The next 12 months will be a watershed for the Canadian newspaper industry. For the first time in history it’s expected that online ad spending will outpace print spending in Canada ($2.2 billion online to $2 billion for newspapers according to ZenithOptimedia). This is also the year that the dailies of the fallen Canwest print empire now in the hands of Paul Godfrey under the new Postmedia banner are expected to reveal their leaner, meaner selves… in all their digital-first, iPad app glory. Meanwhile, competition from other media (locally focused citizen projects, the laser-sharp targeting of Facebook… even a suddenly small biz-focused Google) continues to heat up, forcing newspapers to develop (or co-opt) innovative strategies to retain readers and advertising dollars.
To remain relevant, newspaper companies must take stock of the value they have always proposed to marketers. “For an advertiser who wants to have immediate reach in a market and connect with an audience in a really relevant environment, the [newspaper] platform continues to offer that value proposition,” says Andrew Saunders, vice-president of advertising for the The Globe and Mail. “That hasn’t been diminished from our perspective. Our print readership has increased and our digital readership has exploded, so we effectively are reaching more Canadians today than we’ve ever reached in the history of the company.” But to keep those audiences and deliver them to advertisers, newspaper companies are re-evaluating the way they do business almost daily—from revenue opportunities to editorial systems. Marketing presents 11 tactics and strategies for newspapers in 2011 in their long battle for reinvention.
1. Get app
The launch of the iPad in 2010 set newspapers racing to develop applications that supercharged their news. Dan Leger, director of news content at the Halifax Chronicle-Herald, says his paper was one of the first in Canada to develop an iPad app. However, he understands that being first isn’t everything, and that the Herald’s iPad and iPhone apps are continually being upgraded to allow readers access to a greater range of content, including the addition of more columns and opinion pieces. “We recognize that mobile devices are going to play an increasingly important role in the way that news and information are going to be delivered to audiences.” It would be difficult to find a newspaper owner who would disagree with this point. Last month Postmedia announced the launch of iPad apps for its nine city dailies, including the Vancouver Province, Saskatoon Star-Phoenix and Ottawa Citizen. “It’s only been three weeks since we’ve launched these apps, but I think very clearly there is a demand to use these tablets for information consumption,” says Malcolm Kirk, executive vice-president, digital media for Postmedia. More tablet apps, from major dailies like the Toronto Star to free weeklies like Toronto’s Now, will deploy in 2011.
2. Reader tracking
As they deliver more content digitally, the opportunity to track reader engagement has provided invaluable insight for newspapers. Andrew Saunders of the Globe relays some of the media consumption habits his team has gleaned from initial research: “Our mobile activity peaks when people are commuting to the office. And then our desktop unique visitors and page views increase through the day.” Similarly Postmedia now arms its writers with reader-usage data. “Our strategy going forward is to make that information available to our journalists so they can make the right kinds of content decisions,” says Malcolm Kirk. “What subjects are (readers) most engaged with and what do we have to provide more content around—or perhaps less, based on user engagement and interest?” Kirk adds that having a better understanding of how people consume newspaper content on different platforms will also result in more targeted opportunities for advertisers. “A big part of our objective over the next year or so is to refine those practices so that we can get into a model that allows that kind of fine-targeted content and advertising to exist.”
3. Let the audience in
OpenFile.ca isn’t a newspaper, per se, but its unique content strategy could point the way forward for Canada’s daily fishwraps. Launched last year, the free-subscription site gives readers a seat at the assignment editor’s table. OpenFile subscribers who want to see a particular story covered can, as the name suggests, open a file on the site about the issue in question. OpenFile’s editors then assign the stories to professional journalists. The site’s readers can then keep the file alive by adding additional content, including photos and video. Wilf Dinnick, founder and CEO of OpenFile, recalls a particular file opened by a Torontonian frustrated about the dilapidated state of a local park. A reporter followed up on the story, igniting a wave of traditional media coverage from the grassroots level. Though there isn’t much in the way of advertising support yet, Dinnick believes marketers stand to benefit from sponsoring such content because reader-creators are more heavily invested in it. “When somebody opens a file, our engagement time is much higher than if a reporter comes up with [the story].” He adds that content partnerships with traditional dailies are a possibility for OpenFile, which launched with Toronto coverage and will branch out to Waterloo, Hamilton, Calgary and Montreal early this year.
