In the newspaper world, the times (and the Heralds, Stars and Journals) are changing. Over the past decade, declining circulation, plunging ad sales, changing readership patterns and waning influence have come crashing together like tectonic plates, creating a mountain of challenges. And the industry faces a long, arduous journey to the new media summit.
Some members of the expedition (Halifax Daily News, Rocky Mountain News, Cincinnati Post) have already perished, others grow weaker, yet newspapers continue to push ahead.
They’re not climbing this mountain simply because it’s there; they’re climbing it because they have no choice. In this context, they are treating social media tools like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube like handholds, each as a means of propelling them forward.
Examples of their use are everywhere: an iPhone app for The Globe and Mail (which launched in November and now generates between 2.5 million and five million page views a month, according to the paper’s vice-president of advertising sales, Andrew Saunders); a Twitter feed for The Windsor Star; a YouTube channel for the Calgary Herald; a Facebook page for the Edmonton Journal, and on and on.
“On the social media side, I think we’re much more comfortable now than we were two years ago,” says John Stackhouse, the Globe’s editor-in-chief. “It’s very much a connection point.
The journalism is the same… but we need to constantly find new ways to connect with readers.” Virtually every Canadian newspaper of note now has a presence on one or more of these platforms. Suzanne Raitt, vice-president, innovation and marketing with the Canadian Newspaper Association in Toronto, says that newspapers are increasingly among the earliest adopters of such tools. This is due in part to a tough climate, she says, but also because of a genuine desire to move the newspaper industry forward.
“What you’re starting to see is a change in philosophy–a ‘Let’s just try it ‘[approach]. You’re seeing newspapers say ‘This is what people want, so let’s do it. It won’t be perfect on day one, but we’ll learn from it, try it and move forward.’ ” The Globe’s Saunders credits digital and social media with more than doubling its monthly reach, from two million to five million–a figure that includes the Globe, Report on Business magazine and their attendant digital offerings.
He’s less forthcoming, however, about whether the Globe has translated those audience gains into monetary gains. “We continue to see a lot of opportunity, but it comes down to building some scale and attracting the right audience,” he says.
Stackhouse says there’s no way to quantify how much of the national daily’s editorial resources are devoted to digital and social media, since they are now fully integrated with day-to-day newsgathering and reporting efforts.
On Jan. 27, for example–now unofficially known as iPad Day, by the way (see sidebar pg. 15)–TheGlobeAndMail.com had a team of “six or eight” reporters providing a blow-by-blow account of Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ introduction of the company’s latest device.
“By three o’clock, we hadn’t just flooded the zone, we owned the zone,” boasted Stackhouse later that day. “Now we’re going to turn around and figure out how to [cover the iPad] appropriately and with as much enthusiasm and passion for the newspaper platform.”
It’s an example, Stackhouse says, of how much importance the Globe places on its digital initiatives. “It’s not insignificant and, critically, it’s growing,” he says. “I just came out of a weekly management meeting, half an hour of which was devoted to what we’re doing with Facebook [where the Globe has a modest 3,811 fans–3,810 more than the “Yes, The Globe and Mail Newspaper has terrible customer service” page], why we’re doing it, and what we’ve accomplished over the last month.” Pam Laycock, chief operating officer for Torstar Digital and interim VP of digital for Star Media Group, says that social media tools enable newspapers to be both immediate and interactive, ensuring that TheStar.com experience, for example, is “different and complementary” to that of the Toronto Star.
The Star is highly active in the social media space, whether it’s hockey columnist Damien Cox live-blogging the announcement of the Olympic men’s hockey team, or Washington bureau chief Mitch Potter providing Twitter updates on U.S. President Barack Obama’s February 2009 visit to Ottawa.
The power of social media to take a local story global was underscored by a recent piece on TheStar.com about a Toronto restaurant extending a Valentine’s Day invitation to patrons to have sex in its washrooms. The story was subsequently picked up by the Drudge Report, ultimately resulting in visitors to TheStar.com from all over the world.
“A lot of it we can’t control,” says Laycock. “So what it means is we have to keep publishing fantastic stuff that not only has appeal to our readers in the GTA and Ontario, but has universal appeal.” When the Star redesigned its website last year it also implemented Facebook Connect, which enables users to log into its website using their Facebook identity, invite Facebook friends to TheStar.com, and post comments made on TheStar.com to their Facebook wall. Laycock declines to provide numbers, but says Facebook is now one of the top five referral sites for TheStar.com. Another top referral site is NBA.com, thanks to Star sports columnist Doug Smith’s hugely popular Raptors Blog.
Steve Buors, Calgary-based VP of local digital with Canwest Publishing, says there is no longer a distinction between the newspaper chain’s traditional and social media efforts. Vancouver Sun reporters are as likely to include Twitter updates in their daily routine as they are to produce a story for the print edition.
“This is completely integrated into our newsroom,” he says. “This isn’t one guy sitting in a corner doing social media; everybody in the newsroom owns a piece of this. It’s a vital part of what the newsroom does every day.” Twitter in particular has been embraced “very quickly” by reporters, who recognize its ability to spark conversation with followers rather than tweeting irrelevant status updates. “At one point it was ‘I’m walking out my door right now and I’m holding my breakfast,’ whereas now it’s evolved into people having conversations. You see them sharing ideas as opposed to the minutia of their lives.”
