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Shotgun advertising paid the bills for 60 years. Small-fry ads never have and it's very hard to make money from them. Newspaper sales reps that came into the

Shotgun advertising paid the bills for 60 years. Small-fry ads never have and it's very hard to make money from them. Newspaper sales reps that came into the industry more than 10 years ago came into it when they basically just processed incoming orders from chains, franchises, and ad agencies. That money is largely gone. "Small-fry ads" means asking those same people to now go out and hunt down money from local businesses being courted by performance-based ad companies like Google, Groupon, Living Social, Twitter, Facebook, Constant Contact, Yelp...you name it. That's a hard job. You need a superb sales staff to take business from those people. If you were a superb sales person, you'd want to make a lot of money and sell a great product everyone wants to buy. Would newspaper sales be your first choice?

prawn 14y ago
Besides their own blindness/fear, what's stopped newspapers from creating those new ventures themselves? Becoming the performance-based ad spin-off, recruiting the superb sales people? In the same way that a web celeb can bring a huge boost to anything they start, so can a newspaper drive instant publicity to a new venture of their own. Took the major networks here years before they started buying up each of a site re: cars, dating, travel, parenting, etc. Is it a concern of driving away potential advertisers in those fields? Anti-competitive behaviour? In Australia, fantasy comps (based around Australian Rules Football) are very popular and a huge boost to the big newspapers. I've been told that recent newspaper strategy meetings often boil down to "Wish we could come up with another thing like (insert fantasy comp name here)." Give me a meeting and eventual minimal shareholding and I'll give you five ideas straight up. --- One example of the newspaper approach is in restaurant reviews. Before and after the success of sites like Yelp, newspapers here have continued with their review-a-restaurant-a-week approach. No categorised index of local restaurants. No repository of reviews beyond those that hit print. No crowdsourcing. For a long time online, I turned repeatedly to a restaurant index (Miettas) with a crappy design, weak search and dated content just because it had remotely reliable and professional reviews that a Yelp-type site didn't have. Newspapers could have seen, and could still see, success in this space, IMO.
- brandnewlow 14y ago
  It comes down to people, like I said before. What you're suggesting is that newspapers have all these great people who should be able to cook up product ideas that generate great revenue for them. If you were one of those people, would you do that for your newspaper, or would you apply to YCombinator? Let's take Jack Dorsey as a recent example. He came up with Twitter while working at Odeo. He shared the idea with the rest of Odeo and eventually Odeo was shuttered and all resources were put into growing Twitter. Now, let's imagine Jack Dorsey working at a beleaguered newspaper in Oregon, for example. First of all, it's hard to imagine, isn't it? Why would Jack Dorsey be at a newspaper instead of an SF startup? But assuming he was there and came up with Twitter the following things would likely happen: 1. Company would spend too much time evaluating the idea before deciding whether to put resources into it. 2. Company would assign a team to work on it, led by Jack. Abilities of team would vary wildly. 3. Jack's team would have to run everything through company I.T. which means hosted servers and more paperwork. 4. Jack's project would be expected to show results immediately and be commercialized swiftly, not 5 years after launch like with Twitter. 5. Newspaper company would eventually lose patience with project and pull the plug. This happens at any big company. Newspapers are no different. No sense of ownership means its hard to focus and get great things done.
  - prawn 14y ago
    Hard to find sympathy when the options have been there. Sadly, your 5 steps sound awfully realistic.

prawn 14y ago

Besides their own blindness/fear, what's stopped newspapers from creating those new ventures themselves? Becoming the performance-based ad spin-off, recruiting the superb sales people? In the same way that a web celeb can bring a huge boost to anything they start, so can a newspaper drive instant publicity to a new venture of their own. Took the major networks here years before they started buying up each of a site re: cars, dating, travel, parenting, etc. Is it a concern of driving away potential advertisers in those fields? Anti-competitive behaviour? In Australia, fantasy comps (based around Australian Rules Football) are very popular and a huge boost to the big newspapers. I've been told that recent newspaper strategy meetings often boil down to "Wish we could come up with another thing like (insert fantasy comp name here)." Give me a meeting and eventual minimal shareholding and I'll give you five ideas straight up. --- One example of the newspaper approach is in restaurant reviews. Before and after the success of sites like Yelp, newspapers here have continued with their review-a-restaurant-a-week approach. No categorised index of local restaurants. No repository of reviews beyond those that hit print. No crowdsourcing. For a long time online, I turned repeatedly to a restaurant index (Miettas) with a crappy design, weak search and dated content just because it had remotely reliable and professional reviews that a Yelp-type site didn't have. Newspapers could have seen, and could still see, success in this space, IMO.

brandnewlow 14y ago
It comes down to people, like I said before. What you're suggesting is that newspapers have all these great people who should be able to cook up product ideas that generate great revenue for them. If you were one of those people, would you do that for your newspaper, or would you apply to YCombinator? Let's take Jack Dorsey as a recent example. He came up with Twitter while working at Odeo. He shared the idea with the rest of Odeo and eventually Odeo was shuttered and all resources were put into growing Twitter. Now, let's imagine Jack Dorsey working at a beleaguered newspaper in Oregon, for example. First of all, it's hard to imagine, isn't it? Why would Jack Dorsey be at a newspaper instead of an SF startup? But assuming he was there and came up with Twitter the following things would likely happen: 1. Company would spend too much time evaluating the idea before deciding whether to put resources into it. 2. Company would assign a team to work on it, led by Jack. Abilities of team would vary wildly. 3. Jack's team would have to run everything through company I.T. which means hosted servers and more paperwork. 4. Jack's project would be expected to show results immediately and be commercialized swiftly, not 5 years after launch like with Twitter. 5. Newspaper company would eventually lose patience with project and pull the plug. This happens at any big company. Newspapers are no different. No sense of ownership means its hard to focus and get great things done.
- prawn 14y ago
  Hard to find sympathy when the options have been there. Sadly, your 5 steps sound awfully realistic.