Fitting the Pigeonholes: The Challenge of Selling Print Advertising in the Age of Hypertargeting

The choices are constrained.

Pigeonholes.

That’s the trouble with print advertising these days. Pigeonholes.

Judging from reader feedback, I apparently hit a nerve recently in a Publishing Executive article by stating that many magazine-media advertising reps don’t seem to know how to sell print ads these days.


Younger sales reps were hired for their digital knowledge, but their clients are increasingly asking for multimedia proposals that include print. And some of the print veterans haven’t adjusted to the age of targeted marketing.

(Some commenters noted that the issue arises in selling any kind of print-based marketing.)

Choice A or Choice B

When mass media dominated, brands that wanted to target their print-media ads were forced into a limited number of pigeonholes: To reach men, put the ad in the sports or business section. For women, use the lifestyle section. The choices offered by major magazine publishers often boiled down to buying ad pages in Title A or ad pages in Title B.

That doesn’t cut it any more – not when digital ads can be behaviorally targeted based on what someone has searched for, what stores she has visited, or what side he dresses on.

Now it’s the ad buyers who have the pigeonholes – narrow descriptions of their target prospects. They want to get their message in front of families who are “in market” for a minivan, patients with a specific medical condition, or, in the half-joking words of the The Ad Contrarian, “left-handed women golfers over 35.”

You can't just sell ad pages to such a buyer, no matter how much you discount your rate per page. You have to show how you'll reach those pigeonholed prospects.

The challenge for many magazine publishers is that they split their operations into a print team and a digital team.

Glasgow University Magazine, 1892

That worked when advertisers and agencies likewise bought into the print-versus-digital foolishness and had separate buyers for each medium.

But with so much evidence indicating that multimedia campaigns are more effective than single-medium efforts, the advertising world seems increasingly to be asking publishers for integrated, multimedia plans.

That’s an opportunity for multimedia publishers, but also a challenge: The digital reps know how to present advertising solutions that fit into their clients’ pigeonholes, but are clueless when it’s time to translate that knowledge to a print proposal.

And many of the veteran print reps are still trying just to sell pages rather than finding a way to get the advertiser's message into its desired pigeonholes.

Let's get prigital, prigital . . .

The Publishing Executive article presents eight tools that both kinds of sales reps can use to fit their print offerings to an advertiser’s pigeonholes. (Omitted was a ninth idea: Check your magazine’s editorial calendar to see whether any of the upcoming issue themes or special sections would resonate with the advertiser’s intended audience.)

Another thought: Don’t respond to a multimedia RFP  by having some people work on the print portion and others on the digital part. Coordinate, so that everyone involved is looking for the best media choices to fit each of the advertiser's pigeonholes.

Make sure you consider all possible media – magazines, custom print, web, social media, email, ebooks, live events, and webinars. And stuff that blurs the lines: If you turn excerpts from your magazine into a sponsored, downloadable PDF, is that print or digital? Who cares? Just call it prigital.

Other Dead Tree Edition articles about print advertising include:

• Put a Wrap On It: As Magazine Ads Dwindle, One High-Priced Approach Thrives
• U.S. Magazines Are in a Steep Decline, Except . . .
• Magazine Advertising Entered the 21st Century Today

Anxious Times for Magazine Publishers?

From the Twitter account of @crayonelyse

Those of us in the magazine industry – uh, magazine-media industry -- like to point out that we’re not going the way of newspapers because we’re better at handling digital disruption.

But our friends in book publishing aren't persuaded.

The description of a session at the Digital Book World 2017 conference about thriving “in an area of constant change” concludes: “Maybe things aren’t so bad: Just look at the newspaper/magazine publishing industry!”

Humph, as if we're part of the same industry as newspapers!

Nor is the U.S. Census Bureau persuaded: It reports that, during the first nine months of 2016, revenue for magazine publishers declined 4.4% while newspaper publishers were down only 3.1%.

Hey, but at least our Facebook Likes are growing. And we're not changing the names of our companies to something that "sounds like the noise an ejaculating elephant makes."  

Related articles:

• A Magazine Resurgence? The Numbers Say No
• Are Printed Magazines Growing or Shrinking? Yes 
• 13 (Made Up) Terms To Help You Understand Publishing in 2016 
• What Digital Advertising Can Teach Us About Printed Magazines

And the Future of Newspapers Is . . .

