The year 2009 may be the worst year yet for the newspaper industry.
According to Newspaper Association of America, print ad spending has plummet down in the first quarter with a 29.7% decline. Online ad spending also suffered with a 13.4% negative change.
While we see a transition online, some newspapers companies are still not looking too good.
Is news no longer important to us?
Social Media
Social media is the big thing now. CNN and New York Times managed to catch the wave and became top ranking tweeters way before other companies started engaging it. While people are still advising news publishers to tweet their news headlines, I would say that that’s no longer enough.
While there is nothing wrong with tweet bots as long as they bring value to their followers, we must ask how much unique value they are delivering to their readers. Twitter has become a means of referral traffic but what news companies need is something called direct traffic. How are they going to attract loyal visitors?
Be more social
The problem with newspapers both online and in paper form is that it works mostly on a one-way communication. Yes they have a comment box online and some are also on Twitter. However, half-hearted effort does not drive interaction.
When it comes to being more social, newspapers sites have lots to learn from TED.com, the site that spread great ideas and made them free to the world. TED realized that comments and user interaction are sometimes as important as the videos it shared. What it did was to make these components more visible and organized. This tells people that the site is not all about what it has to give, but viewer opinions and actions matter too.
Integration of Twitter and Facebook
To become more social, there’s no escape from sites such as Twitter and Facebook. How should newspaper companies integrate them into their websites?
To help news go viral, let’s start with placing retweeting widgets in posts and using Twitter and Facebook connect for their comment log in system. Through Twitter connect, comments are also retweetable (Tweetmeme would be coming up with retweetable comments too). They direct traffic into the sites through readers’ actions.
Make content digestible and appealing
Back to TED.com, how did it make its content digestible and appealing? To drive interest, it categorized its videos according to their nature – jaw dropping, persuasive, courageous, ingenious, informative and et cetera. It also uses the more genetic way of sorting content – Technology, Entertainment, Science and et cetera (how newspapers websites do it).
The very same content presented in a different way appeals to different masses. If I like to consume news in a more laid-back manner, I would prefer it to be categorized in a fun way. If I like my news to be presented seriously, I still have the generic categories. It would be a win-win situation for newspaper websites.
Customized news
What most news websites are offering now is a one size fits all. Even if the news is categorized, the range is overwhelming. Consumers are not facing a lack of choice; they are in fact facing the opposite problem.
Swiss Post attempted to solve this problem with personal news. Users are able to choose which sections of individual newspapers they’d like to read. Maybe it’s time for newspapers websites to do the same for the vast content within the site itself.
Through RSS feeds, news websites should also help readers customize what they would want to be updated on. CNET News readers can subscribe to separate content from the site, eliminating news from the site that are not important to them. Newspaper websites should have that as well.
Making the best out of multiple platforms
If you own a newspaper company, I would advise you to engage your readers through multiple platforms and establish your presence through them.
Set up a YouTube channel to deliver news stories that are timeless, invite people to upload their local news on your Facebook page and have them share news related pictures that they captured via Flickr or DailyBooth.
Learn from big news companies like CNN and use Twitter to update people about your latest news. Most importantly, humanize by talking to users wherever and whenever possible.
The Mobile Era
Increasingly, people are consuming their news on the go. iphones, blackberries and kindles are accelerating this trend. Users are turning to their mobile phone applications to tweet and Facebook.
What makes it different for news?
Creating applications for handsets to deliver news could be the way to go.
Videos in newspaper (as in really the paper)
According to Telegraph, Harry Potter “moving news” in Daily Prophet could become a reality. US magazine, Entertainment Weekly would be launching video advertising on its pages.
“Readers will open the magazine to be confronted by a small screen about the size of that on a typical mobile phone which will automatically play a short film.”
The sky’s the limit for the newspaper both online and offline. If companies were willing to take steps to innovate, perhaps things would turn around for them. With all the suggestions made, it all comes down to one thing – the user experience. How would you create them?
