Bundling a table with your newspaper subscription
17 January 2012 · By Earl J. Wilkinson
Finnish daily Helsingin Sanomat learned something shocking about non-readers in 2010 field studies: Many ordinary, middle-class, working families did not have a dining table. That is yet one more impediment to reading a print newspaper. Instead, the heart of their living room was a home entertainment centre with a flat-screen TV and other devices, the study found.
In an article for INMA's Ideas Magazine, Editor-in-Chief Reeta Meriläinen opined: "If one does not have a table, it is impossible to spread out and read a broadsheet like ours. Perhaps, we thought, we should bundle a dining table into our subscription."
Count me in.
I'm a single guy who lives in a 20th floor condominium in downtown Dallas. Great nestled, panoramic view of the skyline. When I moved here two years ago, I made a series of design and furniture choices. None included a dining table or a kitchen table, much like the Finnish field studies suggest.
...[more]2011 in video perspective: culture, business models, multi-media, social media
30 December 2011 · By Earl J. Wilkinson
The rapid shift from print to multi-media companies dominated industry headlines in 2011 — punctuated by the urgent need to get the right people for new hybrid job functions.
Below are some video interviews and presentations I made about culture change, business models, multi-media, and social media in the past year that I thought might be a good year-ender as we all pivot to what looks like a dangerous 2012.
Happy New Year!
...[more]Wind behind transformation: U.S. publishers’ EBITDA at half of peak
15 December 2011 · By Earl J. Wilkinson
When I looked at the hand-written, crumpled piece of paper, and compared it with the historic data I had on file, I did a double-take: profitability of U.S. newspaper companies has dropped to about half of its peak from 12 years ago!
Analyst John Morton faxed the data to me this week, he the rare and meticulous keeper of such industry data. This was the final piece to my authorship of the INMA Newsmedia Outlook report that looks at culture change and the path to a multi-media growth story. You can see the chart of EBITDA margins of U.S. publicly traded newsmedia companies on this page.
When you realise that the 2008-2011 numbers were achieved on the backs of massive cutbacks, you see in numbers what it takes a lot of words to describe outside the United States.
...[more]In a pinch, INMA saved me with its social media resources
23 November 2011 · By Earl J. Wilkinson
When Bhaskar Das of the Times of India invited me to speak at the AdAsia Conference in New Delhi, I agreed without hesitation. It's an event that would attract 1,200+ media and advertising executives, and Bhaskar is without peer as a marketing genius and INMA member. I couldn’t say “no.”
The problem came with the subject and the format. I didn’t look at the details of the invitation — until the week of the event.
Instead of a presentation on media industry trends (my strength), I was serving on a panel of experts about social media.
Social media?
Panel?
Surrounded by people smarter than me on the subject?
I panicked.
And I did the only thing that INMA members, faced with the same conundrum, should do. I burrowed deeply into INMA resources and took a cram course.
...[more]Changing culture not an assault on newsrooms, but the entire newspaper template
15 November 2011 · By Earl J. Wilkinson
Suggesting culture change at newspapers is like questioning religious tenets in church. It may be sacrilegious, but it also may be necessary. You will be bashed by the high priests and bolstered by those in the shadows.
In the past few weeks, I’ve taken my theme of culture change from Australia to Sweden to Portugal to the United States to India. Every speech I make, I swear it will be the last time I touch the subject. Yet I get the same voracious reaction — good and bad.
The good:
- Bangalore: In India, I was shocked in recent weeks at the year-to-year change in attitude about digital’s role in this historically print-dominated market. As the tectonic plates shift, publishers are talking culture as a foundation for multi-media. Young executives came up to me after a speech in Bangalore with such great enthusiasm for speaking on a taboo subject.
- Williamsburg: In Williamsburg, Virginia, CEOs desperate for new wind behind the sails of tired newspapers asked me to push harder on the culture change subject and if INMA would be willing to do day programmes on the subject.
Inspiration from the road: how digital dimes will save journalism
11 October 2011 · By Earl J. Wilkinson
Clark Gilbert pointed to the concentric circles like a mad scientist might draw out the cure to a disease on a napkin.
Deep into Conference Season, Gilbert’s presentation to the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association (SNPA) in Williamsburg, Virginia, mesmerizes an audience of CEOs looking for the Holy Grail.
More precisely, his audience wants to know how to continue funding high-quality and high-quantity journalism with digital dimes — and how to work around the innovator’s dilemma with which he was once associated at Harvard University.
For media companies, the innovator’s dilemma is about playing defense with the legacy business while simultaneously playing offense with a new digital business going after revenue, Gilbert says. The concentric circles are the growing overlap of the two businesses over time.
