Some open questions
Digital First is better than doing nothing. But successful execution of the strategy faces many practical difficulties. The Freeman may be seen as a work in progress.
Its rate card updated its rates as of July 1, 2011. But the readership it has long posted – 56,800 daily and 62,100 Sunday – came from numbers provided in 2005 by an outfit called Mori Research.
Much of the paper’s content is on-line, and increasingly includes video clips, meeting Tweetings, and editorial blog postings. But by the standards of the social media the audience is not yet fully engaged. Few stories get as many as a half-dozen comments in response; most are lucky to earn a single response. If the goal is to engage the community in citizen journalism, the Freeman has a long way to go. For the week ending this past Saturday, for instance, the Freeman received 38 total comments on its Facebook page, including one reader’s mixed praise on its editorial criticizing Verizon’s recent service performance: “And the Freeman is one big uninformed paper.…Just sayin’.”
The ability to share content among locations and platforms can be important in reducing costs. “Local newspapers aren’t all local news, after all,” points out analyst Felix Salmon. “Things like features, reviews, columns, comic strips — anything which can be syndicated, basically — can be shared.” JRC’s New York cluster has allowed its papers to share content, management and other costs with each other more easily. The larger the share of the news hole devoted to syndication, however, the smaller the share devoted to local content.
Can the Freeman’s small and overextended editorial staff be expected to deliver “original and compelling journalism”? Occasional bursts of skill and enthusiasm are an insufficient remedy for an atmosphere of consistently mediocre performance. Without a more substantial editorial core, papers like the Freeman run the risk of encouraging new competitors in all platforms. From an editorial perspective, Thunderdome’s emphasis on common content has a dark side. As JRC’s editor in chief James Brady puts it, the system will allow the papers “to spend their actual staff time covering local news and embedding themselves in the local community — which they have to do to make themselves successful.” Readers can expect a larger amount of filler content; whether this makes “actual staff time” in the local community more productive remains to be seen.
On August 15, Paton announced the appointment of Brady as editor in chief of all its publications. Calling itself “a leading multi-media company in local news and information,” JRC said that Brady would lead the editorial charge to transform the company’s newsrooms on all platforms. His job will be to orchestrate JRC’s daily news coverage and to directly oversee all newsgathering operations.
“If our dailies continue on the trend they are on right now, by the end of the year they will have brought in more digital revenue than the costs of running their newsrooms,” Paton said on September 7. “Digital revenues can pay for newspaper newsrooms.” This quotation may be saying as much about the legendary editorial stinginess of JRC as about the surge in digital revenues.
According to analyst Salmon, “local newspapers are, and always have been, the first best source of local ad-sales talent. They know their towns, they know their advertisers, they know their readers. Local advertising relationships are valuable and expensive things to build.” Quality of sales-ad staff is critical to survival in a competitive environment.
As a collection of smaller community newspapers, JRC has fared better in the Internet revolution than larger papers have. Most of MediaNews’ revenues, though, come from big regional papers. Paton’s digital-first strategy will face different competitors and require different execution in those cities. Will sufficient managerial attention be paid to markets as small as Kingston?++
