How we can save newspapers

The Independent - Is it time governments got involved with supporting the world of news-gathering?

The two best print newspapers in the United States – the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and the Christian Science Monitor – have just died. The New York Times is nearly bankrupt, and the Los Angeles Times is already there. In beds all around them in the Emergency Room, the world's newspapers are being fed ink on a drip, as ashen relatives stand and stare. How many of them will survive this depression? And what would a world with drastically fewer people gathering and sifting the news look like?

Newspapers are in a bizarre position. More people are reading the stories we write than ever before: via the web, we have a higher readership than in the most inky-fingered Golden Age. But we are withering. Why?

Since the mid-19th century, newspaper readers haven't had to pick up the full tab for putting the paper together and delivering it to your breakfast table. First they were subsidised by governments or political parties. Then they were paid for primarily by advertisers who want to sell you stuff. The price on the cover is only a small fraction of the money it takes to pay for gathering the news.

This model is ailing now because, as Professor Paul Starr of Princeton explains: "Until recently, the internet seemed primarily to be additive, vastly enlarging the opportunities for self-expression and public debate, while newspapers and other old media continued serving their old functions, such as financing the bulk of original reporting for the general public." You increasingly read it online, but the bill was picked up by print readers and print advertising.

But this could only ever last for a transitional decade. As more and more readers begin to click rather than flick, it is almost over. The problem is that an online reader is worth 10 per cent of a print reader to advertisers. So for every reader you lose on the page, you need to gain 10 on the screen. The sums don't add up – so the newspapers are sickening and shedding staff.

Does it matter? There are some reasons to scorn newspapers in the US, where the press is unusually pompous and proud and protective of the interests of the powerful while bragging about its "balance." Yes, advertising-funded newspapers are a fractured lens on the world, unconsciously under-reporting anything that threatens the interests of their paymasters. The recently reissued book Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky shows this brilliantly: it's why almost all newspapers failed on Iraq, on the disastrous effects of deregulation, and now on the climate crisis. But today, we are facing the possibility of replacing this fractured lens with no lens at all.

When I last wrote about the need to save newspapers, one reader snapped: "Why don't you launch a campaign to save CB radios too?" But CB radios don't play a crucial role in a democracy. It has been put best by Joe Matthews, a former reporter for the Los Angeles Times, who says: "With fewer watchdogs, you get less barking: corruption undiscovered, events not witnessed, tips about problems that never reach anyone's ears because those ears have left the newsroom. How can we know what we'll never know?"

A recent study in The Journal of Law, Economics and Organisation found that one of the biggest single factors in reducing corruption in a country is "the free circulation of daily newspapers per person." Go to any country, and you'll find that the lower the newspaper circulation, the higher the corruption. If nobody's watching, anything goes.

As inky news-gatherers vanish, there is a vacuum that online journalists are not able to fill. With less advertising cash and no upfront payments from the readers at all, they have far less money to send out foreign correspondents, assign people to tricky investigations, or do the long slog that journalism so often requires. Look at the best political site, the Huffington Post, for which – in the interests of full disclosure – I should point out I write. As they are the first to admit, HufPo pays nothing to its contributors, and it knows what is happening in the world only because newspapers send out correspondents. If they vanish, blogs will be left in an airless cabin, talking only about themselves.

This doesn't have to happen. Many people in the increasingly frantic newspaper industry whisper about potential techno-solutions. Some say an easy system of online micro-payments – an i-Tunes for the news – will save us. Others invest hope in the Kindle, the hand-held device on which you can buy a newspaper. But we can't afford to wait for them to go mainstream: journalism's accumulated structures, brands and wisdom could be lost forever by then.

There is a better way. In an age of bailouts, several European governments are experimenting with ways to support the world of news-gathering so it will survive for the 21st century. The best plan has come from French President Nicolas Sarkozy. He has launched a programme where every French citizen, on her 18th birthday, will be given a year's free subscription to a newspaper of her choice. The effects are subtle. Many young readers will develop a newspaper habit. In turn, newspapers will compete harder to capture this lucrative guaranteed market, and make their product accessible and fresh. A benevolent whirl replaces the current death-spiral.

