The sales are up, and news companies feel a little recovery wind at their backs. With the worst of cost-cutting over, they're looking for growth. Here's nine questions as they chart that new path.
1. Is one foot better than two? Newspaper companies are feeling a new vim and vigor, and their share prices reflect that. The last 12 months have felt as if someone was standing on their chests with both legs, one leg's is the challenge of the web for readers and advertisers. The other's been the recession. Now the recession leg is applying less pressure, and may be removed completely soon. In other words: Back to the challenges of 2007.
2. Doesn't Media Spectrum's announced partnership with Tribune offer significant potential to the news industry? Saving money on ad pre-press (ad order-taking, ad design, etc.) is hardly sexy stuff, but Media Spectrum's customers report savings of 25-50% in ad pre-press costs. That's huge, especially applied over an industry still beleaguered by cost structure issues. (We can see that news companies have cut 25-40% of their costs over the last three years in staff, paper and everything else, but more is needed as online-only rivals come at them.)
A little sexier -- and to the point of where news companies can find growth going forward -- is Media Spectrum's self-service ad platform. I wrote recently about Advance's partnership with Microsoft around local sales, further ratification of the Yahoo Newspaper Consortium notion that it's all about enlarging local sales going forward.
"How you get more of your local businesses that we haven't gotten to before," is the big goal of the self-service platform, says vp/operations Mike Sachs. Sachs tells me that Tribune has gone live with the self-service ad platform in six of eight Tribune markets and has already brought in hundreds of new, smaller advertisers, ones that could never afford print and may not have been touched by the company previously.
So where does self-service fit for Tribune. "We're not firing salespeople; we're redeploying them to (sell) larger businesses." The system may allow the company to re-allocate as many as a fifth of its sales staff.
Now Tribune and MediaSpectrum, which also has made a believer of UK-based Trinity Mirror, are teaming up to sell the newspaper industry on ad self-service, launching a joint initiative today.
3. If Journalism Online takes off, will we see a pitched battle between Paypal and Google Checkout in the news world? Google has recently renewed its pitch to publishers, urging them to use Checkout to power their paid content strategies. Checkout has been aimed at micropayment initiatives, but it hasn't caught fire.
On the other hand, Journalism Online, which this week announced 1000 "affiliates" willing to keep talking -- and provide some potentially highly useful reader data -- about paid content, will probably focus on Financial Times-like "metering" approaches. That means subscriptions, rather than micropayments.