The businesses that today are nipping at you initially had almost zero overlap with your space when they started. Over time, the new business encroaches on the old business and intensifies the natural desire to play defense. Disruption eventually creates new net growth, though the incumbent never sees it that way. The incumbent only looks at displacement.
Gilbert’s challenge now that he’s a media company CEO: confronting the dilemma.
The CEO of Deseret Media says that the lessons he took from academia suggest the only path to survival involves a couple different actions.
...[more]Re-thinking publishing’s value circle to grow revenue
23 September 2011 · By Earl J. Wilkinson
News publishers see revenue and profit expectations under-performing at an alarming rate.
While advertising revenues are in decline in some countries, they are under-performing growth expectations in other countries. For example, the American publisher that budgeted for 2% growth is seeing 10% declines. The Indian publisher that budgeted for 15% growth is seeing 10% growth.
The growth path for news publishers involves:
- A re-arranging of assets at their fingertips.
- The expansion of revenue streams.
- The cultural co-mingling of these streams.
Several publishers have lamented the long-term advertising contraction in this way: They can continue to scale their previously uncuttable newsrooms to the revenue realities. Yet at some point, the lack of financial returns and the tipping point of no longer being able to fund Big J journalism will force them to question why they own newspapers.
Let’s not get to that stage.
Here’s a suggestion: change the rules of what determines success by expanding where we drill for revenue. Let’s find new value in the assets we have or come up with a way to create scale in the acquisition of new assets.
...[more]New oxygen for the news industry: re-thinking value and skill sets
12 September 2011 · By Earl J. Wilkinson
When asked what value a newspaper has to hotel guests, the audience of newspaper executives skeptically murmurs. Yet a hotel chain’s research — breaking down the individual pieces that come with a hotel room — surprisingly found a newspaper worth US$5 on its own — 500% more than the typical newspaper price. Subsequent research asking the newspaper’s value if it helps find a person a job found recipients said it was worth as much as US$2,000.
Paul Wang punches the air with numbers and ideas, exhorting the room of newspaper executives to see the customer’s view of value.
Value equals uniqueness + relevance + authenticity, the Northwestern University professor tells the Emailvision Roundtable audience in Vail, Colorado, on this late August morning.
He goes on, with a marketing politician’s wish-list:
- I want a database where people want in.
- We want to unite people to our storytelling.
- Database marketing is becoming less a chess game and more a ballroom dance.
- News publishers should become “contribution brands” that answer the question: What value can I add to my community?
As a room full of marketers, researchers and sellers sat mesmerized at Wang’s reminder of the basics of marketing, I couldn’t help but think that this is the kind of oxygen our industry needs.
...[more]Culture change is the conduit to a revenue growth story
24 August 2011 · By Earl J. Wilkinson
I have come to view “culture change” at newspapers as equivalent to religion.
There are those who:
- Are fervent believers.
- Are tired of being preached to.
- Believe the message yet feel powerless to do anything with it.
- Don't view it as a proper subject in public settings.
So imagine my surprise last week, as I awkwardly danced around the subject among Australian publishers, to have the subject thrust at me with the emotion of another digit on a P&L.
The Australian publicly traded media sector peaked in early 2007, plummeted to new depths through 2009, went through a mild recovery through early 2010, and has since dropped to nearly penny status. By comparison, the U.S. peak was 2004.
Australian publishers shake their heads, throw up their hands, and roll their eyes at the helplessness of stock prices battered more by perception than reality. Lamented one executive: “We have become Big Tobacco.”
...[more]Why INMA will keep talking about culture change at newspapers
28 June 2011 · By Earl J. Wilkinson
In thumbing through the evaluations from the recent INMA World Congress in New York, a comment from a U.S. attendee popped off the page that I, no doubt, took far too seriously: stop talking to us about culture change if it can’t affect my position back home.
The comment has gnawed at me for a month, and I need to stop biting my tongue and put in writing what’s on my mind.
Consider the facts in the national market the world thinks is either a leading indicator or an outlier to avoid, the United States:
- Newspaper advertising sales have declined for 18 consecutive quarters dating to 2005. Print advertising expenditures are at their lowest level since 1983.
- Paid circulation for daily newspapers has decreased every year since 1986. Circulation as a percentage of the population has decreased every year since the 1950s.
- Our industry’s response has been to cut people and newsprint, often without regard for priorities or the customer.
- The top publishers refuse to collaborate on anything meaningful such as industry innovation, incubation, or experimentation.
- When the analyst community five years ago gave publicly traded newspapers a green light to lower profit margins to heavily invest in digital, sales, marketing and research, publishers dabbled but mostly passed.
- The old beacons to whom we have turned in the past for inspiration and guidance — Editor & Publisher, Presstime, Deutsche Bank and other fantastic analysts who covered the industry — are all dead, dying, or irrelevant.
