Crisis opportunities

As difficult as it might be to believe, the current crisis offers news publishers some important opportunities. First, because it was a long time in the making (steady circulation declines, for example, have been well documented for decades), many publishers have already been thinking about how they could change for some time.

In recent years, IFRA has had many discussions with publishers about changing their newsrooms to not only integrate digital but also to make them more customer orientated and more efficient. However, since the print business was still generating strong profits until fairly recently, decisions on actually making future-oriented changes were nearly always postponed. Today, there is no longer any reason to delay them. Indeed, now is the time to take action. Publishers must once and for all break away from the traditional daily print cycle and learn to truly embrace a more platform-agnostic approach.

Likewise, most advertising departments can benefit from major restructuring that puts the customer and his or her success first and foremost, both digitally and in print. Despite the lingering question of “How can we make money with online?” we have seen few real changes in the behaviour and attitude of advertising departments. Until now, most have remained focused solely on print, with online part of the upsell, i.e.: “If you buy this print ad, you also get an online ad for a little surcharge.”

An awareness of online as its own media where publishers can earn money has not been established apart from a few well-known exceptions, such as Schibsted, which started years ago to take online seriously as an advertising media. In the rest of the world, it has been: “We have print. Print is where we make money.”

Consequently, the mindset and sales approach for advertising have long centred on print. For example, the rules of how print advertising is sold have typically been applied to online, but we know from research that the size of an online ad does not have the same importance for the reader in terms of factors such as ad recall, as it does with print. Online, context and frequency are more relevant for the ad recall and impact of a campaign. Naturally, this has an influence on how ad packages are designed and priced.

As with the newsroom, it’s therefore now time to move the processes, the offered products and services and also the management structure in advertising sales beyond print to firmly include digital.
Lastly, the crisis also offers the opportunity for many publishing houses to develop their internal management and leadership skills. In the past, especially in newsrooms, journalism skills rather than managerial ones have largely dominated. While journalism skills are obviously of great importance in newsrooms, the lack of strong leadership and management skills have left many unprepared to cope with the changes that now must be made.

News publishers can actively fight against this crisis by taking strong, decisive measures to make their newsrooms more efficient and reader oriented and their advertising departments more customer oriented. While there are no “magic bullet” solutions, one way out is to finally reach decisions and start planning and implementing the changes that are necessary.