Adapting to a digital world has been a challenge for news media publishers.

Alabama Media Group recently took a ripping off the Band-Aid approach.

During this week’s Webinar, “Liberate Your Newsroom: Closing Print Editions with Alabama Media Group,” INMA members heard how Alabama Media Group made the transition from print to digital a smooth one. Group President Tom Bates and Kelly Ann Scott, vice president of content, shared their journey and insights.

As Alabama’s largest media group with a portfolio that includes one of the top 10 local news Web sites in the United States (AL.com), the company has won four Pulitzer Prizes — two of them last week — and has one of the largest investigative teams in the southeast. Until late February, it continued publishing four local newspapers in addition to its online offerings.

Bates explained that the transition to digital began in 2012 when the company invested heavily in digital operations. At that time, it reduced its print schedule from daily to three times a week and leaned heavily on content management platforms, consumer data platforms that provided audience analysis, and technology that supported targeted advertising.

“That really laid the base for our digital business today,” Bates said. “That’s been crucial to putting us in this position.”

Bates joined the company seven or eight years ago to prepare the company for the transition from print to digital. He looked at operations through the lens of starting to lean into digital, beginning with “figuring out the income statement of a digital-only business.”

He developed a P&L of the stand-alone print operation and then projected at what point it would move into the red. That gave the company an estimated runway of how much time they had to make the digital operations sustainable.

Rather than being tempted to extend the print runway, Bates said, “there was real power for us in knowing what a digital business looked like and it’s given us urgency and clarity in all the future decisions that came to us.”

When Alabama Media Group ceased print operations in February, it was publishing just 30,000 copies per issue — down from about 260,000 daily copies a decade ago. But the robust site AL.com was reaching more than 1 million people daily, digital ad revenue had “grown quite significantly,” and the news team was (and is) bigger than it was five years ago.

Becoming a digital company

One distinction it made internally was that it is a digital company that had print newspapers — not a newspaper company with digital brands. Scott said it focused on building a portfolio of high-performing products that serve very specific audiences.

“If you think about old newspapers back in the day, they did a lot for a lot of different people in one place,” she said. “We broke apart those products so that they can have different focuses, different audiences, and different teams that serve them.”

Some of the key questions it asked about those different audiences included:

• Who are those audiences?
• What do we want to do for them?
• How can we reach our target?
• How can we pay for our work?

Working backwards, it then went about unbundling the traditional newspaper sections and creating different digital verticals to suit the audiences for each one.

Although the format changed, Scott said Alabama Media Group held on to some of its most valuable assets in the newsroom:

“Many of the people in our room are actually old print people with a print skillset that have translated their product thinking to new digital ways. And that’s important because there’s a lot of things and institutional knowledge that can, in fact, translate. And I think we’ve sought to capitalise on that and build our brand stronger in many ways.”

The media company also implemented annual planning and knows which big projects it will take on each year and what products it will launch, Scott said. At the same time, it leaves room for adjusting to audience needs.

“Changing with our audiences is key,” she said. “We know that where we are today is still just a point in time. Audiences will keep changing, and we need to keep changing with them. So we’ve set ourselves up to do that.”

Saying goodbye — and thank-you

Alabama Media Group had a defined strategy for shuttering its print business, and when it became clear in April 2022 that the print side would not be profitable, the company deployed its plan.

“We decided that we would announce the end of print in early November of last year and then print the final editions at the end of this February,” Bates said. That meant the team had a window from November to February to ramp down printing and distribution while communicating with print subscribers and advertisers. They wanted to retain as many customers and advertisers as possible and migrate them to the digital space.

“We had been enhancing our e-editions since 2021 with an eye toward the end of print,” Bates said, noting that “diehard print subscribers” preferred this format. With that audience in mind, the team began leaning into the design of those publications and gradually migrated some of the print newspaper’s more popular features to the digital format.

The audience responded well to the gradual changes — and so did advertisers.

“We’re doing a number of digital programmes now,” Bates said. “We have, however, actively walked away from small advertisers who did predominantly buy print. So part of our model is this notion that we can’t necessarily serve everyone; it will not be as efficient to do so. Now we’re at a point where there’s a minimum spend level to be an advertiser for us.”

As part of that constant conversation with its audience, the company signed off its print edition with a thank-you note to its readers “because it was thanks to our print readers that we got to this point in time,” Scott said. The company also emphasised the journalists readers had come to know in print would still be working in the digital space.

While there’s no standard playbook for moving from print to digital, what worked for Alabama Media Group was a mindset of transparency and communication — with its subscribers, journalists, and advertisers.

“That’s helped us throughout this period because folks in the organisation are very committed to the work,” Bates said. “I would say we’re very optimistic moving forward. There are challenges; we’re all dealing with challenges all the time. The way we sustain this business tomorrow may not be exactly the same. So we’re prepared to keep evolving, but we believe this can work. We can see it working.”

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