. . . Sugardaddying.

Our latest Publishing Word of the Day describes the most successful tactic of late for keeping daily newspapers afloat: Purchase by a millionaire or, preferably, a billionaire.

Motives for sugardaddy buyouts of struggling newspapers range from civic mindedness to a craving for the spotlight to a desire to sway local news coverage.

Often mixed in is successful-entrpreneur, I-can-fix-this-backward-business hubris. (That rarely ends well if the sugardaddy is incapable of humility.)

Some of these plutocrat publishers see past the declining print revenues and the failure to catch the web wave, recognizing the long-term potential of respected, trusted brands.

Corporate newspaper owners try to survive via downsizing and financial engineering. Only a deep-pocketed, patient-money visionary like Jeff Bezos would actually invest in the kind of experimentation and additional editorial and tech resources that are rejuvenating The Washington Post.

Every day this month, all 31 of them (Did I really just promise that?), Dead Tree Edition is presenting a Publishing Word of the Day that sheds light on the state of publishing in 2016. Tomorrow's offering is a choice of two words describing the alleged resurgence of printed magazines.

Is Print Really Killing Publishers?

A commentator I respect, Joe Wikert, published a piece last week headlined “How Print Is Killing Publishers” that at first struck me as completely wrongheaded and backwards. But what we have here is failure to communicate.

“Print is a publisher’s silent killer” because publishers are relying on print “even at the expense of digital transformation and growth,” Wikert wrote for Book Business magazine. “The crazy part is we all know it's a big problem and yet very few publishers are taking evasive action.”

Publishers’ biggest problem, Wikert claimed, is when their brands are “directly associated with print” – that is, “when consumers hear your brand name [and] all they can think of is a print product” and see “no association with digital whatsoever.”

“Joe, were you flash frozen in 2008?” I said to myself. “That’s the kind of bass-ackward thinking that decided ‘The Daily Beast’ was a stronger brand name than ‘Newsweek’ simply because Newsweek was in print.”

I thought of publishing brands like The Atlantic and The Christian Science Monitor that are thriving on the web without having to disown their century-plus print legacies. And I recalled the web-savvy colleague who said, “Having a print publication can do wonders for a web site’s brand image.”

It was hard to think of any U.S. magazine publishers that are not trying to become less dependent on products that have to be delivered by the U.S. Postal Service or the newsstand system. The only notable exceptions are digital-native brands like Allrecipes.com, Politico, and the new Newsweek that decided to build cache by putting some ink on paper. (How’s that for not worrying about being “directly associated with print”?)

I was wrong
Then I realized the fundamental error in Wikert’s thinking – and that I was making the same mistake: Any generalization about “publishers” is bound to be wrong, especially when it centers on the vague word “digital.”

Taken out of context, the word “publisher” means so many different things to different people that it ceases to have meaning. When newspaper people say “publishing,” they mean newspaper publishing. To magazine people, “publishing” means mostly magazine publishing. And for folks in the book industry, “publishing” means, believe it or not, book publishing.

There is no such thing as "the" publishing industry, only publishing industries.

“Digital transformation” is a chameleon term in the publishing industries. It can be about web sites, digital editions, apps, e-newsletters, or shiny new object of the week.

For book publishers, digital transformation refers to the once-seismic, now-glacial shift to e-books. Or people buying printed books from e-stores instead of bookstore. Or even the growing reliance on digital presses to reduce inventory costs via “print on demand.”

Wikert’s company, Olive Software, creates XML editions of publications for many leading newspapers (and other organizations). Perhaps he is genuinely frustrated by clients who cling to outmoded ways and the once-a-day publishing cycle. Perhaps print -- or, rather, the failure to embrace other media -- really is killing some of those publishers.

A galaxy away
If so, the publishing industry Wikert experiences is a galaxy away from the one in which I toil during the day (and write about at night). Not many magazines can say they have figured out the “digital transformation,” but most have moved beyond print-versus-digital thinking and are working to ensure their brands are relevant in multiple media. (Because, God knows, no one medium can bring in enough scratch to keep the lights on.)

Wikert might be horrified to know that some publishers in my industry consider Olive-type editions to be “print” because they are often outgrowths of printed products -- sharing the same content, advertisers, ratebase, and P&L. For those publishers, “print” has come to mean “paginated content” that doesn’t necessarily involve dead trees, while “digital” means such un-paginated content as web sites and e-newsletters.

