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(Editor’s note: The author is a retired newspaper publisher turned academic, and was director of Knight Ridder’s 25/43 Baby Boomer readership project, which included an experimental reinvention of print classifieds, in 1990.)
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In nine months since I was carried from the bloody arena of the newspaper business and ascended to the ivory tower, I’ve gained this perspective: Most newspapers don’t need the best new idea to grow their classifieds business. They mostly need to get better at executing what they already know.
I’m not an expert on classified advertising, so I can’t offer advice to anyone else. Here are a half dozen things I wish I’d done about classifieds and what I would do today:
- Stop obsessing about the national trends. Here in flyover country, there was no real estate boom and there’s no bust. Employment numbers remain healthy. Wichita Craigslist has been around for a few years, but hasn’t become an established marketplace in any vertical. It isn’t too late to save the business in Wichita or lots of other places in America.
- Invest in technology. We dithered endlessly over how to get our advertising and accounting systems to talk to each other. We found a hundred barriers to having our customers place and price their own ads. I should have been more insistently impatient about finding and financing solutions.
- Invest in people. Newspaper/Internet outside salespeople should be the most qualified and the best paid in the market. They should have the technical and clerical support they need to focus their time on selling to auto dealers, Realtors, employers and employment agencies. That wasn’t true at any of the newspapers I worked at over a span of 35 years.
- Get rid of the newspaper/Internet pricing silos. Advertisers should be sold eyeballs, not platforms. Companies allocate revenue to make their web operations look better at the expense of their newspapers. No wonder people think newspapers are failing. The truth is, the local newspaper and its website are a dynamite combination. Sell them that way.
- Stop tinkering with in-paper presentation. If the type is readable and the classifications are clear, readers will find and act on the ads. No amount of tweaking the color and headers and unpaid content will make a material difference in profitability.
- Promote. Promote. Promote. God should strike us down for cutting the classifieds promotion budget year after year. We got the results we paid for.
Lou Heldman is Distinguished Senior Fellow in Media Management and Journalism at Wichita State University. He is retired president and publisher of the Wichita Eagle and Kansas.com. You can reach him at lou.heldman@wichita.edu.
Tags: 25/43
the newspaper business » Blog Archive » Another Newspaper Relic Weighs In wrote,
[…] Lou Heldman is Distinguished Senior Fellow in Media Management and Journalism at Wichita State University. He is retired president and publisher of the Wichita Eagle and Kansas.com. In nine months since I was carried from the bloody arena of the newspaper business and ascended to the ivory tower, I’ve gained this perspective: Most newspapers don’t need the best new idea to grow their classifieds business. They mostly need to get better at executing what they already know. […]
Link | June 13th, 2008 at 8:41 am
Ken Bilderback wrote,
“Companies allocate revenue to make their web operations look better at the expense of their newspapers.”
I beg to differ. It’s exactly the opposite. Papers still pretend that people are buying primarily for print to make their print product look better than it really is.
And please DON’T stop obsessing about the national trends. Craigslist, realtor.com. autotrader.com, etc., etc., might have made less difference in Wichita than in some other markets, but their effect is bigger than Mr. Heldman realizes and it’s getting bigger all the time.
Publishers who become complacent in Wichita, Paducah, Peoria or Podunk will get swamped by the same tsunami that already has hit some markets. Stand up and fight.
Link | June 13th, 2008 at 5:02 pm
John Knowles wrote,
Boy this guy Ken really missed the point.
The new reality is about results. Newspapers sold on circulation or general readership can not make the transition into results based advertising sales. While the vertical Dot Com businesses are constructed around results based listing databases.The newspaper’s attempts to copy/ produce their own “national trend like” listing database site has been weak. With most newspaper companies attempting to find a hybrid solution that coleuses with their general readership based business model.
Newspapers must introduce a results based measurement mechanism that connects advertising placement to outcome. Especially in the Classifieds. Perhaps in-bedding ad codes or dedicated phone numbers need to be added to ad content. As well as the creation of a measuring classification traffic tool to be used for both print and on-line advertising.
As Lou Heldman said, ” Advertisers should be sold eyeballs, not platforms”.
It is time for dramatic changes in the last of the true mass media companies, but it doesn’t have to be following current national trends.
Not to long ago these trends were simple disruptive models. An accurate measurement mechanism will give any advertising platform an advantage, more so one with an inherent audience.
As Mr Heldman noted, investments in technology and people are the answer. Newspapers may end up delivering the next disruptive business model.
Link | June 21st, 2008 at 12:25 pm