The 10 things local newspapers should do - compiled in one blog post

OK, I was critical of the American Press Institute's tired ideas for the newspaper industry. But what do I propose? Well, here goes: 10 ways to strengthen local newspapers in the face of the economic meltdown and the societal shift to the Web.

1. Start with the customers: Readers and advertisers. This might sound obvious. But too often newspapers still base their thinking and strategy on their own processes, traditions or needs. They have to stop thinking of readers as receivers or advertisers as sponsors, and instead treat them like participants in a common community.
• Readers should be able to customize/personalize how they use the services of their local paper. With everything newspapers offer, from the main newspaper and specialty print products to Web sites and smart phone services, the user should feel a sense of control.
• Readers should be able to contribute to the community conversation and a community’s understanding of itself in everything a newspaper does.
• Readers are looking for tools to improve their lives: financially, intellectually, emotionally, health-wise, etc. Newspapers should do everything they can to meet that need – to be a resource for a better life – and make sure their communities know that’s what they’re doing.
• Newspapers shouldn’t produce content the way they’ve always done it: basically, this could be boiled down to headline and text. Instead, they should ask what would provide the greatest benefit to readers in any medium and do that.
• Just as readers should be able to customize and personalize the services of a newspaper, so should advertisers. Newspapers need to be a resource to help businesses grow.
• Just as readers should be able to participate in the community conversation, so should advertisers. It’s newspapers’ job to help them do so. Banner ads don’t cut it.
• Just as readers need tools to improve their lives, so do advertisers need tools to improve their business. Newspapers should provide those tools and make sure that businesses know that newspapers are the place to turn to improve their competitive position in a local market.

Here are some concrete steps:
• Change the way subscriptions are sold. Switch to a membership model. (See step #2.) Enlist the community in the newspaper’s mission and offer a whole range of ways to be part of that mission, including never receiving a print product.
• Ask readers and non-readers alike what they want from a menu of options and then give it to them. This means newspapers should be asking for every e-mail address in a household and every cell phone and the capability of every cell phone, not just for the home delivery address. Each member of a household should be able to opt for a different suite of products/services and have a different relationship with the newspaper organization.
• Highlight readers' contributions on all platforms and celebrate their role by rewarding contributors with greater visibility, shout-outs and financial rewards.
• Offer advertisers ways to participate in social networking appropriate to their businesses.
• Provide advertisers with an easy-to-use suite of tools to allow them to play in the digital world.

2. Establish a clear and credible public service mission. Newspapers tout their watchdog role, but if you evaluate the percentage of their expenses dedicated to this function, the budgetary reality would undermine the claim in many, if not most, cases. If newspapers are going to follow a membership model, as I believe they should (see recommendation #1), there has to be a reason to join. Today the most common complaint is how thin many newspapers have become. Even if unfair, the belief that there’s “nothing to read” in many newspapers is widespread. The No. 1 reason to support a local newspaper should be because it’s an independent watchdog dedicated to holding government and other powerful institutions accountable and to enabling citizens to participate fully in our democracy. Ultimately, it’s not how much there is to read that matters. What matters is whether the newspaper makes a difference in the lives of its readers and its community.

If newspapers do this, the foundation of every one of its communications with the public can be this simple truth: that the newspaper, in tandem with concerned members of the community, is performing an essential function – as essential as water, power and roads. Without the newspaper, people must know, the community would be that much poorer. Today, in some cases, for perhaps understandable reasons, newspapers are not able to forcefully make that claim.

Here are some concrete steps:

• Strip down the newsroom and start over with this mission in mind. Reconstruct the entire news operation on all platforms to make sure the newsroom has this mission at its heart. This will be difficult. Many internally will ask, ‘Well, how can we stop doing this?’ Or, ‘How can we stop doing that?’ The answer is if newspapers don’t perform their central function well, nothing else will matter. If it’s not clear by now that things have to change, the battle may be lost anyway.
• Communicate to the public that this is the No. 1 priority of the newspaper and tell the community every time the newspaper helps keep politicians and others honest or makes government transparent.
• Invite the community to participate in this central endeavor. Newspapers shouldn’t just be looking for breaking news tips or comments from their readers. They should be asking for readers’ help on their most important work and offering others a platform to perform the same function. This includes sharing the best work of other news organizations on their own Web site, if anything just to reinforce the value of this work and to help measure the performance of the local paper.
• Newspapers should champion the public’s right to know, access to open records and the importance of public meetings in symposiums and other forums.

