To very quickly summarize it, The New York Times has had a ton of success with its digital subscriptions, but despite that, is facing a continual decline in digital traffic.
And like all other media companies, they blame this on the transformation of formats and a failure to engage digital readers.
They say the solution to this is to develop more digitally focused 'growth' tactics, like asking all journalists to submit tweets with every article, be smarter about how the content is presented and featured, and generally focus on optimizing the format for digital. (...)
So why would I subscribe to a newspaper whose product has such little relevance to me as a person?
But, wait-a-minute, I hear you say, this is just in relation to you. If we look at the market as a whole (mass-market approach), each article is relevant to the percentage of the audience. And you are right. Each article is relevant to a percentage as a whole, but to the individual you are not relevant at all.
And this is why newspapers fail. You are based on a business model that only makes sense to a mass-market, but not to the individual. This is not a winning strategy. Yes, it used to work in the old days of media, but that was as a result of scarcity.
Think about this in relation to the world of retail. What type of brand are newspapers really like?
Are newspapers a brand like Nike, Starbucks, Ford, Tesla, GoPro, Converse, or Apple? Or are they more like Walmart, Tesco, or Aldi?
Well, companies like Nike, Starbucks, Tesla and GoPro are extremely niche brands targeting people with a very specific customer need, within a very narrow niche. This is the exact opposite of the traditional newspaper model. Each one of Nike's products, for example, are highly valuable to just their niche, but not that relevant outside it.
Whereas Walmart and Tesco are mass-market brands that offer a lot of everything in the hope that people might decide to buy something. They trade off relevance for size and convenience.
In other words, newspapers are the supermarkets of journalism. You are not the brands. Each article (your product) has almost zero value, but as a whole, there is always a small percentage of your offering that people need.
That doesn't necessarily sound like a bad thing, but people don't connect with Walmart or Tesco. They don't really care about them, nor are they inspired by what they do.
No matter how hard they try, supermarkets with a mass-market/low-relevancy appeal will never appear on a list of the most 'engaging brands', or on list of brands that people love.
And this is the essence of the trouble newspapers are facing today. It's not that we now live in a digital world, and that we are behaving in a different way. It's that your editorial focus is to be the supermarket of news.
The New York Times is publishing 300 new articles every single day, and in their Innovation Report they discuss how to surface even more from their archives. This is the Walmart business model.
The problem with this model is that supermarkets only work when visiting the individual brands is too hard to do. That's why we go to supermarkets. In the physical world, visiting 40 different stores just to get your groceries would take forever, so we prefer to only go to one place, the supermarket, where we can get everything... even if most of the other products there aren't what we need.
It's the same with how print newspapers used to work. We needed this one place to go because it was too hard to get news from multiple sources.
But on the internet, we have solved this problem. You can follow as many sources as you want, and it's as easy to visit 1000 different sites as it is to just visit one. Everything is just one click away. In fact, that's how people use social media. It's all about the links.
Imagine what would happen to real-world supermarkets, if every brand was just one step away, regardless of what you wanted. Would you still go to a supermarket, knowing that 85% of the products you see would be of no interest to you? Or would you instead turn directly to each brand that you care about?
This is what is happening to the world of news. You are trying to be the supermarket of news, not realizing that this editorial focus is exactly why people are turning away from you.
by Thomas Baekdal, Baekdal.com | Read more:
Image: uncredited
