Posts Tagged "newspaper industry"

9
Sep 09

National Media Companies Chase Local

Posted by camilla in General / Industry Notes & Commentary — View Comments

There’s been a flurry of major news surrounding hyperlocal lately: AOL acquiring Patch and Going.com, MSNBC snatching up EveryBlock, and just this week, we hear that The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times will soon be launching local editions in the San Francisco market. ESPN recently launched a Chicago-focused site and will soon launch in two other sports-centric cities: Boston and Dallas. Similarly, Fox Sports is planning to go after the Detroit and Houston sports fans. All very interesting news. All with the same theme: big national (actually, global) media companies going after the local market. Before you know it, every major national media company will be pursuing a local strategy.

So, why are these big corporations chasing after local? What makes them think they can enter this new space when their focus has historically been on a much broader national level? Well, the temptations are compelling, and a smart local approach actually may make sense for some of these companies at this point in time. Some factors they’re probably considering:

  1. increasing local online ad dollars
  2. changing local landscape with new entrants and incumbents, where the once-dominant local papers are facing serious financial problems
  3. demand for more hyperlocal content and news that the local publishers are not covering like they used to due to resource constraints
  4. “keeping up with the Joneses” factor: everybody else is doing it, maybe I should get in on the action too

The combination of these factors (and probably several others) add up to a big opportunity. After all, local content brings the potential of new users, improved visitor loyalty, and additional local / regional ad revenues.

But as many folks know, the online local game is a tough nut to crack.  The notion of local is personal and subjective, sources of relevant content are numerous and growing, and local ad sales presents its own set of challenges with SMBs still struggling to make the online transition. The best player poised to win this game is still the local publisher! They have the inside knowledge, the connection to the community, and the long-standing relationships with the local businesses. As long as the local publishers are willing to adapt to a new model of news and committed to innovating and working with the right set of partners, they have a leg up on their national or global competitors.

So, local publishers: Don’t panic that the big boys are out to eat your lunch. Think of this as a wake-up call that you are in a highly desirable sector full of new opportunities. And the time is now: Big corporations move slowly, so the smaller guys should be more nimble to make and implement changes. We hope many of the local publishers see this as the ideal time to reinvent yourselves and re-claim your local territory. And outside.in is here to help.

19
Aug 09

Uncertainty and Chaos Create Bigger Need for Organization

Posted by camilla in Announcements / General / Industry Notes & Commentary / Outside.in for Publishers — View Comments

I’ve been tuned into Aspen Institute’s Forum on Communication and Society (FOCAS) on the theme Of the Press: Models for Preserving American Journalism. There were lots of smart folks talking, debating, listening, refuting, and defending their vision for the future of journalism.

One big theme that jumped out at me as I listened to the questions and comments to Jeff Jarvis / CUNY’s New Business Model for News and what pretty much everyone in the room seems to agree on is that the current news ecosystem is full of “uncertainty and chaos.” With non-profits, big media, local and community papers, local bloggers, and start-ups – there are plenty of players. With all the various revenue options and models (many of which have yet to be proven), the challenges in attaining profitability are also numerous but risky. What all this signals is loud and clear: the need for organization. And that is exactly where Outside.in comes in…what we excel at is aggregating AND organizing the explosion of local content (by region, city, neighborhood, as well as by topic and category). In fact, that is how we are supporting various publishers right now, primarily through our online platform—Outside.in for Publishers (http://publishers.outside.in), which is now being used by dozens of media partners (such as the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Chicago Tribune / Chicago Breaking News) who are digging into hyperlocal sources in their markets and leveraging our tool to create rich, community news pages for their sites.

The FOCAS participants, though highly accomplished and well-established veterans in their respective industries, seem to be crying out for some organization (note: Jeff Jarvis’s scatter diagram illustrating the various players in the ecosystem didn’t really do the trick) to make sense of the fragmented and disparate news world out there. Well, we have our own vision of the new news ecosystem, which relies on Outside.in enabling the flow of content and inventory from the network of local bloggers and less highly-trafficked content creators up to the publishers who will curate this long tail of content and send traffic and revenue down to the network (see image below of how we picture this). An ecosystem is only effective if there is an exchange of values amongst the parties. And our vision is to build products and provide services that enable this efficient exchange.

ecosystem-graphic

12
Mar 09

Newspapers Need to Aggregate!

Posted by mark in General — View Comments

Another day, another story about the future of newspapers.

I’m going to chose one quote from today’s story in the NYT and dig in a bit.

“Industry executives who once scoffed at the idea of an Internet-only product now concede that they are probably headed in that direction, but the consensus is that newspapers going all digital would become drastically smaller news sources for the foreseeable future.”