There is no single “digital transformation” in any of the publishing industries. E-books dominate romance fiction but have hardly touched the world of art books on coffee tables. The web has wiped out much of the weekly newsmagazine business, but glossy fashion titles seem as healthy as ever.

Regardless which publishing industry you’re in, shibboleths (whether “print is dead” or “print rules”) and simplistic solutions will end in disaster. Sorry, folks, there are no one-size-fits-all answers in this business.

Related articles:

• A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Funeral of Print Media  
• A Renaissance for Print, Or Is Flat Just the New "Up"? 
• 8 Media Trends You May Have Missed in 2013

 

8 Media Trends You May Have Missed in 2013

The mainstream press has had its fill of articles recapping 2013, but it missed some important trends and lessons that emerged during the year:

Newspaper reaches for a new high

1) New hope for newspapers: The Denver Post has hit upon a promising market for beaten-down daily newspapers: weed. When publishers from other states see how the Post is trying to cash in on legal pot with its new web site The Cannabist, they may be tempted to start publishing a lot of pro-legalization editorials. I suggest a companion print product -- a special section printed on hemp, with an invitation to “Read it, then smoke it.”

2) Why cell phones have a “vibrate” option: A major magazine company revealed the startling results of an in-depth investigation via a news release: “Meredith's Parents Network, the leading parenthood media portfolio which includes Parents, American Baby, FamilyFun and Ser Padres, today announced exclusive new findings that phones and tablets have improved moms' sex lives and texting has replaced talking in their romantic relationships.”

3) The Postal Service is still solvent: For several years now, a lot of us have been saying that the U.S. Postal Service was months away from running out of cash unless Congress did something. Congress, of course, did nothing during 2013 – unless you count the naming of post offices. Still, with downsizing, increased volumes of parcels and “junk mail,” and its refusal to “prepay” retiree health benefits, the Postal Service keeps delivering six days a week and still has a few pennies in its piggybank -- even though it’s billions of dollars in the red. Now if it could just be allowed to deliver legalized marijuana . . .

4) Magazines are not newspapers: For several years, pundits have predicted that traditional magazine publishers would soon go the way of newspapers, shriveling up from massive losses of advertising, circulation, and profitability. But 2013 proved them wrong. Magazines – or, rather, “magazine media” – are adapting better to the web and are finding growth in such fields as events and services. Some had banner years for their print products, with increased ad pages and even some expanded ratebases. Meanwhile, one of the nation’s most storied newspapers was so diminished in value that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was able to buy it with some spare change he had lying around.

5) Print is hot: It wasn’t just that web-only brands like Newsweek, AllRecipes, and Politico decided in 2013 to publish printed magazines. Print is now so "in" that a TV ad for Viagra featured the owner or manager of a printing company.

By the way, Viagra in a Printing Plant? What’s Up with That? had a larger audience and stirred up far more discussions than any previous Dead Tree Edition article about printing. Which tells you something about what printers and us print geeks have on our minds.

6) The digital divide is a myth: We’ve been told for several years that, once people got e-readers or tablets, they would mostly abandon printed publications. Several studies released in 2013 told us otherwise: Tablet owners overwhelmingly prefer printed magazines to digital ones; only 22% read tablet-based magazines on a weekly basis.  iPad owners read more printed books than does the average consumer. And most magazine publishers will tell you they have far more tablet owners reading their print editions than their apps.

7) A business model for iPad magazines emerges: Many publishers had viewed the iPad as a great medium for their publications and apps. But Apple has recently thumbed its nose at traditional magazines, allowing its Newsstand app to fall into disrepair and making it nearly impossible to find all but a few e-magazines.

A magazine that is getting promotional love from Apple's Newsstand

Recent quotations helped me understand, however, that there are at least two paths to publishing success on the iPad: The first is ad agencies: “The target market for iPad magazines is 22-year-old media buyers," a publishing colleague told me. "Selling iPad subscriptions to anyone but your print subscribers has become well-nigh impossible. But having an iPad version really helps you with the ad agencies, regardless how meager its circulation is."

And the other path? Porn: “It is apparently easier to get porn magazines from Russia into the App Store today than it is a bug fix update for a major consumer title,” D.B. Hebbard wrote last month for Talking New Media.

