro-blog they will search the newspapers site out specifically when they want to get the facts. For a user to be able to recall a brands name, the paper needs to have targeted them directly, cultivating brand awareness, and providing them unique content and perspective on that subject. Otherwise the nearest aggregator, Google, is all I need to find more than enough media-bites to make this happen.

 

7. CONCLUSION

By not being unique within a global market, by cutting senior staff writers that gave the paper personality and a brand, and by syndicating the same content from third-party sources papers ultimately doomed themselves through these actions.

By doing the opposite they can save themselves and provide unique content that users would seek out and ultimately pay for.

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Soraya Kishtwari  (April 20, 2009). Newsweek's new look. Editorswebblog.org (March 8th, 2010)

Sramana Mitra, (December 02, 2008). Newspapers Struggling: Gannett,  New York Times, McClatchy & Co., Seekingalpha.com (March 8th, 2010)

 

 

 

 

 

 

http://virb.com/t/9642374

"We don't do focus groups," they resulted in bland products designed not to offend anyone.

I am constantly reminded of this blog piece featuring Jonathan Ive, the product designer behind the iPhone, among many.

"Christopher Frayling reminded us at that point of Henry Ford's line about what his customers would have demanded if asked - "a faster horse" - and it's surely true that the point of innovative companies is to come up with products that customers don't yet know they need."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/2009/07/listening_to_mr_iphone.html

 

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