Nieman Foundation at Harvard
The plight of the local American newspaper is well known at this point: Circulation is shrinking, print ad revenue is shrinking, and papers haven’t been able to make up the difference digitally.
But in a new paper released last week, Shorenstein Center fellow Matthew Hindman, an associate professor at George Washington University, says newspapers are far worse off digitally than most people think.
News sites attract about 3 percent of all web traffic, Hindman writes, and about 85 percent of that traffic goes to national news sites. That leaves local news organizations with about 15 percent of online news attention, or about half a percent of overall web traffic. And that terrain is further split among local papers, TV and radio stations. The average local newspaper only gets 5 minutes per month per web user, Hindman writes: “Local newspaper traffic is just a rounding error on the larger Web.”
The bottom line is that any successful strategy for digital local news requires sites to grow their audience. This is obviously true for sites relying on ad revenue — though local newspaper sites cannot expect the same level of ad revenue per person that larger websites earn. Audience growth is just as essential for plans that rely on selling subscriptions. The current core audience of local news sites is too small to provide digital sustainability. Visitors who spend just a few minutes a month on a site are not good subscriber prospects. Even nonprofit journalism efforts need to demonstrate that their work is reaching a broad audience in order to ensure continued funding.
In order to grow their audiences, Hindman says local newspapers must answer two related questions: How can they make news “stickier” compared to all the other content on the web? And how can local news sites attract some of the audience that currently only reads national news sites?
Hindman offers a number of possible solutions. His top priority: improving the technical experience of local news sites, speeding up load times and making them work well on mobile devices. He also recommends improving content recommendation systems and simply producing more content to populate their websites. Additionally, he suggests local news sites do more A/B testing, optimize content for social media, and produce more videos and multimedia.
All of these suggestions, of course, cost money and resources; Hindman acknowledges that “for newspapers money is exactly the issue, and everything-at-once is not a viable strategy.”
Newspapers need to think marginally, to identify the changes that provide the most stickiness for the least additional cost. Some strategies are so important that they should be implemented immediately. For any editors reading this: If your site is slow, you are bleeding traffic day after day after day. If your site does not work seamlessly on mobile or tablet devices, drop everything and fix it. If your homepage does not have at least some visible new content every hour, you are throwing away traffic. Fix
these problems first.
If you’d like more details on Hindman’s specific suggestions, here is a link to the full report.
3 comments:
Newspapers need to be less about “news” — aggregate that content from free sources such as Twitter, FB and the local bloggers — and more about being a revenue-generating information source describing all aspects of being in an area: movie and restaurant reviews, maps and directions, grocery prices compared, local phone directory, a “who is near me?” geolocation of your friends, geomapped home listings with prices, etc. They need to be Yelp, the Yellow Pages, Zillow and Google Maps all in one (except all those things already were developed … while news management was ignoring the existence of the Internet). News gathering is too expensive without developing these other sources of revenue.
imho Nj.com is doing a phenomenonal job building local digital audiences. They feature stories from about a dozen different affiliated local newspapers. I think the big key is they implemented their own social network (one that respects anonymity) within the site, every article has a comment section, polls, and also they’ll pretty much publish any articles/letters to the editor that citizens send in.
If other areas in the country are doing a terrible job building local digital audiences, maybe they should look at the model nj.com offers.
@Bob Mentzinger – I respectfully disagree. Strongly.
Aggregating content from Twitter and Facebook is worth next to nothing when users start their viewing from those sites in the first place. Unless, of course, you somehow find value in driving them back off your site. Local bloggers? I’d be happy to refer to them if they’re posting on my site. Otherwise, I’m not the least bit interested in driving viewers off my site and onto somebody else’s.
And how am I going to become a revenue-generating source with my viewers by providing the same services that Yelp, YP.com, Zillow, Groupon et. al. provide for free? As you intimated, that ship already sailed and most all newspapers and their associated websites weren’t on it. Forget about charging anything for something viewers can find on the first page of Google for free.
If you want to have people spend money with you online, you need a unique value proposition that isn’t provided by others for free. The amazing thing is most local newspapers — moreso in smaller markets — already have much of the stuff they need in their hot little hands. It just needs to be packaged better.
Some of this stuff is obvious, because it’s in the daily record — daily arrest reports from the cop shops, court decisions, city and school district agendas and reports, box scores for area high school and college teams, area movie listings. Make it searchable across multiple criteria, on both an immediate and historical basis. Then actively promote that if you want that information fast, and you want it right, the place to get it is on your local newspaper’s website.
Others are not quite so obvious: if you have a good sales staff, your paper’s ad master provides a better and more current list of area businesses than the Chamber of Commerce business directory. A weekly trip to the recorder of deeds will provide faster updates on property transfers than the monthly Dodge reports. Either of these services — and countless others — can be provided with premium, targeted advertising or premium service subscriptions because local papers are positioned to get the story faster/better/more accurately than cheap and lazy web aggregators. And it’s information good papers still find everyday.
Newspapers need to curate and develop the unique values they offer, and actively promote those values. Just saying “news is too expensive” is MBA drivel, and offers nothing more than unoriginal thinking. That’s what’s slowly killing newspapers. To put it in context, aggregated “content” ain’t news, and it ain’t special. Because real news has value, waiting (but not for long) to be untapped.
If it’s properly developed, owning your market is still worth more than regurgitating junk content. It may be cheap, but you get what you pay for.
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