8) The wheels are coming loose on the content marketing bandwagon: 2013 was the year we publishers realized that every Fortune 500 company, and a lot of smaller ones as well, seemed to be copying our every move under the moniker of content marketing. Chanting mantras about “owned media” and “brand journalism,” practitioners sound like devotees of some Koolaid-drinking cult as they espouse the virtues of bypassing publishers to go direct to the consumer.

But the honest content marketers are starting to acknowledge the bandwagon is hitting some bumps. Having the junior member of your PR department do the writing is a cheap way to create articles no one wants to read; there’s a reason that kid couldn’t get a job as a real journalist. Even for good articles, finding an audience is challenging regardless of how many tweets, posts, and pins a brand uses to publicize it. Consumers, it turns out, aren't especially interested in connecting with brands.

Lately, more brands are turning to professional journalism – either by using qualified freelancers or by licensing content from publishing companies – to boost the quality and credibility of their content. And some are also turning to those bypassed publishers for help in promoting their content. It’s a hot new concept known as “advertising.”

Bezos Needs To Learn the First Rule of Newspaper Ownership

Amazon founder Jeffrey P. Bezos demonstrated yesterday that he desperately needs a primer on the publishing business before he buys The Washington Post next month.

In his first interview since the purchase was announced, Bezos showed his naivete about the industry with this comment:

“We’ve had three big ideas at Amazon that we’ve stuck with for 18 years, and they’re the reason we’re successful: Put the customer first. Invent. And be patient. If you replace ‘customer’ with ‘reader,’ that approach, that point of view, can be successful at The Post, too.”

The last time I looked, the vast majority of American newspapers’ revenue came not from readers but from another type of customer – advertisers. Sure, perhaps Bezos knows better and decided to emphasize the noble journalistic side of the business rather than the grubby capitalist side.

But he didn't go out of his way to curry favor with advertisers: "I’m skeptical of any mission that has advertisers at its centerpiece."

Many of the Post’s advertisers, who view Amazon as a ruthless and even unfair competitor, are already wary of a Bezos-owned Post. Knowing that his vision for the Post apparently does not include pleasing them will do nothing to allay those fears.

Bezos needs to learn the first rule of owning a newspaper: Don’t piss off your advertisers; that’s what reporters are for.

Other Dead Tree Edition articles on the newspaper industry include:

• The Perfect Newspaper Story?
• Washington Post's New Magazine Will Bypass USPS  
• Rupert, Weiner and Cardboard Animals: 5 Who Should Be Ahead of Me on RISI’s Top 50 Power List. Note the Headline Writers Prayer.

5 Myths of Saturday Mail Delivery

Misunderstandings abound regarding the U.S. Postal Service’s proposal to end Saturday delivery of all mail except parcels later this year. Here some of the most common myths:

1) Congress recently put a stop to the plan. That’s the story told by the news media, Congress, and the Government Accountability Office, but it’s not necessarily true. Congress did indeed put the requirement to continue six-day mail delivery into a recently approved appropriations bill. But the USPS’s Office of Inspector General says that if the Postal Service merely refuses the pittance in such appropriations (which are mostly for free mail for the blind), it would not be blocked from ending Saturday delivery. And it’s not even clear whether USPS’s plan – which would continue Saturday delivery of certain types of mail – would violate the legislation.

2) Ending Saturday delivery would save USPS $2 billion per year. Even the Postal Service talks about $2 billion in savings, but in reality its position is that its profitability (cost savings minus lost revenue) would grow by $2 billion. The calculations have been subject to debate and competing interpretations, partly because of different assumptions about how much business would be lost. Also, the $2 billion estimate was for full cessation of Saturday delivery, not for the latest plan to have mostly non-career employees delivering profitable parcels on Saturday.

3) The loss of customers would hurt the Postal Service. Actually, it could be a blessing. The customers who care most about Saturday delivery are daily newspapers and certain weekly publications; few other mailers care so much about getting delivery on a specific day of the week. Newspapers may be USPS’s most unprofitable product because they are often inefficiently prepared for mailing, can be difficult to sort, and sometimes get special treatment. Even highly presorted and dropshipped weekly magazines – though not as unprofitable as USPS alleges – are no big money maker. And most will survive without Saturday delivery.