3. Realign the internal operations of local newspaper companies to make marketing, advertising and editorial partners every step of the way. This will involve a zero-based approach to the structure and commitments of the company. Newspapers tell their advertisers how critical it is to get out their message on a regular basis. Yet newspaper companies appear to see marketing as the first place to cut. Marketing doesn’t mean traditional ad campaigns, although it could include some of that. It does mean an entire organization telling a consistent story about itself and living up to that story. Google says its mission is “to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.” That’s pretty easy to understand. If a local newspaper had as clear a mission – “to be the central source of news and information on (x place) and make it easily accessible and useful” – it would enable the entire organization to tell a consistent story and evaluate every potential use of resources against the mission statement.

Here are some concrete steps:
• Locate advertising, marketing and editorial types in close physical proximity so they’re working together and talking every day.
• Make each main content focus of the organization its own channel, or sub brand, with a business manager attached to the content type. Establish separate tracking for audience, reach and revenue for each channel: sports, news, multimedia and business, for example. Share that information with the staff. Give the channel managers responsibility and authority to develop new products.
• Develop or hire expertise in social networking and viral marketing. Every advertiser needs to be exposed to new ways to reach customers and offer them benefits.
• Make mobile the focus of this new approach. This should be the fastest-growing part of any newspaper and as the new frontier it will be the place where there will be the fewest institutional obstacles to experimentation.

4. Make the classifieds a separate, standalone business. Instead of trying to beat Craigslist from within a newspaper operation, free the people running classifieds to do what’s best for that business or hire new people to take the business in a different direction. (I owe this opinion to a seasoned newspaper advertising executive who encouraged me to consider this approach.) Give the new company the existing revenue stream and technological base and the authority to set their own course. If they want to buy pages in the newspaper for print ads, fine. If not, fine. Remove any contribution from classifieds from the newspaper’s budget. Don’t include any projections of a contribution from classifieds. What this will do is free the people running classifieds to stop thinking of them from a newspaper perspective and start thinking of them from a customer perspective. Their role going forward: Connect buyers and sellers. If a newspaper or some other print products work in specialty categories, fine. If not, that would also be fine. The managers would not need to use print unless it made sense. If they can’t make the business successful, it dies. This would also free the rest of the newspaper from waiting for the return of classified revenue in key categories. It will make it clear to everybody left at the newspaper that they have to find new sources of revenue, that they can’t live on the hope that what once worked will come back and save them.

Here are some concrete steps:
• Create a new company with the mission of connecting buyers and sellers. Do not burden the new management with the existing staff. Let them hire the team to achieve their goals.
• Reset the revenue budget of the newspaper to determine the expenses it can support under the new business structure.
• Establish a team to find new sources of revenue not tied to existing classified categories

5. Make the local newspaper a transactional site. The newspaper needs to provide a way for local users to research products online and to buy them through the newspaper’s business directory/web site. This recommendation is obviously is related to recommendation #4. Instead of remaining a “classified ad taker,” the surviving newspaper company would focus on actually aligning itself with local businesses, many of which would probably never advertise in the newspaper. Just as newspapers can’t rely on classifieds, they also can’t survive off display advertising. Newspapers need new ways to bring in revenue. One such path would be to become a middleman for local commerce. Many local businesses are stumped by the web and new technology and newspapers could be the ones to provide them a bridge to connect with customers online and on portable devices. These companies would welcome somebody making their business more successful, especially if they knew that the price of doing so would not be a significant upfront cost but would instead be a percentage of the revenue. This is one place the newspaper’s brand could help. Doing this would reinforce a newspaper's emphasis on looking out for the people, whether in monitoring government or in helping them make intelligent decisions as consumers. Newspapers could be of service to their readers by providing access to inventories or sales by local outlets.

Here are some concrete steps:
• Adopt business directory software that allows local businesses to manage their own Web sites, take advantage of the newspapers’ expertise in search engine optimization and connect with smart phone users on the go who might be in their vicinity.
• Communicate to the community that one of the roles of the newspaper is to organize all the information they might want to know about the community, including where to buy things or to get services.
• Use the membership model with these businesses to make them promoters of the newspaper. Just as businesses like to tout their membership in a better business bureau, they should be exposed to the benefits of being able to tout their membership in newspapers’ encyclopedia of what’s available in their communities.