4. Group-buy partnerships
Group-buying tools like WagJag have given newspapers a new way to attract advertisers. WagJag, linked from all of Torstar Digital’s online properties, including the Toronto Star site, promotes daily hyperlocal deals with discounts ranging from 50% to 90% to readers via e-mail alerts and web ads. The deals are geographically targeted—readers in downtown Toronto are offered different group-buying bargains than those in the suburbs. “For consumers, you’re getting really exclusive, deep-discounted deals,” says Candice Faktor, vice-president, strategy and new ventures for Torstar Digital. “And for merchants, what’s so unique about this is that you’re getting to promote your business and offer a deal to the consumer without having to pay an advertising fee.” It’s a case of media company as sales agent, with Torstar taking a commission from each WagJag deal sold rather than charging merchants an upfront fee. Group-buying sites like WagJag and Groupon also leverage readers’ social networks, as word-of-mouth buzz about the daily deals often spreads among friends via Facebook and Twitter.
5. Digital-age training
With audiences increasingly expecting to get news in a variety of formats from a single source, the job description of a newspaper reporter is changing. The Calgary Sun is just one of many outlets that has implemented extensive multimedia training programs for staff reporters and photographers. “Now, we travel with cameras, we travel with video cameras,” says Jose Rodriguez, editor-in-chief at the paper. “There used to be the old 10 o’clock deadline where you funneled everything in at the end, and that doesn’t work anymore. It’s immediate filing to online and, like a wire service, multiple posts. We’re constantly updating online.” In addition to online training, says Rodriguez, staff in the Sun Media newspaper chain are being taught how to feed multimedia news content to SunTV, the television channel launching later this year. That means, among other things, reporters learning how to produce stand-up, television-style video reports in addition to their written work. On the sales side, newspapers are taking important steps to ensure employees are equipped to sell across the multiple platforms for which they produce content. Postmedia, for example, has established a proprietary training program in which staff are formally certified to sell digital space. Part of that training can include tagging along with more experienced sales agents. “Let’s say you’re a sales rep that has less familiarity selling digital products,” says Malcolm Kirk. “We’ll arm you with a digital sales specialist to go out on a [client] call.”
6. Going social
The Chronicle- Herald’s Leger says Twitter has become a valuable medium for alerting readers to breaking stories and highlighting featured content, while Facebook has become a means of collecting information and connecting with readers. “It’s improving access to audiences that we aren’t going to meet in our ordinary day-to-day affairs. It brings you into places where you weren’t expecting to go.” Leger certainly wasn’t expecting international readers to swarm the Herald website when the paper reported on a cross-burning incident in Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley last year, but thanks to Twitter, that’s exactly what happened. “On the face of it, it was just a local crime story with overtones that were more profound. But the fact that it was tweeted and retweeted around the world brought more interest to what we were doing.” Reminiscent of the structure of OpenFile, newspapers are also using social media to source story ideas and information. “We solicit from [social media] further information from people that can lead us to more news on a story or just fresh stories that they know about,” says the Calgary Sun’s Rodriguez. “It’s an important part of where we’re going.” Now co-owner Michael Hollett cites the publication’s print and online coverage of last year’s G20 conference as an example of citizens using social media to help reporters. “What we were getting were tweets like, ‘come quick—they’re not letting [protesters] out of the holding pen,’” says Hollett. “It was very useful in terms of getting real-time alertsto stuff that was happening around the city.”
7. Leveraging local
Community weeklies may give away much to the major dailies in terms of size, but they’re capable of punching well above their weight with readers and advertisers. A small suburban weekly may not be the first choice when it comes to a broad branding initiative, but the consistent delivery of local audiences allows Victoria-based Black Press to entice marketers with sales-oriented advertising options. Candy Hodson, senior vice-president, national sales and marketing, points to an example that dates back a couple of years but nevertheless highlights the local advantage. When retailer HomeSense entered the Vancouver area with two stores, Black Press developed a “guess the price of this item” contest that it advertised in the print editions of two suburban papers. In addition to the ads, Black Press papers also ran stories about the contest winner—a marriage of commerce and content that would be unusual for a big-city daily. Hodson said the campaign not only drove traffic to HomeSense, but also integrated the retailer within its new community. Hodson also believes ads in smaller publications have less chance of getting overlooked than major daily buys. “Typically, when people are reading the local community newspaper, they read it cover to cover, so there’s not too much that’s going to be missed.” Now’s Michael Hollett also extols the virtues of smaller papers for local, results-oriented advertising campaigns. “The core of our paper is local advertising and that stuff is completely results-based. There’s no focus groups, no guys behind smoked glass asking people what they buy. You either sell more stuff or you don’t and our retailers sell more stuff with us.” Larger newspapers are also recognizing the value of local content. Postmedia’s Malcolm Kirk says readership of the company’s city paper websites is increasing as the company puts more emphasis on local content. “The engine of our digital business is local,” he says. This philosophy is also embraced by The Globe and Mail, which forged a content partnership with the popular Torontoist.com blog in 2009 to bolster its GTA coverage.