4) Letter carriers oppose ending Saturday delivery. Yes, the main carrier’s union, the National Association of Letter Carriers, is vehemently opposed to the Postal Service’s plan. But many rank-and-file carriers would be happy to get Saturdays off. The NALC is “fighting a battle the majority of its members do not want,” writes Tom Wakefield, a city carrier and NALC member who runs PostalMag.com.“Five-day would be such a benefit to letter carriers. Today, because of shortages of letter carriers in many districts, many, many carriers are being mandated to work on their days off against their wishes, often with less than 24 hours notice,” adds Wakefield, mirroring frequent comments by rank-and-file carriers to Dead Tree Edition and other sites. “Today, the ‘daily grind’ is stretched to six days, with a Sunday off and one day during the week for many carriers. Five-day would allow two days off in a row and the daily grind would only be five days.” Many carriers are also hoping that five-day delivery would cause USPS to thin its carrier ranks by offering retirement incentives.

5) Ending Saturday delivery is the key to saving the Postal Service. No one who has looked at USPS’s finances believes five-day delivery is a cure-all, regardless of their position on the Postal Service’s plan. Because of declining mail volumes, $2 billion alone is not enough turn around the Postal Service even if the accounting games with postal pensions and “pre-funded” retiree benefits are corrected. More cost cuts or, less likely, significant new revenue sources are needed to keep USPS afloat.

Related articles:

• The Law Is On Donahoe's Side Regarding Saturday Delivery 
• How USPS Could Bypass Congress on Saturday Delivery  
• Is the Postal Service Really Broke?  
• Do Postal Execs Want To Lose Money on Periodicals?

Is There Life After Print? Yeah, Maybe at a Community College

My fellow printing geeks keep telling me that print isn’t dead, but it sure is looking pretty sick at times.

Here are some of the recent news items that make a “print guy” in the magazine industry feel like a marked man:

Hype-rventilation

Many so-called leaders of the publishing industry have gone ga-ga over the Apple Newsstand, with some recent excitement about the top 100 sellers racking up sales of a whopping $70,000 every day. The top 100 U.S. and Canadian magazine titles on the real newsstand (the ink-on-paper one that's been left for dead) generate $70,000 in sales about once every 19 minutes.

And never mind that most of the Apple Newsstand money is coming from subscriptions, which in the print world are bringing in even more money than single-copy sales.

Dead Tree Makes the AP!

Dead Tree Edition had a bit of a breakthrough this week when the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and subsequently the Associated Press, cited my article Quad/Graphics Has Quarterly Loss, Eyes Plant Shutdowns.

Scores of magazines, newsletters, and Web sites have referenced Dead Tree Edition during its 19 months of existence. I depend upon such referrals for most of my readers because I’m a klutz when it comes to search-engine optimization or social media (though I did my first retweet last week. I couldn't resist Margie Dana's comment: “B&N launches ebook self-publishing service called ‘Pubit’. God forbid you hit ‘c’ instead of ‘t.’ What a name!”).

But, as far as I know, John Schmid’s article in the Journal Sentinel is the first citation of Dead Tree Edition in a major daily newspaper, and the AP pickup of the story was also a first. (Gordon Hamilton of the Vancouver Sun has called Dead Tree Edition "one of my favourite sources for updates on the scandalous American black liquor subsidy," but his references to my work have only been in his blog, not the actual newspaper.)

I've tried to give newspapers tips about news in their area based on my articles about nearby paper mills or postal facilities. But the typical American newspaper has put up a firewall between its reporters and the public.

Have a hot tip to pass along to a reporter about something on his beat? Be prepared to fill out a generic “Contact us” form on the newspaper's Web site – and then to hear nothing.

But I do think that, faced with shrinking news-coverage resources, savvy professional journalists will follow Schmid's and Hamilton's example by looking to knowledgeable amateur writers as a source of leads and insight. The strategy is already fairly common at some business-to-business magazines.

An irony of this week's breakthrough is that the article Schmid cited took a slap at reporters for only reading news releases and not actual source documents. Schmid proved me wrong by digging into Quad's 300+-page "S4" report for the reporting in his article.

Newspapers Are Greener Than Web News, Says Environmental Expert

Which is greener, getting news online or reading a newspaper? For environmental expert and activist Sarah Westervelt, the obvious answer is the printed newspaper.

