I twittered an offhand remark yesterday: "Please stop calling print the core product." It was retweeted quite a bit, and I received some "please explain" queries. Here's my explanation.
If you're still thinking your core product is a newspaper, you're misleading yourself and maybe even killing your business.
Your core business is not print.
And this may dismay the online news crowd, but your core product isn't news.
In fact, you need to stop thinking that advertising supports news and start thinking about how news (and other content) supports advertising.
Your core business is helping others sell their goods and services.
That's been true since the middle of the 19th century, when the industrial revolution transformed newspapers from subsidized journals aimed at the political class into commercial mass media aimed at everyone, or at least everyone who could read.
Newspaper offices became large-scale factories, churning out hundreds of thousands of copies that were sold at a pittance, sometimes even at a loss, in order to build a deliverable audience for advertisers. This was called the "penny press," and it revolutionized journalism as well as the business model that supported it.
Your core product is a commercially relevant audience, gathered through multiple print channels (daily paper, weekly free TMC, free specialty products) and now also through multiple digital channels (web site, "moms" and other specialty sites, mobile, email, and now even distributed behavioral advertising networks).
What I'm saying shouldn't be new. The original Innosight NewspaperNext report clearly advocated a "new core" concept. It was urging us to learn to think about innovating outside that core, but it seems to me that most of us don't even understand our own core business. Not if we keep identifying print as that core.
Comments
Or, as I like to say...
Total agreement here...
an addendum
I beg to differ...
Maybe but is it right?
Anyone want to buy a well-worn Yelvington fan club pin?
POV and language
Maybe some of this is point of view. Maybe some of it is language.
I grew up in the newsroom and understand and share the general point of view about the vital nature of news. Please understand that I'm not saying news is not essential to the business. It is, and it's immensely essential to the economic and political health of a community.
But newsrooms are categorically blind to the underlying business realities of their own employers. This is, sadly, going to lead to even more business failures as big city dailies crater and poorly thought-out, quixotic Web-only efforts spring up to fill the editorial void.
The business of newspapering is what we usually call advertising. That's where the money comes from, and the product we sell is actually a marketing / communications service to businesses, primarily local.
Internalizing this truth shouldn't be frightening -- it can help us recognize opportunities to make our business stronger in ways that also strengthen our public service mission.
That core public service mission also shouldn't be overlooked here, either -- it's not about the Web, nor print. But it ultimately also is not news. News, too, is a tool for accomplishing the underlying goal. But that's fodder for a completely different blog item.
Well, I'll keep my Yelvington fan-club pin for now...