Eat that fish: Not online or print, but how to work together
ASNE‘s annual meeting is happening this week in Washington. Several of my students have been there covering it.
With low attendance at the conference, a lingering low pressure system of bleak industry news, hot new mobile devices on the market, and recent pew reports, it could be easy to argue that “print is dead” and the future is all online. And you’d probably expect me to say that, my students did.
But I don’t think that’s true.
As social media and wine guru Gary Vaynerchuck told a packed room when we hosted him A.U. — “If there’s a fish in that pond, you gotta eat that fish.”
That answer was for a question of if a social media strategy should focus on facebook or twitter or something else. And the answer is good for newspapers and all legacy media as they deal with the change moment. It isn’t print OR online, it is print AND online.
Here’s an article I read with interest today about the future of print in the newspaper business:
Would You Want To Buy A Newspaper Business These Days?.
While it looks at the financials and multiples from a high altitude, and beats the currently popular drum about iPads saving print, it doesn’t get into the real deal: the service and value proposition that was lost when newspapers lost classified advertising.
I would buy a newspaper in a heartbeat today, and work my ass off to use the print platform and the online platform together to tell stories more effectively and advertise more smartly.
The growing mobile market of small screen smartphones and tablets offers an opportunity to harness the immediacy and depth of the web. We’ve seen how effective broadcast can be in driving traffic online when folks are sitting in lean back viewing experiences. Print has not been an effective pusher in some part because people are often reading print on the go, and by the time they’re back at a machine, other priorities distract them from looking up the site they wanted to check.
Since those web phones almost all have cameras, and lots of print folk are working on apps for those platforms, why not make the apps use the camera to scan 2d or matrix barcodes in stories and ads to jump online instantly for more depth, the latest updates, the reviews closest to your gps location? Make the app a service that adds value to the print piece, not a bookmark to your mobile web content.
We tried this with a crazy device called a cuecat a decade ago, but the technology and market were not ready. Now, with a scanner on board the connected browsing device in your pocket, the culture is primed to go. Witness how mobile photos took off with camera phones.
But, I’m not sure that newspapers are ready to think about convergence on a meaningful level where advertising, editorial and technology can work together in a rolling, flexible sequenced approach where print and online can offer value to each other and make sure that users and readers are engaged with the brand on both platforms. Notice how netflix is a movie service, managed online and delivered in the mail or streaming on a number of devices. If there’s a fish in the pond that can show a movie, neflix is going to eat that fish. If you’re a news service, you be it on print or online or on the go, but you eat every fish in the pond.
Right now, most newspaper apps are just easily dumped for mobile web or simply bookmark devices to mobile web content – repackaging internet content from the browser — just like the active desktop and active channels in older windows releases that never caught on.
Bloggers are learning that content and advertising online isn’t the way to make money, but offering free content is a great way to draw people to buy a service you provide or product you sell. Kind of like how news and information was a great way to get people into a local peer-to-peer classified advertising and marketing service. So now media needs to offer more value to local advertisers (both companies and people) as a service platform to innovate the classified space.
Synergizing print and online means harnessing technology and building new workflows in a smart way to offer local online advertising and better access to live news information via a large and effective design canvas that is cheap to buy, produce and distribute, but can only be made once a day. Right now, we give lip service to convergence, but the fish are swimming by each other, and the industry leaders are wondering which fish will eat the other.
That’s how you take two fish from the pond and feed a multitude. You will find salvation by providing a useful service. Not by repackaging a print product as a print-looking animated product on a shiny screen. Or by putting a fence and tollgate around the pond.