“It doesn’t take electricity to read my paper,” she said in a video posted recently at PBS' Mediashift site. “I’m too informed about what’s going to happen to my computer when I’m done with it and too concerned about that” to rely on the Web for news.



“I try to rely on the really good bio-compatible materials that have been around a long time,” said Westervelt, who as e-stewardship director at the Basel Action Network has done much to expose the bogus “recycling” of toxic wastes from discarded electronic gadgets.

“If everybody stops reading newspapers then perhaps we stop growing trees,” Westervelt said during the video, which was taken from a discussion sponsored by USC Annenberg's Specialized Journalism Program. Among other participants in the discussion were the production directors of the San Jose Mercury News and Chronicle Books.

Westervelt didn’t claim that everything about printing and paper is environmentally friendly, noting that trees for paper are sometimes grown on single-species plantations. But those issues pale in comparison with the many toxic materials and “15 different plastics” typically found in computers, she said.

Unlike paper, computer components do not lend themselves well to recycling and reuse because “you have this really complex waste combined with not enough value in the materials to pay for responsible recycling,” Westervelt said.

“So what we have is companies that are presenting themselves as recyclers and really what they are is waste brokers. They are just consolidating, loading up shipping containers and it goes off to China or India or Pakistan. And it’s just having absolutely horrific impacts in a lot of these developing countries to both human health and the environment.”

For a briefer and more light-hearted defense of printed newspapers against the digital onslaught, check out this video of a male a capella quartet doing a fabulous take-off on Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy”, with lines like "Does that make us crazy? Wanting you to read."

And, yes, this blogger does check his facts twice.

Related articles:

• Smackdown: Printed Editions vs. Digital Editions: A look at the environmental impact of Dead Tree editions (ink on paper) versus Dead Dinosaur editions (digital content read on devices containing 15 different petrochemical-based plastics).
• The Greenwashing Media Award Goes to . . .: Vendors of digital-publication software have made some bogus claims about the environmental friendliness of Dead Dinosaur editions.
• Green Publishing Quiz: Test your knowledge, and your misconceptions, about environmentally friendly publishing.

Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be mail sorters

Several industries and occupations related to printed materials will be among those with the worst job losses through 2018, a new government report predicts. As if we didn’t already know that.

The Postal Service, printing, and newspaper publishing will be in the top 10 for employment declines between 2008 and 2018, the Bureau of Labor Statistics report says.

The 30 occupations with the largest projected decreases during that period include “postal service mail sorters, processors, and processing machine operators” (-30%); “paper goods machine setters, operators, and tenders” (-21%); “postal service clerks” (-18%); and “mail clerks and mail machine operators, except postal service” (-11%).

Oddly enough, the predictions, if accurate, might actually be good news for some of the industries and their employees. They indicate that the rapid employment declines of the past year will taper off.

For example, the report predicts the U.S. Postal Service’s employment will decline 13%, from 748,000 in 2008 to 650,000 in 2018; USPS is already about halfway there. Postal officials’ presentations indicate they will finish 2010 with about 650,000 employees, and it seems likely that downsizing will continue in subsequent years.

However, the BLS does seem to be on target with its projection that the bulk of USPS job cuts will occur among non-supervisory employees who do not deliver the mail. Letter carriers, it predicts, will decrease by only 1% and represent the vast majority of new USPS hires.

The projected decreases of 25% for newspapers and 16% for printers don’t seem so big when you consider the cuts they have already made during this recession-racked year. And the 8% decrease in “reporters and correspondents” since 2008 has probably already happened.

For further reading:

• The BLS news release, which lists the top 10 industries and top 30 occupations for both job gains and losses.
• The full study on which the news release is based.
• Mail Volumes Have Declined Faster Than The Postal Workforce, But That Might Change, which presents details of actual and projected employment declines at the Postal Service.

Ten Things I Would Do If I Owned a Newspaper Company

Let me put this as delicately as possible: Opinions about the newspaper business are like anal orifices these days; everyone has one, and most are full of fecal matter.

Despite the overabundance of punditry regarding what newspaper companies should do, I couldn't resist entering Metaprinter's "If I owned a newspaper company . . ." contest. So here goes my list, which is by no means comprehensive:

1. Stop thinking of the company as a newspaper company and the individual subsidiaries as newspapers. That tends to lock people into the model of one newspaper per subsidiary with a single Web site that mostly rehashes what was in the printed newspaper. Each subsidiary should think of itself as the dominant provider of information and advertising in its market. That might lead to multiple publications, Web sites, and other products.
   