6. Newspapers should revamp their approach to print advertising. If they do, it will free them up to change their approach to the type of content they print. Today, the approach to editorial content is in part driven by the need to fill holes around ads. As a result, at least partially, you see “A” sections filled with wire stories that can be easily cut to fit. Yet in other areas of modern life, high quality product design has become a standard consumer expectation. If you want proof, all you need to do is go to Target. Or go and test drive a modest, compact car. Even those are well designed now. Yet in many newspapers much of what they print still looks like an after thought. They present small and unwieldy partial pages that editors “fill” with “wire” content that feels like yesterday’s news. That can’t continue. Newspapers need to adopt a more coherent approach to print advertising that allows them to elevate the quality of their content. This will provide a basis for them to charge readers more, something they’re going to need to do in many cases. In others, it may be that a free newspaper with a fixed-page count with standard advertising units sold on an auction basis is the better approach. But in either case, what’s essential is that the advertiser is connected to quality editorial content and that’s only possible if editors can actually plan for the units they have to work with. We’re long past the days where newspapers can get away with “filling” holes. Space actually dictates content. If you doubt that, just check out what people say on Twitter versus what they might say on a blog.

Here are some concrete steps:
• Establish a set of standard ad sizes and positions and make those apparent to potential advertisers on the newspaper’s Web site, the way USA Today already does. Make the ad sizes modular, so they can be adapted to any format. Even today’s broadsheet papers may want to produce some tabloid sections or even editions in the future. If newspapers put the customer first, they will make it easy for them to understand the sizes and make it easy for them to build ads in those sizes.
• Provide an online way for smaller advertisers to build and distribute standardized print ads. Take the work out of it for them.
• Adopt this approach in all specialty publications.
• Reinvent the editorial content of the newspaper based on the ability to use modules that can be placed in any position. Stop using “wire” to fill holes. Make every content decision intentional, with the reader in mind. Ask not whether something would fit. Ask whether anybody would want to read it.

7. Flip the model on its head. Everybody on a newspaper’s staff needs to understand that the newspaper is one of the products, not the identity of the organization. We now live in a digital world. The mindset of the organization, on every front, must be that everything starts online and is distributed or made available in whatever form the reader wants it, wherever and whenever the reader wants it. This is very difficult to accept, because as soon as an organization does adopt this approach it stops being a manufacturing company producing and delivering a physical product every day and enters new, more challenging territory. Today you often hear people say “nobody has figured out how to make money on the Web.” This is generally an excuse to continue to depend on print, which of course remains the dominant source of revenue for local newspapers. But is the claim really true? The answer is no. Plenty of folks have figured out how to make money on the Web. It’s traditional advertising-based businesses that have struggled. But maybe they would do better if they didn’t see themselves as they always have. It’s time to find out.

Here are some concrete steps:
• At newspapers that haven’t already done this, conduct anonymous media consumption audits in every department and share the results with the entire staff. This will ensure that everyone understands the scope of the shift in habits and behavior that has occurred.
• Create groups on Facebook and Twitter for the organization. Make sure that if people don’t monitor these services they’ll miss important information for their work.
• Hold virtual meetings. Shift from an office-based organization to a tools-based organization, providing staff with the mobile tools they need to be effective wherever they are. Ability to use the tools needs to be a job requirement.
• Train, train, train. A newspaper's staff needs the opportunity to learn. But they have to take the initiative, too. Training can be virtual. It doesn't need to be traditional classroom work. Newspapers need independent thinkers and independent actors. If people can't be both, they probably don't belong.

8. Stop pretending that if the newspaper’s staff didn’t do it, the work is not good enough. Other companies routinely hire contractors to produce content according to their exacting standards or collect content produced by others and repackage it in ways that benefit the consumer. So should newspapers. As newspapers examine their organizations and what their budgets can support, they need to be committed to maintaining a core team central to the newspaper’s mission and they need to be ruthless about finding the most efficient ways to do everything else. Newspaper should shift away from the “staff” and “salary” model to a model where a core team works with independent contractors and freelancers who are rewarded based on what they sell or on the amount of traffic they drive. Right now we see organizations cutting compensation across the board. Is that the right way to motivate someone to be part of a newspaper? I don’t think so. Newspapers need to be leaner but to make this switch successfully they also need to reward even better the staff they keep. Based, of course, on their performance and impact on the success of the organization.

Here are some concrete steps:
• Evaluate every job and activity of a newspaper to determine which continue to be necessary. Determine which of those jobs or activities must be carried out by a member of the staff.
• Establish a training program and compensation model for outsiders who contribute editorial content or sell products that bring in revenue.
• Establish an “experts desk” that actively recruits people from the community knowledgeable about a whole range of topics, from cooking to health to weather to biology. Make them part of the newspaper family.
• Establish a “business building desk” that actively recruits people who might be able to help grow the newspaper’s business.

