So we’ve established that print media is in terminal decline.
At either end of the spectrum, News Corporation and the Guardian are suffering badly. Both are trying their damnedest to thrive in the digital age.
They’re applying unconventional approaches to their industry’s decline.Some of those strategies can be used by every business to make sure they innovate in ways that can secure their survival.
Here are some lessons about coping with change gleaned from the lingering death of paper-based media:
1. There’s no such thing as “business as usual”. The traditional paper publications have thrown themselves into their old areas of expertise — more, and more highly paid, columnists; more skewing the sales figures — as if they were in an old-school circulation war. The slightly smarter ones have recognised that readers and advertisers are moving online, so they’ve got smart web designers in to digitise content. The takeaway: The real winners will be those that totally reconfigure the business model. Things are never going to be the same, this is not a blip — or as Steve Yarrow put it on Tom Peters’s blog: “This is not a recession; it’s a recalibration“.
2. “Eat your own children”. That’s a ghastly turn of phrase that Intel genius Pat Gelsinger used to describe the process of making Intel’s own multi-billion dollar silicon chip plants redundant by designing a new generation of processors. Many newspapers and magazines felt that producing great websites might endanger their print sales or ad revenue, so they either did little on the Web, or they charged for it.
The takeaway: In a world where competitors can offer your audience something similar for free, that’s crazy. Your business needs to be prepared to serve customers exactly what they want, even if that means hurting some of your cash cow offerings. Take a look at how some newspapers are syndicating all of their content… often for nothing.
3. Think niche, think local. While regional and big city newspapers in the US are folding, local papers are doing well . They still have a niche. A local electrician needs to advertise exclusively to people within a few square miles — it’s actually relatively hard to do that online. Even the big media groups have cottoned on: while the Guardian has invested heavily in making it easy to consume its content for free, where it has an exceptionally strong niche it still has the option to charge for online content.
The takeaway: In many other industries, localisation, customisation and tightly focused expertise remain insurance policies against general market upheaval.
(Photo: franckdethier, CC2.0)
