Publishing in the Digital Era
Although the attendance was fairly meager, today’s Publishing in the Digital Era panel brought together an all-star group to share their insights on how to evolve an old business to the realities of a new world. Joining Moderator Randy Bennett of the Newspaper Association of America were panelists Christian Hendricks, VP of Interactive Media at McClatchy Company, Michelle Slack, Director of Digital Media at Hearst Newspapers, Sylvia Mariano, Executive Director of Edmunds Inc., and Karen Dorst, Account Development Director at Mansueto Ventures (publishers of Inc, and FastCompany).
Of all the groups represented on the panel, Edmunds was clearly the farthest along on a path from print to digital. In fact, they discontinued all print projects in 2005. Now, all their revenue comes from online ads, and sales of data and research derived from their highly niched user base. In response to the moderator’s question as to how difficult that decision was Mariano answered “it was easy, printing an annual book that would be immediately out-of-date was painfull”.
From the very beginning Edmunds embraced user generated content. Now, user generated content is given equal importance to editorial content within the organization. So, when the web 2.0 revolution rolled around their priorities were more about making it easy for users to interact than in creating processes from scratch.
Karen Dorst’s group was also early to the online community business. Fast Company first created an online community in the 90s, but has seen tremendous growth in the past three years.
Hendricks from McClatchy, and Slack at Hearst, are both managing organizations in the midst of a significant transition. “We reach really local markets, but the majority of all online marketing is done on a national level,” said Slack. Offline, the percentage of total advertising split between local and national is skewed in the opposite direction in the favor of local. “So we’re trying to reach those customers.”
Both representatives of the newspaper groups maintained that there is very little cross-over between their online and offline audience. However, both seemed to have a different view of the implications of this. Christian Hendricks at McClatchy believes they can increase the numbers of online readers ultimately using their offline products. “75% of our online readers never touch our offline products”. Michelle Slack at Hearst seems less sure of that as a priority. “We are not necessarily concerned about moving online visitors to our offline products”.
These old media companies are trying to do a few very challenging things all at once. They are trying to :
- Reach a local advertiser, who was comfortable with an offline sales process, online.
- Leverage their unique virtues of strong editorial capabilities while at the same time creating very deep user generated content areas in their online offerings.
- Maintain effective pricing for their local offerings online by offering more tailored solutions, in the face of lots of online competition that tends to drive prices lower.
- Take advantage of the fact that they do have a local ad sales force, while the Google’s and Yahoo’s of the world do not. But, you have to wonder which would be more effective, a local sales force, or a simple online process for placing ads like the AdWords system. They are trying to gain the virtues of both.
- Maintain offline businesses that still represent the bulk of their revenues, even though they are seeing very little growth.
- Offer more effective solutions for advertisers that may span online and offline. This can make things more complex. “We are becoming more of an agency for local advertisers” says Hendricks.
There have been some bright moments. “When you publish a story and in one hour there are 150 comments, it obviously impacts loyalty” said Hendricks. For Hearst, Slack said they’ve been able to publish very good content in niche areas that would just be too expensive to cover comprehensively with a professional journalist.
Christian Hendricks seems to have an almost Zen-like take on the online media environment : “We view Google/Yahoo as the water, and we’re the fish. We want to integrate our assets into their environment.” I think if you want to be a fish, the first thing you need to do is grow gills - not an easy prospect.
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