8. Content costs
While the debate over paywalls has bubbled across the industry for years now, many expect 2011 to be a turning point as the New York Times introduces a “metered wall” around its content. Black Press owner David Black says newspapers may be wrong in allowing their online content to be accessed for free while jacking up the prices of print issues. “Especially in the States, publishers have pushed the subscription prices and single-copy copies up quite a bit, and I think that is hurting business in the long run,” he says. As for the idea of digital pay walls, Black says they’re a good idea, one that he intends to put into practice at his U.S. dailies in Honolulu, San Diego and Akron, Ohio (although not for the websites of his free or paid-subscription Canadian community papers). “If you don’t have [a pay wall] and you have a really good website, a lot of people are opting to stop the print subscription,” Black says. “Publishers are actually shooting themselves in the foot.” Canadian newspapers aren’t exactly lining up to drop print prices, and the pay wall concept remains controversial and unproven at best (in the U.K., the Times reportedly lost 86% of its online audience after erecting a paywall), but rest assured that if papers like The New York Times can pull it off this year, others will follow.
9. CPM-plus
Sponsorship advertising, group-buying, and research that allows digital campaigns to be targeted more directly to specific audiences all bring the traditional CPM model into question. But neither the Globe’s Andrew Saunders nor Postmedia’s Malcolm Kirk see CPM completely disappearing. “I think CPM still dominates, but as we get into a world where the content and the advertising can be more finely targeted, the value of that sort of advertising will command a higher price,” says Kirk. Saunders agrees. “We can look out on the horizon and see digital advertising modeled around group-buying and that sort of thing, where the CPM model is thrown out the window.” But there’s also room for CPM “where advertisers want to build brand awareness. You’ve got premium CPM offerings and transactional performance offerings in the market, and that balance may shift over time, but I do think you’ll have a combination of the two.”
10. Beyond the banner
Newspapers must continue to evolve what might be termed “traditional online advertising”—inventory that gives agency creatives a chance to think outside the skyscraper. Last year, for example, the Star Media Group, a division of Torstar, introduced the “Double XL” box, an advertising unit that expands outward into the web page. “We had to re-architect our websites to work that in,” says Pam Laycock, vice-president, digital for Star Media Group and chief operating officer at Torstar Digital. The first company to take advantage of the innovation was TD, with a creative execution in which TD Waterhouse senior vice-president Pamela Lovett-Reid emerged from the ad to address users. Torstar believes it must be the source of not only ad space, but new ways to use it, says Laycock. “We try to get out ahead and make sure that people know we’re a place that will be very attentive to new ideas and also push the envelope and bring [ideas] out to key advertisers.”
11. Outsourcing content
Back in 2007 digital and new media guru Jeff Jarvis declared a new rule for newspapers: “Do what you do best. Link to the rest.” The Toronto Star demonstrated the evolution of that theory to great effect during the 2010 World Cup. The soccer tournament is always a major event in multicultural Toronto, but the Star wasn’t an official media partner, nor could its reporters possibly deliver the depth and breadth of coverage to satisfy fans of every team. What it did, however, was use Daylife, a service that allows editors to source news content from around the world and arrange it into attractive digital packages. We could bring together a really rich page on every single country—every single player, if we’d wanted to,” says Laycock. The Star was also able to get Sony involved as the sponsor for its Daylife-fed World Cup web pages. “It was a great money-maker for us, a great traffic-driver for us and it was great exposure for Sony,” says Laycock. “Here was a great audience in Toronto, an amazing content opportunity, and we played up the content and tied it to the advertiser and pulled all the pieces together.”
