EGC Clambake for April 24, 2007 - “The Business Plan is Love”
pointing to...
Conover on media: WHAT IF YOUR BUSINESS PLAN WAS LOVE?
"Stop making papers with the goal of people not hating them and start making papers for people to love."
ahhh, back to more regular blogging after a super snowboarding season in the dunn household (photos & video)...
i haven't even listened to the latest egc from dave, but i saw this post from daniel pointed to in his shownotes and the title alone caught my attention...
i'm glad dave shared this and look forward to hearing what he actually had to say about it in his podcast - but from reading it alone all i can say to daniel is "right-on"...
the newspaper industry is heavily challenged right now, not surprisingly some fine folks have called them dinosaurs ;)
the industry's pending demise has been covered heavily - classified erosion and online under performing are two commonly referenced reasons - but the need for paradigm shifting of the core business model is also critical and daniel raises great points in his post...
very large metros tend to have a love/hate relationship w/in communities or rather the multiple communities that they service, but smaller metros and community papers in my experience tend to be more beloved than hated - tighter integration w/in the community and being the go-to resource for hyper-local content (high school sports scores, community events, niche, niche & niche)...
its an economy of scale issue, smaller properties can focus closer on local community issues, so to daniel's point they can do more things well for more people compared to the larger metros, even though metros have much larger circulation - locals have a better percentage of communities compared to communities of interest...
especially as newspapers look more towards improving their digital media efforts, the large metros will need to create the engagement and feel of the smaller metros and community papers from what use to be a singular static uber metro normalized content offering - daniel does a great job of persenting this...
but of course the smaller metros and community papers will need to step their digital media efforts up as well, after all they are now competing for readership on a global scale due to the pervasive network - but if done right they should own niche and local topics, especially since a high percentage are truly beloved entities across generations and as their demographic of readers shifts from pulp to byte they should be able to continue to actively participate w/in their communities as they transition online...
Comments