Newspapers Can Thrive Online

Numbers alone might lead one to think that the end of days is almost here for newspapers, but there’s also my personal observation, too. I could go a week without reading a newspaper or seeing one lying around the offices of ICMediaDirect.com. According to the Audit Bureau of Circulations in the six-month period ending March 2006, the daily circulation of American newspapers dropped 2.5% to 45.5 million from a year previous. Print numbers were already stagnant and circulation inflation scandals have been popping up across the land.

This is not to say that people are losing interest in the world around them, far from it. Instead, it’s the increasing number of us who are using the Internet as the primary source of information that’s putting the dent into print circulation. This migration to the Web has been anticipated and there isn’t a newspaper executive around who’d deny this trend.

So why would Jason Klein, president and chief executive of Newspaper National Network, a marketing partnership of advertisers and newspapers, state with conviction, “I think this industry is in for exceptional long-term growth”? The jig is up, doesn’t he get it?

The growth Klein refers to is in the advertising dollars being raked by newspapers from their online offerings. 2006, also known as the Digital/Information/Wireless Age (Wikipedia can’t seem to make up its mind), is no time for pessimism in the newspaper trade. Online newspapers represent the cutting edge of ad-supported content delivery. We love the sea of information at our fingertips and the abundance of online content selection has swept aside genuine efforts by big media names to institute the pay-to-read model. (Much to the New York Times’ dismay.) It’s classic Web2.0, driven by and benefiting end-users.
   
It’s estimated that 60-70% of online advertising for newspaper comes from classified ads, even with the boom of free advertising offered by sites like Craigslist.  While this free advertising is both welcome and terrific, advertisers often find better results by paying up for the advantages offered by newspapers online. Internet advertising should account for 7% of total newspaper revenue in 2006, up from 5% last year. I believe that the healthy online classified outlook is because many advertisers subscribe to the “you get what you pay for” point of view. Craigslist is wonderful, but advertisers shouldn’t expect to be treated like clients; the saying goes paying customers, not freeloaders, “are always right”. Free advertisers can do little more than let their message out at their host’s convenience.

This enticing promise of the web as a revenue generator, therefore, represents the next step for the newspaper, not the end of the line. Newspapers online characteristically cater content to the website visitor and try to provide a wide variety of offerings to keep us on-site. By now, many newspapers understand that end-users, like in any other proper Web 2.0 development, ultimately drive the content of a website. Even the renowned Washington Post has relaxed traditional print standards of editing from the top down in order to court popular opinion online.

For generations, the Washington Post has enjoyed a national profile. Its pages have been the social and political pulse of our nation’s capital and its reporters famously broke the Watergate scandal in the 1970s. Instead of fighting the flight from print, the Washington Post incorporates the trend into online strategy. They recently teamed up with the cutting edge blog search engine Technorati to create the Buzz Map, a top-10 list of links to bring interested viewers to the hottest topics. It maps user interest by negotiating a universe comprised of time (the last 72 hours) and blog network (more than 100 columnists and popular opinion bloggers with added user-comment features) to rank top posts of interest hourly.

At any point in time, the Buzz Map has three to six of its offerings considerably larger (thus highlighted) for web surfing inspection in bringing visitors into the interactive fray. The most popular posts, the hot zone, are displayed in larger print while clickable headers while the cooler, less followed, but still top 10, remain more diminutively sized. One click and an interested end-user can see the whole blog article.

This Buzz Map is pretty cool. Its users are “sending up” content from the blogs, front and center, for everyone else’s inspection simply by clicking on and reading what interests them. The upside is that quality and timeliness of content will be rewarded, yet risked, is content that may be skewed by celebrity, personality or ideology. Several bloggers have lamented appearances of a herd mentality. If content discontent is the primary concern for the Buzz Map thus far, then it’s a great sign. Instead of disinterest or technical complaints, the peanut gallery is buzzing over the offerings, where the interest belongs.

The Internet is affording the media more opportunity to profit from content, more advertising for businesses that wish to do so, and whole worlds more information for readers to peruse. The transition to online is not only an opportunity for traditional media, but a necessity for survival. The Washington Post and Technorati must know by now that they’ve stumbled onto a winner. And, by extension, so will most newspapers when they embrace the Internet.