So, what do we now? It’s the $64,000 question facing all of us who began our careers in newspapers and now have expanded them to include a variety of digital media platforms, all the while trying to figure out how to remain viable in print and profitable electronically.
No one, of course, has come up with any definitive answer. But Ted Power, vice president of Gannett West and publisher of the Reno Gazette-Journal; Beryl Love, executive editor of the Gazette-Journal; and Paul Mitchell, professor at the University of Nevada Reynolds School of Journalism, had some thoughts about how to move toward the future and examples of how they have been doing that for some time.
Michael Anastasi, managing editor at the Salt Lake Tribune and APSE’s first vice president, led a discussion at the APSE Western Regional meeting in Reno that focused on the importance of recognizing who your readership is and tailoring your coverage to the people you’re trying to reach. It was a session of suggestions for the future; the solutions are yet to be uncovered.
“If you’re trying to reach folks in households who make $150,000 and females,” Power said, “what can you do to reach rich women? On the other hand, if you’re trying to reach 25- to 39-year-old men, what can you do for that? It’s very different. Who’s the paper trying to reach, and why are they trying to reach them?”
The Gazette-Journal in the last year has spent a great deal of time doing that, and launched an initiative to improve circulation of its Wednesday and Sunday papers. Both of those days have seen circulation gains year over year.
The Reno area is dealing with it’s own economic challenges, beyond the state of the overall economy. With casinos opening in Northern California, there’s less of a reason for Bay Area residents to make the trip across the mountains to Reno casinos and to look at the area for second homes. “Reno has a very scary future,” Power said. “No one is seeing a whole lot of advertising stability right now.”
Still, the Gazette-Journal has entered into a partnership with Yahoo! that will yield additional revenue, and Power and his staff are not sitting idly by. “People still want to read newspapers,” he said, emphasizing the importance of marketing the product papers have to offer. “We have to sell the newspaper again,” he said. “We stopped doing that a few years ago.”
Love spoke about the importance of Sports sections establishing an identity with their content, going beyond the traditional event coverage. The Gazette-Journal, which had gone to a local-local plan that was advocated by the paper’s parent company, Gannett, was “bleeding audience” in the boomer men target group. “There was an expectation if the Sports section is going to have value, readers expect to have NFL coverage of Bay-Area teams, and we made the decision to get that in the newspaper,” Love said. “Changes are an ongoing process.” Love stressed that local coverage is still the bread and butter of the paper, but that it can’t be at the expense of what the readers you’re trying to reach want.
Power added that the paper has identified the zip codes in its area where it is targeting readership and expects everyone on his staff to recognize that, to focus coverage on where the paper’s readership lives.
Love suggested that papers could benefit from having some fun in personalizing their target audiences, avoiding the marketing jargon for demographic groups and simply coming up with an individual with specific characteristics. “Go off site, have some fun, paint a picture of this person and make a poster and use it to act,” he said. In their case, they came up with Lynda, and a frequent refrain: “What would Lynda want.”
The fictionalized Lynda became a celebrity in her own right, but Power is looking to make celebrities out of his staff as well. “We have to make people want to come here to hear what our experts have to say,” he said, “to show that unique content that we have to offer.”
And that unique content, we all hope, ultimately is what will help the industry figure out a plan to generate revenue electronically and allow for charging users fees for some level of information, something those no one has effectively figured out so far.
“We need to spend energy to take our copy beyond the 14-inch game story, and that’s where we might be able to monetize that.” Love said. “In other words, check scores and results for free, but get more in-depth coverage for some kind of subscription model that includes print and digital…. But it’s going to take some hard thought before you can say where you are going to stick the pay wall.”
Mitchell, who spends much of his time with students, stressed that in order to attract younger readers to a paper’s website or to any moble application, a critical ingredient is electronic games. “Kids are always on their phones, playing games,” he said. “Incorporate that game technology into your coverage. It can lift your profile and lead to revenue streams.”
