You sort of wonder what old R.J. Reynolds must be thinking today, with the story that the company he founded is said to be considering introducing a smokeless version of his beloved Camel cigarette. I kept wondering whether the can would be shaped like a hump.
In the marketing business, this is what’s called a brand extension, where companies try to attach the clout and cachet of one product to a new product that bears the same name. Like when Quaker Oats started making oatmeal bars.
You have to admire RJR’s willingness to try new things.
There’s an interesting parallel between newspaper companies and cigarette companies. In terms of volume, both essentially reached their peak in the United States many years ago and have slowly drifted downward. Here’s the newspaper circulation figures. Here’s domestic cigarette consumption.
Is there a reason these two vastly different industries seem to track each other? As the folks in the tobacco business like to point out, correlation doesn’t always imply causation, but the decrease come down to essentially the same issue: consumers choosing to spend their money and their time elsewhere. Lifestyle choices. You adapt by one of two ways: either convincing your existing customers they were wrong to leave you or by finding new customers.
That’s what smokeless Joe—if it happens—is all about.
Your host is Ken Otterbourg, the managing editor at the Winston-Salem Journal. It's a forum to discuss the media, from
You can also look for new markets. The tobacco companies went overseas and I guess for newspapers the answer is finding new distribution channels for their content. I think the danger for newsapers is thinking of newsprint as the product. The product is the content printed on the newsprint; the paper itself is simply one delivery vehicle among many options. I’d guess from your efforts here that you are looking “overseas” now?
I couldn’t agree with Jon more. Most newspapers (except the Journal of course [wink]) and the publishers and editors that run them still think the “paper” is the product.
The business model shouldn’t be to sell more papers but rather to engage the community and stimulate a public dialog through the distribution of content (both news and advertising) in multiple channels. The product is the content, something that Yahoo! and Google, who are making quick inroads on the “newspaper business”, know all too well.
Publishers and editors have long understood that the value of the paper is held in the paper’s connection to the community but thinking that their “product” is the paper is short-sighted. The result of this outdated idea is that less people read the paper because the newspaper business failed to adapt their product for new distribution channels already adopted by their customers. Only in the last few years have newspapers adopted the Internet as a distribution channel and even so, many papers’ relationship with the web is flaky at best. I’d argue that there are only a few well constructed news web sites out there.
What’s more, most people (wrongly) believe that the “paper” and the “paper online” are one in the same. As you know, and as the Washington Post has publicly discussed recently, they are often 2 separate entities with vastly different content and business models - which serves only the business of the paper and not the customer.
Good points.
You’re right that content is content, in whatever form it takes.
The problem is that content is expensive and somebody has to pay the freight for it. Yahoo, Google and the rest generally speaking are collectors and distributors of news content rather than creators of it. You may be able to link to a story about the Daytona 500 from Yahoo, but my guess is that they don’t have a reporter there.
The costs add up, and we routinely publish stories that may on the surface appear to make little economic sense, but we feel are vital from a journalistic and community standpoint and from building a culture in our newsroom that values thoughtful and probing reporting.
It’s hard to be in newspaper management and not see the bottom line. But I don’t approach our newsroom from a financial model; I approach it from trying to answer this question every day: what does a resident of Northwest North Carolina need to know to be an informed citizen. It’s a difficult bar to reach, and I am sure that there are people out there that feel we don’t reach it. But that’s the goal.
JournalNow is a separate animal, and you are right that it has a different business model. But in many respects, how they do things comes down to some pretty basic and comparable activities. Are we/they providing content (news, information, opinions) that people value, and can we/they find the revenue to support the cost of gathering and distributing that news.
The Newspaper Editor - America’s unsung hero.
In all seriousness, you’re in a tough spot in terms of declining readership and the financial impact that companies like Google and Yahoo! are making on your company.
That said, you’ve got the right goal - keep the citizens informed.
Keep up the good work in print and the stimulating dialog here.
Ken,
I agree that “informed citizen” is the right direction: Newspapers (and their online partner) ought to be the source of information that helps readers make good decisions in the community they live in.
But if that’s the goal, and circulation continues to decline, does that mean people don’t want to be informed? Or that newspapers are not informing them well enough? Not informing them with the right information?
___________
Joe Murphy
Senior Online Content Producer
JournalNow.com
People want to be informed, of course, but what they want to be informed about changes daily. We have access to more information than ever and advances in technology have caused a rethinking of the definition of community.
We all still have 24 hours in a day. Imagine somebody who spends two hours each night chatting online with people around the world who are interested in his hobby of collecting left-handed widgets. That’s his community. His choice. The tradeoff is that he has less time to be interested or involved with events that are just down the street.
The trick is to put out a newspaper or a news web site that tells people what they want to know, what they need to know, and what they didn’t want to know until they read it.
One of the interesting conclusions that we see by looking at the decline in circulation numbers from Ken’s link to naa, is that the decline is gradual. Many assume that the Internet is responsible for the decline in news print.
However, if that were the case, then we’d see a drastic dip in circ numbers around 1997-98 when most newspapers went digital. But we don’t see that… The circ numbers are declining at a steady rate which began in the 60’s.
The current trend in newspapers, especially online newspapers, is reader engagement and news customization for the individual.
The print and Web components of a newspaper have very different yet distinct strengths. The Web allows us the opportunity to make a users experience interactive and allows us to connect with other people in our community who share common concerns and interests.
The power of the printed word on paper gives the message being delivered credibility and a distinction from that which we’d find online because of the multiple editorial processes required.
Newspapers are just beginning to figure out the balance between these two symbiotic means of content distribution. The more open we become, coupled with the increased participation by our readers, the better suited we will be to tailor our services to meet the demands of a changing industry.
I believe the Web is the answer to the declining print circulation numbers, not the cause.
Ryan Miano
Online Content Manager
JournalNow.com
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