10 Strategic Changes the Newspaper Must Make to Reinvent Themselves

In recent posts I pointed out many of the challenges the newspaper industry is facing:

• Subscription and advertising revenues are on the decline
• Attempts to move to the internet have had lackluster results
• Operations have been cut to bare bones
• Analysts have for the most part abandoned the industry

In the recent PEW report State of the News Media 2011

“…newspapers suffered continued revenue declines last year—an unmistakable sign that the structural economic problems facing newspapers are more severe than those of other media. When the final tallies are in, we estimate 1,000 to 1,500 more newsroom jobs will have been lost—meaning newspaper newsrooms are 30% smaller than in 2000.”

According to an article from the American Press Institute:

“The newspaper industry is at a strategic inflection point – a period of disruptive changes that threaten its current way of doing business with no clear future path. The threats come from many directions but are manifesting themselves in the form of declining circulation, rising costs and downward revenue pressure. These trends show no sign of reversing themselves. The industry’s very survival is dependent on its ability to reframe completely the way it does business, and find new ways to attract and keep customers.”

The war against the newspaper industry is mounting—as are new-media competitors focused on local market share. The threat is real and the competitors are unrelenting.  But all is not lost! There is still time to be disruptive and thrive—that is if the newspaper industry does not let their legacy business model stand in the way of seizing new opportunities.

Click here to see the full text of this post as well as the 10 strategic changes the newspaper must make to reinvent themselves.

 

Newspaper 2.0–The Social Newspaper

For the past several years now, people have been claiming that the internet edition of the newspaper is ‘Newspaper 2.0.’    So if we follow that train of thought, moving the newspaper to a mobile device is now ‘Newspaper 3.0?’  Look folks, moving the print edition newspaper onto another medium is not a revelation. It doesn’t justify announcing a next-generation leap–especially when that move resulted in nothing less than cannibalizing the newspaper’s bread-and-butter legacy edition, cutting deep into their revenue base, and putting their sustainability in question.  Read the entire story here!