That does not have to be true.

There are thousands of local bloggers who are living in, involved with and writing about their local communities and neighborhoods.

These are the stringers of the future for these news organizations!

They will not be on payroll.  They will not require proactive editorial oversight.  They will bubble-up stories that the fully-staffed newspapers of old would never have found.

What they do require is traffic to their sites via links from newspaper sites and, ultimately, revenue generated by newspaper sales teams who can leverage their great relationships with local advertisers.

Newspapers, please aggregate what is already being written in your markets.  You can then point your readers to the best and hold on to your position as the arbiter of what’s important.

Of course, we at Outside.in would be happy to help.

Go to http://outside.in/publishers for more info.

11
Mar 09

Aggregate, Curate & Network

Posted by mark in Announcements / General — View Comments

Earlier this week we wrote about one person’s ideas on what newspapers need to do to survive and thrive.

Today we want to talk more about the opportunity for a new model for local news, one that provides as much value to the the traditional local publisher as it does to local bloggers and hyperlocal content sources.

We think there’s an opportunity for a virtuous circle where publishers connect with local bloggers and content to bring hyperlocal content and ad impressions to the publisher and traffic and revenue to the bloggers.  Make no mistake, if a new model is going to be successful it needs to be a two-way street.

I was on a panel this afternoon at the Newspaper Association of America’s mediaXchange conference in Vegas (baby!) where I proposed three pillars for a new model for news.

Those pillars are:

  • Aggregate

Local media companies need to get “more local” or hyperlocal to compete for audience.  The current biz model and editorial cost structure don’t allow them to hire reporters to cover every neighborhood.

Couple that with the explosion of hyperlocal content, literally hundreds or thousands of “stringers” in every market that are craving more traffic and more revenue and there is opportunity.

That opportunity centers on Aggregation.  Dynamically sourcing every single local piece of content and organizing by discrete neighborhoods can immediately make make you hyperlocal.

  • Curate

But, every publisher has a different editorial voice and a different audience.  And, how do you make sure you are featuring only the content you want and not sources or posts that don’t fit your editorial vision?

That’s where Curation comes in — being able to sit at a dashboard and pick and chose, highlight and suppress — make editorial decisions on top of a massive aggregated data set.

Historically, editors make curatorial decisions about their own internal content — which stories to assign, what to feature on page one.  Going forward, those types of curatorial decisions will be made on other people’s content as well.

  • Networks

But how do you solve the revenue and inventory challenges these companies face.  One way is to build Networks.  Local sales is done best by local sales teams.  Period.

Local inventory is being commoditized by the national ad networks who are driving prices down.  Local sales teams have the best relationships and the greatest opportunity to create solutions for their advertisers, if they only had the inventory that ad networks have.

So, become that network.  Partner with the blogs and hyperlocal media properties in your market and represent their inventory.  You will have different margins (more on that in a future post), but you could stand to have 10x the inventory.   Say what you will about ad networks, but they are big, growing and profitable.  Local newspapers should be too.

I was also able to preview our new product that helps publishers build their business on the pillars of Aggregate, Curate and Networks. We’re really excited about how we can help facilitate these relationships and can’t wait to announce it in more detail soon.

Until then, we are working with a select group of local publishers in our beta version and invite you to join us.

If you are interested in joining the beta, drop me a line at mark<at>outside<dot>in or visit http://www.outside.in/publishers.

18
Nov 08

Evolution: Newspapers

Posted by mark in General — View Comments

Today’s NYT has a good piece on new models that are evolving from the cutbacks at newspapers.  Today’s focus: investigative journalism.

Tells the story of how the cuts at local newspapers led indirectly to the formation of VoiceofSanDiego.org, a great not for profit news organization focused on hard hitting investigative pieces.

It is too bad that the local newspaper couldn’t create a new model and benefit directly from it.  Newspapers do have the opportunity to use new models to extend their coverage to their readers’ benefit, reduce their costs and accumulate salable ad inventory.

Obviously, with our focus, we’re talking about a few things:

* solutions applicable to all sections of the paper (news, sports, arts, business etc…), like

* deep integration with and aggregation of all content providers in the local market; to

* leverage their brand and salesforce to drive traffic and revenue to those content providers, thereby creating new inventory; and

* build for new and evolving technologies and platforms like mobile and less for print.

All of which should lead to a more defensible and relevant position in the market.

So, to be clear, we know there are some forward-thinking companies charging down the path to new solutions.  Heck, we’re working with some of them.  Stay tuned for some updates on that front.

It’s heartening to see new ideas evolve out of the cuts, but I still think newspapers can be more aggressive about being the change they need to become.

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