Canwest has also created iPhone and Blackberry optimized websites, and is working on custom apps for the two mobile devices. “We want to be where our readers are; if they’re downloading applications and want to consume their news information that way, that’s where we want to be.” There is no specific timetable for when these devices will debut, Buors says, noting that the current uncertainty surrounding the Canwest assets is having no impact on their introduction.
While tools like Facebook and Twitter aren’t contributing directly to Canwest’s bottom line, Buors says they are generating incremental revenue by driving more traffic to its newspaper websites. “Every time we can increase our audience, both in terms of the number of readers and the number of pages they view, it’s a boon for us.
“We are always looking for opportunities to monetize,” he adds. “Step one is to make sure we are extending our reach, and from that we’re confident that with the brands we have and the presence we have in the communities, we will be able monetize it.”
Beth Lawton, manager of digital media for the Newspaper Association of America in Arlington, Va., dubs newspapers’ efforts “interesting experiments” that serve primarily to build their brand and increase their web traffic–which sounds suspiciously like code for “they don’t make any money.” “Any time you’re building your brand, especially with younger readers or younger potential readers, and any time you’re building traffic in a new or interesting way, that’s going to benefit your business,” says Lawton.
But will these types of initiatives be enough to reinvent newspapers? “Can’t hurt. Might help,” says Lawton, coining what could become the industry’s unofficial mantra in the months and years ahead.
John Hinds, president and CEO of the Canadian Newspaper Association, says the fundamental problem for newspapers isn’t creating worthwhile content for these platforms, but figuring out how to make money from them. While the bulk of newspaper involvement with tools such as Twitter has been restricted to the editorial product, there has been some experimentation with the social media phenomenon as an advertising mechanism.
In Texas, the Austin American-Statesman–which has just over 17,000 Twitter followers–has started selling ads on the micro-blogging service for $150 apiece. These ads go out twice a day Monday to Friday, must include an actionable offer for food, drink or entertainment (one October ad for a local haunted house, for example, utilized a buy-one-get-one-free offer that was extended to anyone mentioning the ad) and are limited to 120 characters to leave room for retweets.
The program is “very much in its infancy,” says Tim Lott, the paper’s vice-president of audience, but shows a potential way forward for the industry. “We’re still working carefully and methodically on how to make more money off those efforts without utterly alienating our audience,” he says. “We’re working to figure it out.” Saunders says the Globe is using social media tools like Twitter and Facebook in integrated ad campaigns–including a recent initiative that parent company CTVglobemedia undertook for the Mental Health Commission of Canada–but doesn’t foresee them having their own rate card anytime soon.
“I think there needs to be a lot more learning, and a better understanding of the impact and metrics the advertising community would accept and value,” he says.
Meanwhile, even the many papers that have adopted new technologies cling stubbornly to legacy thinking. A December study by Washington, D.C. consultancy the Bivings Group entitled “The Use of Twitter by America’s Newspapers” found that while all of the country’s top 100 papers are using Twitter (indeed, many have multiple accounts), they haven’t fully grasped the “social” aspect of social media.
Most alarmingly, given the accepted notion that new media fosters “conversation,” the report found that 33% of newspapers replied to users in less than 1% of their tweets, while a further 15% never replied to users’ tweets during the time period measured. Similarly, 43% of the accounts examined by Bivings retweeted other users in less than 1% of their tweets, while 23% of the accounts examined never retweeted another user during the time period measured.
“This suggests that these papers are rarely reading or reacting to the updates of people they follow,” the report concluded.
Paul Gillin, a Framingham, Mass.-based consultant and creator of the popular website NewspaperDeath- Watch.com–which has been chronicling what it describes as the “decline of newspapers and the rebirth of journalism” since 2007–says such data is symptomatic of a deep-seated mentality within the newspaper industry that it is a one-way source for information.
“When you live in a world where you are the oracle, the source of all information and nobody can really contradict what you say, it doesn’t lend itself to a culture of cooperation,” he says. “Now they’re finding they have to change that around. They can no longer afford to be the only game in town, and they’re not culturally prepared to do that.”
Even though the industry can claim some victories in the new media space, they haven’t been able to completely dispel the general gloom from an advertising standpoint.
Canadian newspaper advertising was down 20% to $1.9 billion in 2009, according to a December report from ZenithOptimedia. The agency predicted a further 4.8% decline this year as the industry undergoes a “massive restructuring.”
U.S. newspapers, meanwhile, lost $9 billion in 2009–a figure that includes $750 million in online losses alone– and Chris Kubas, vice-president of Toronto-based Kubas Consultants, says the industry faces yet another turbulent year as advertisers continue to rein in spending.
His company’s recent “Preview 2010” report, based on interviews with 532 newspaper executives in the U.S. and Canada (both small and large circulation papers), predicted that advertising revenues will decline in seven of eight listed categories this year, with the biggest declines coming in employment classified (-7.5%), other classified (-5.2%) and national display advertising (-3.4%).
