In Denver this past week we saw The Rocky Mountain New close it's doors after nearly 150 years in the newspaper business in Colorado (www.rockymountainnews.com). This was a sad day for many, myself included. I grew up with the newspaper and was a carrier for the paper as a young man. My mother was a circulation manager for a community newspaper so our family had a close relationship to papers. I will miss the paper.
The loss of the paper sparked a huge local debate, "what killed the Rocky Mountain News and has hundreds of other newspapers across the nation" struggling to keep their doors open during an age when the business model is changing for the way people get their news, companies advertise and how we communicate in the year 2009 and beyond?
Newspaper people weighed in. Dean Singleton, Publisher of the Denver Post (www.denverpost.com) claimed it was the combination of the Internet and the current recession we find ourselves in, a recession that started in December of 2007.
Local Liberal Boulder based Congressman Jared Polis (www.jaredpolis.com ) claimed it was the "new media" that did the paper in and that losing newspapers is a good thing.
Some media people claim it was www.craigslist.com, www.careers.com, www.cars.com, www.servicemagic.com which drew away the much needed advertising dollars that used to support the newspapers, still others claimed it was bloggers. Scripps Media (the profitable media giant, parent company to the Rocky), CEO Richard A. Boehne blamed all of the above but not surprisingly did he blame his executive team or their actions.
The real people to blame in this case is the executive management team at the Rocky and all the executives at the newspapers across the country. These executives were asleep at the wheel and the bus drove off the cliff. Let me explain.
Craigslist.com, monster.com, cars.com, careers.com, Google ads, Facebook.com and dozens of other online sites gobbled up the revenue that the Rocky (and soon will bulldoze the Post too) needed so bad. Companies started to also question the "pay, spray and pray", method of advertising. Database marketing, direct mail, email and effective Internet marketing now entered the scene.
No one can feel sorry for the newspapers because they had every advantage when the Internet rolled around. The newspapers owned the mind share of the consumers and had the capital to execute against all these upstarts. Reality is the newspaper industry could have created and owned these new sites and monetized them. Sorry to say, the Denver Post, our surviving newspaper, is on the same path as the Rocky unless they figure out a way to sell other services that replace the drain of ads going to other sites.
No one rides a horse to work, no one listens to 8 track tapes, no one milks their own cows and makes their own butter these days. In the modern world, you adapt, evolve and move forward or close your doors. The Rocky was closed because they chose to behave like they did 149 years ago, as a newspaper. The Rocky and other news media giants could sell multi- channel media like search engine optimization services, email marketing, build websites, provide direct mail services, social media and sponsor networks of blogs but that would require them to act like a leads development company, and not just selling ads around the news and not just be a newspaper.
So instead of acting on the loss of their ad revenue, the newspaper executives chose to ignore the new methods of helping their advertisers create new business, they fell asleep at the wheel and did not change their business model. So one can safely say, it was not the Internet, it was not bloggers, or the new media, it was complacency and ignorance of falling asleep at the wheel by not adapting.
No company buys any form of advertising for fun, it has one purpose, to make the cash register ring. There are many new ways to help advertisers make money than just placing an ad in the paper.
Want to know more... call me. Its easier than you think. The technology is here.
Rex@theanalytixgroup.com
303-619-6679
I hadn't seen it phrased just the way you did in your closing paragraphs, but that really sums it up. Hard line ("real world") advertising is far from dead but for me, putting business cards on community bulletin boards is more effective than placing an ad in a newspaper.
ReplyDeleteI despise reading a book on a computer, I like a PHYSICAL book. But for reading news stories I prefer to read them on a computer. Less paper to have to toss or recycle!