Charting Maine’s Future

Last week’s post, “Paper News in a Digital Age,” has officially garnered more responses than any other post I’ve written here. Since one of GrowSmart Maine’s roles is to function as a statewide incubator for civic engagement and interaction (and newspapers are an invaluable part of fostering those statewide discussions) I’d like to continue this conversation and invite more reporters, writers, and publishers to chime in with comments or guest posts. I’ve also enabled anonymous comments for anyone who doesn’t care to be identified, but comments will still be moderated for appropriateness.

Now, as someone who blogs, freelances for print publications, and cares deeply - on a personal and professional level - about the future of our newspapers, here are my own personal ideas about how to improve newspapers’ business models (and I hope that you’ll improve on these ideas by leaving your comments):

Unlike some other commentators, I have my doubts about the so-called “death” of print journalism. A printed newspaper is the only practical way to read the news on a bus, or a park bench, or in a diner. And most people would rather read from a printed page than strain their eyes by looking at a backlit screen.

However, I must confess that it’s been weeks since the last time I bought a copy of the Portland Press Herald. Since that paper began its layoffs in the newsroom, there are usually only two or three articles a day that interest me, and they’re usually pretty short. Instead of going out, paying 60 cents, and flipping through the pages in search of those articles, I can go online and locate their headlines in a few seconds. A lot of other people take the same approach, which leads to declining print circulation.

As circulation declines, the paper has responded by shrinking the size of the printed edition, excising wire reports, and trimming other elements of the printed paper. Some of these moves are savvy: no one is crying about the loss of microscopic stock prices from last night’s closing bell. But the cumulative loss of content does real damage to the customers’ sense of value. This is the paradox of mass media: with such a diverse audience, every part of the newspaper - even stock quotes - is “popular” to some people. Cut away enough “unpopular” elements that only appeal to a small niche of your readership, and eventually you’ll end up alienating the majority of your audience.

Here’s my proposed solution, then. Newspapers should behave less like mass-media outlets, broadcasting the same product to all of its readers and subscribers, and more like Internet portals like Yahoo! or Google, which broadcast a more specialized product to targeted customers.

In spite of the Press Herald’s weight loss and the cost of newsprint, I’m astounded at how much paper people throw away without reading it. I always toss the sports and lifestyles sections, because I couldn’t care less about box scores, “Dear Abby,” or high school tournaments. So when I buy a paper, half of the Press Herald’s expenses, and its advertisers’ expenses, are wasted on a customer like me.

And most readers are like me: they throw away half of the newspaper without reading it. Some ignore the opinion pages; others ignore the business section; still others ignore everything but the crossword puzzle.

But what if I could subscribe to only the parts of the Portland Press Herald that interested me? The PPH could save money by using less newsprint. I could save time and hassle by not mucking around with extraneous newspaper sections. And, taking a cue from Google’s extremely successful Adwords program, advertisers could gain value by targeting their ads to specific audiences.

And so, for instance, instead of putting the same daily edition of the Portland Press Herald in newsstands and front porches, every single subscriber would be able to customize their daily paper by choosing from a menu of columns, news topics, and features. And newsstands might begin selling three or four editions of the daily paper, instead of only one: a “sports fan” edition with two pages of news and twelve pages of sports, a “politics junkie” edition with twelve pages of news and two pages of sports, and so on.

This is basically the model of RSS subscriptions, which allow Internet users to create a constantly-updated “a la carte” newspaper cobbled together from various blogs and newspaper sites. By using an RSS reader, you can have a daily update delivered from any blog or news site that publishes a syndicated feed. Here’s a sample RSS subscription that combines headlines from local blogs with international energy news for a hypothetical Maine-based oil baron.

RSS is nifty, but I see two ways that traditional newspapers could do better. First, they could provide this same content in paper form, which would be easier to read. Second, newspapers could provide more locally-targeted advertising for RSS content. It’s difficult for a Google Adwords advertiser to target a specific city or town, but that’s a specialty of printed newspapers.

The RSS model could also allow writers - from national columnists, to freelancers, to local “citizen journalists” - to syndicate their work in print or on newspaper websites in exchange for a cut of ad revenue. This, in turn, would restore and bolster a lot of the content that’s been cut from newspapers in recent years, and add additional value for a newspaper’s readers.

There are limits to how much a print newspaper can be customized, and I strongly believe that a lot of newspapers’ social value comes from exposing a mass audience to news, stories, and viewpoints that they wouldn’t typically be interested in. I may not ever read the sports section, but I’d still want to see the Red Sox on the front page of my newspaper if they win the World Series. The editors’ role should be as a professional news filter, determining what stories everyone should know about, and what stories would most appeal to, or expand the horizons of, a specific audience.

Newspapers should enhance, not divide, the common civic experience. But by restoring interest in newspapers, boosting circulation, and increasing ad revenue, a customized newspaper should have more resources to do exactly that.

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