   
2. Put some staff-created content behind an "ad wall." There's been a lot of talk lately about newspapers not giving everything away on the Web and putting some content behind a pay wall, but that's like trying to put the genie back into the bottle. I would make non-subscribers watch a brief ad before they can see some of the most valuable content (such as the top local stories), just as some Web sites have an ad preceding free news videos. Readers would tolerate such brief ads better than having to make micro-payments for articles that might turn out to be duds.
   
   
3. Pamper subscribers. Invite them to a Meet the Editors event or a town-hall meeting. Does the print edition close too early to publish some ball scores? Then let subscribers sign up for an early-morning email (with a bit of advertising) that has all of the major scores. Would they like to keep up with news of their hometown or favorite sports team 1,000 miles away? Then let them sign up for an email with headlines and links from their hometown newspaper -- er, local information and advertising provider. (These email products would work best if coordinated by a cooperative of news organizations, perhaps the Associated Press.)
   
   
4. End all talk of creating customized, home-delivered newspapers. People who advocate that have never seen newspaper carriers in action. You can customize it all you want, but the carrier careening down the street at 4:30 in the morning can't see whose name is on each paper -- and doesn't care. She's just trying to pitch the papers onto the right lawns, avoid getting caught driving on the wrong side of the street, and get home in time to get little Jimmy onto the school bus. PDFs are better suited than printed newspapers to the distribution of digital content.
   
   
5. Challenge assumptions that most readers really want their newspapers in an e-reader format. People who think that must not have seen the revenue that inserts bring in -- or have children at home. Just wait until your little princess drops your Kindle while reading the funnies or decides to decorate it with Hannah Montana stickers. (Reminds me of the kid who loaded an "Uncrustable" sandwich into the CD drive of the family PC. Oh well, it could have been worse: At least he didn't put Windows Vista onto the machine.)
   
   
6. Find ways to package existing content for new audiences. For example, most newspapers have a wealth of wonderful information about nearby tourist attractions. Why not create a Web site for tourists to the area? Or a free newspaper describing what to visit? (I still remember a helpful little paper I used on vacation 20 years ago that simply showed the menus of restaurants in town.) Is this a saturated market? Perhaps, but no one else has the credibility of the local newspaper. Focus on other out-of-town audiences that might appreciate some of the content, such as people thinking about moving to the area or fans of local pro or college teams.
   
   
7. Try to get away from having a pressroom and post-press operation dedicated to a single newspaper. Except perhaps for the biggest newspapers, that often means a huge investment in capital and skilled labor that is used only a few hours daily. I would look at outsourcing production to a nearby newspaper that used to be viewed as a competitor (but probably isn't) or, conversely, at taking on such outsourced printing.
   
   
8. Make it easier to submit news tips to each subsidiary. Some newspapers do not provide an email address for such items and instead have a painful online-registration process for submitting tips.
   
   
9. Eliminate the Not Written Here Syndrome. With most newspapers, if it’s not written by a staff member or a wire service, it ain’t getting into the paper or onto the Web site. I have given up trying to tell newspapers when I have published an item that should be of interest in their markets, such as the likely closing of a U.S. Postal Service processing and distribution center in town or major happenings at a nearby printing plant or paper mill. From what I can tell, newspapers have done nothing with such tips -- not until the "news" was announced by a local corporation or Congressman. A local newspaper’s Web site(s), and to some extent the printed newspaper as well, should become portals that aggregate information about the area from a variety of sources. Provide links to the local college newspaper, the mayor’s Web site, and community bloggers, highlighting truly newsworthy items (with proper vetting, of course). Link to news about major local companies, whether press releases, items in trade journals, or articles in out-of-town newspapers. Invite local coaches, fan clubs, civic groups, hobby/activity groups, political groups, etc. to create blogs on the Web sites.
   
   
10. Avoid sacrificing the Web sites' user friendliness on the altar of Search Engine Optimization. SEO and web analytics can be powerful tools for figuring out how to get more hits from search engines. But sometimes doing what Google likes means creating something that actual people don't like. "Newspaper" Web sites need lots of repeat business to prosper.