Awhile back a team of Rich Gordon's whiz kids from Northwestern University worked with Davenport's Quad-City Times on a combo print-online youth product called Your Mom.
Last year the paper pulled the plug on the printed product but kept the website. Now Will Sullivan notes that the Lee Enterprises newspaper has killed Your Mom online as well.
I have no inside information about Your Mom's numbers, but I do know one thing: Newspapers have a terrible track record at addressing the youth market and an equally terrible track record on innovation. It's the latter that I want to address here.
It's imperative that newspapers get inside the heads and hearts of young people, learn to understand them, and learn to build tomorrow's business around their needs and interests.
But in the culture and business context of a daily newspaper, a project like Your Mom is a distraction at best and a resource-sucking black hole at worst.
Who wants to advertise to these kids? Are those advertisers bad credit risks? How much will it cost us to call on them? From the ad salesperson's perspective: Will I get enough commission from this sales call to make it worth my time?
The guys from Innosight often advise us to separate innovative projects from the mothership. And they have a simple prescription: Be patient for scale, but impatient for profit. You need to discover whether a project makes business sense (i.e., can generate some sort of a profit) before you try to make it big.
Inside a newspaper, though, the drive is to make it big first, and hope for profit later. This can lead to big mistakes. A mistake is not always a bad thing, but you learn most quickly (with the least suffering) from a series of small mistakes.
It would be unreasonable to expect a team of Rich Gordon's college students to pull a perfect product out of a hat.
The issue for Lee Enterprises is not the success or failure of Your Mom, but rather what steps it takes next. Did it learn from Your Mom? How will it adapt to those learnings and try again? Because the generational dropoff in readership isn't going away.
Comments
newspapers and innovation
Newspapers have a terrible track record at addressing the youth market and an equally terrible track record on innovation.
That's true in general, but in terms of content it's a bit of a simplification. Lee Rainey of the Pew Center, next to whom I sat at lunch yesterday, happened to say the same thing. In fact, he says, newsrooms do a LOT of innovating, some of it quite good, but the business side refuses to fund the innovation to the extent needed to make it commercially viable (or else they define "commercially viable" in terms that don't actually exist in the real world).
And I think young people
And I think young people (I'm among them) can smell "fakeness" or over commercialization a mile away. A lot of the youth publications I've read try too hard to act "cool." I really don't know how you foster community among your usership and young people. This is something we will have to figure out.
And I ask: Hasn't youth readership always been a problem? Do you old timers remember your peers in high school or college reading a newspaper that much?
YourMom
YourMomOnline was one of the examples I used to give when I was asked "What sites do you admire?" The enthusiasm and rawness of the site was amazing. However, your line But in the culture and business context of a daily newspaper, a project like Your Mom is a distraction at best and a resource-sucking black hole at worst is dead on.