9. Stop incremental cutting. It’s true that nobody knows where the bottom is or how bad things could get. But what’s damaging motivation or hope for many at newspapers is that the cutting never seems to stop. It gives the impression that management doesn’t know what it’s doing and thinks it can cut its way to success, which nobody on the staff believes. It also creates a climate of fear. The biggest question on many employees’ minds becomes, “Who’s next?” Employees want a vision. They want a plan they believe has some chance of success. Hanging on and hoping to survive won’t cut it. This ultimately rests on the top people at any newspaper. They need to offer their employees a plan they can believe in, as painful as it might be to achieve. Then employees will have a clue where they might be heading and can decide whether they buy into going in that direction. Nothing is worse than death by a thousand slashes. The best advice for politicians or companies in trouble is often to get the truth out on the table all at once. Don’t let it dribble out day after day or week after week. The former approach may be painful. But generally it’ll be painful for a short period, and then they can try to move on. It’s amazing the problems people can recover from if they face them. The same good advice holds true for newspapers. If they would do this, they might create the prospect that the survivors in the organization could earn more rewards for their work.

Here are some concrete steps:
• This recommendation is related to many of the previous recommendations – for example, making the classifieds a separate business and removing their contribution from a newspaper’s bottom line. The first thing a newspaper needs to do is come up with an entirely new expense budget that leaves it a cushion even in a worst-case scenario.
• Stop making all compensation cuts “across the board.” As soon as good people can find alternative employment they will, if they don’t see any rewards for their own performance.
• Invest in technology and systems to reduce repetitive work that can be done by machines.
• Give the surviving staff the tools they need to do their jobs, even if it means cutting more people to make that possible.

10. Stop pretending newspapers can be all things to all people. Newspapers are prisoners of their own past. They have to break free. The future is actually more exciting than anything in the past, if newspapers can find a way to participate in it. The best way to acccomplish that goal would seem to be to stop thinking like newspapers. In this new world of many niche publications and a few giants – CNN, The New York Times, Yahoo!, Google, MSN – what can the local newspaper do better than anybody else? I think the answer is clear: Connect its own community and help it understand itself. To do this, newspapers don’t need to develop their own unique technologies or tools in every market. Google is the same wherever you go. But what they do need to do is be the leading source of local information – and that doesn’t just mean news. The Web has opened the door for newspapers to become resources about all the dimensions of a community, places where people can find out what they want, when they want, how they want. But that doesn’t mean newspapers can do everything. Advertisers and readers are going to want to be associated with a highly respected organization that delivers real value. Advertisers want results. News doesn’t necessarily give them the results they want. So it can only be one part of a newspaper’s offerings. This doesn’t mean it isn’t central to the organization's mission. But it does mean that to think doing it well is going to be enough to save most newspapers is probably folly. Editors by definition are constantly making decisions. It’s time to make a lot of tough decisions. But now, instead of editors or publishers doing that alone, they need to involve their entire staffs in refining the focus of their organizations, in determining where effort is best expended. The basic building blocks remain the trust and identity a newspaper can establish with aggressive watchdog reporting, by looking out for the interests of the individual and the community. Newspapers have to convincingly make people in their communities feel a part of that mission, feel that they’re being served by the newspaper. But if a newspaper is going to establish that bond, what must it stop doing? That’s a tough question, but one it’s time to answer.

Here are some concrete steps:

• Why does every day of a newspaper seem largely the same? Sure, papers run different sections on different days - entertainment guide on Friday, etc. - but the basic structure is predictable. But are readers' needs and advertisers desires the same every day? I don't think so. Detroit’s papers have it at least partly right in producing limited page count single-copy editions on the days they don’t home deliver. It’s time to treat the print newspaper as a product, intentionally designed for the user. Make every day have value. Name it and tell readers what makes it worth buying. If it can’t pay for itself, change it until it can or eliminate it.
• Study the paper and its Web sites for all “commodity content” available easily from other sources. Reduce the volume of that content dramatically and replace it with unique content or use the cut as savings and repackage the remaining content to heighten its value.
• Determine what your newspaper is going to be known for and make sure everybody in the organization – everybody – knows what’s on the list and why.
• To return to the beginning of this 10-part series, start with the customer and the world they live in. Ask them what matters to them and let them know what they tell you and what you’re going to do about it.

There were two related blog posts published during this series:

One addressed the question why I didn't do at the Rocky Mountain News what I now say local newspapers should do? Read it here.

The other offered links from readers in response to the series. Read it here.