Of course there is a terrible danger in making newspapers dependent on the government's actions. Nobody wants that. But there are ways to avoid this trap. In 1971, the Swedish government set up a system of subsidies to newspapers allocated by an independent body on the basis of circulation and revenue data. Intriguingly, the Swedish press became more adversarial and critical after it was introduced, not less.

As the thud of falling newspapers echoes across the Atlantic, we can't afford to dawdle. Good newspapers – for all their flaws and selective vision – are the sinews of representative government. In 1787, Thomas Jefferson wrote: "Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate to prefer the latter." Unless we act now, fast, we may be left with the opposite: a government, but no newspapers left to monitor them.

Evolution over Revolution: Canadian marketers tiptoe into the digital age

Ipsos Reid study - The digital revolution has overtaken the world in nearly every corner of technology and commerce. Yet for those traditional bastions of trend spotters, trend setters, and trend followers – the marketer – the approach and embrace of the new digital era is taken with a degree of caution. At first look, it appears that Canadian marketers are taking a more evolutionary approach in tackling the digital world, preferring to first build on their own knowledge and experience with the medium before fully embracing it. There is some merit to a cautious approach, but being too cautious or too slow to embrace the digital era comes with some risk.

This past October, Ipsos Reid launched the findings of a new study conducted in collaboration with the Canadian Marketing Association. The study specifically asked marketers about their thoughts, attitudes, and behaviours toward the expanding world of digital marketing, and how their business is managing or embracing it.

The study showed that some 4 in 10 marketers (39 per cent) believe that “spending on TV will decrease over the next two years,” reinforcing the current trend in growth of digital forms of marketing and the shift away from mass marketing to more targeted marketing approaches. Currently, the digital component accounts for only 8 per cent of total marketing spend, yet two thirds (65 per cent) of the marketers surveyed strongly agree that their “senior management is very interested in digital marketing”. This appears to follow market trends and the overall consumer appetite for accessing media through new technology.

The survey results reveal that while marketers are broadening their priorities from traditional mass vehicles such as television to include more targeted Internet and digital marketing tactics, there exist both hurdles and opportunities for the marketing industry as a whole.

Media consumption is changing. New technologies such as personal video recorders, video games, the Internet, and others, are allowing people to consume media in different ways. All of this means that media consumption has become a much more active and less passive pursuit than in the past. Consumers spend almost as much on devices and applications designed to help them avoid advertising as advertisers spend on advertising itself. For the marketer, this means that an integrated approach is necessary.
Familiarity Builds Comfort

In terms of familiarity and usage, some forms of digital marketing appear to have matured and, in some respects, become part of the traditional marketing mix. This includes e-mail marketing, online advertising, search engine marketing (paid), search engine optimization, and interactive consumer websites. Others continue to be considered emerging opportunities in that they still generate only low levels of usage within the marketing community. These emerging approaches include e-CRM, social network marketing, viral marketing, blogging/podcasting, in-store digital media, online video marketing, and mobile marketing.

With both familiarity and usage on the increase, why aren’t marketers allocating more of their budget to digital? Despite positive trends, there is still a distinct lack of knowledge (31 per cent) with marketers either indicating that they are just starting to explore or consider the digital realm (12 per cent) or that they are unsure of its effectiveness (12 per cent). Sentiments such as concerns over video sharing sites and the effectiveness of online viral marketing continue to reflect a neutral wait-and-see approach.

In most areas of the digital landscape, the study reveals that it remains the case that advertising and marketing agencies are more familiar with and express stronger usage of digital than their counterparts on the client side of the equation. While the agencies are taking the lead to a certain degree, it is perhaps not enough. The question remains…are agencies doing enough to educate their clients? And if not, this could be an opportunity area for some organizations to step into?
Best Practices for Digital Marketing

Best practices in digital marketing as noted in the study mirror some of the best practices in traditional marketing. However, there are a few additions to the list. Of note is the need to get permission (7 per cent) and the requirement to be customized and relevant (12 per cent). All of the best practices mentioned by Canadian marketers fall under the mantra of knowing who to target, knowing what to say, establishing metrics to measure success, and executing in an ethical fashion.

Digital marketing presents an increasingly complex arena and the perceptions of digital marketing are diverse. While Canadian marketers appear cautious on the outset, they are eager to learn and explore the opportunities presented in this new digital world. What they require is a confident and competent guide to help show them the way.