Things that drive me crazy in life: Reluctance to change
On saturday the 21st of November 2015, the Economist published an article about consistent losses of revenue in the newspaper business since 2007 -”Up against the paywall”.
When I saw The Economist post on LinkedIn with the following message — “Low profits and continual job losses: What is the best way for newspapers to survive?” — it literally took me 30 sec to come up with one solution and while I was writing my comment on their post a few other options came to mind. At this point my comment became so big I decide to make a post to reply and maximise my frustration with the inability of industries and individuals to adapt to the year we are actually living in.
Solution 1 : Pay as you Go membership
Traditional memberships are a big commitment both in time as well as monetarily. I would guess that a client has to be interested in reading at least 50% of all article in all issues to become a member, which leaves a lot of people out. So, why not make the most of all the articles and make the consumer pay for what they really want to read in the easiest way possible.
Business model: The consumer register for a membership for free. The magazine throws a few articles for free for each new member once they have top up their membership with as little as £10 and every time the member reads an article from that magazine, something as ridiculous as 30 or 40 pence, is deducted from their credit. Once the member runs out of credit she/he just need to top it up.
Solution 1.2: Adverts embedded in the articles
Solution 1 by itself might not be enough and we all know that a large percentage of newspaper revenue comes from adverts. We also know that banner ads don’t work anymore and pop up ads are annoying (so annoying that I actually close the whole page every time I came across one). So, why not embed the advert picture or video into the text of the article. The reader will have the choice of paying, or not, attention to it as badly as when she/he flick through the pages of the magazine.
Solution 2 : Better customer service
I don’t mean sales team I mean better interaction with their audience. Social media is transforming customer service as well as the way we interact with businesses. Newspaper and television is a one way channel in a world that is embracing a two way communication. So, newspapers need to stop seeing social media as a distribution channel and start interacting with their audience. For me this means having the journalist that wrote a certain story engaging with the readers. The journalist… not a junior assistant or a trained monkey with some generic answers of “thank you for your comment” B*S*.
Solution 3 : What bussiness are newspaper in?
Newspaper and magazines should ask themselves what is that they sell? Do they sell words, literature? or do they sell news, stories, content?
Anwser 1: words, content in a writen from. In this case they have to adapt to the reality that they are a niche business and adjust their expectations. The number of people consuming text on paper or online is due to keep decreasing.
This is probably where newspaper are struggling. Most newspapers are full of novelist, people that have a gift to write well and therefore they are attached to this skill, writing, in a world where the word of the year (2015) was a Emoji! Can you see the contradiction?!
Words accounts for only 7% of any message. Body language and tone of voice make up the rest. So it should be no surprise that video is becoming far more engaging and successful than text, which leads me to the next solution.
Anwser 2: news, stories and content!
If newspapers are in the business of selling news and stories then they need to adapt to the year we are living in. It’s no longer a matter of what format they are selling the story. If I had a media company I would be looking into losing a bit of money on the news texts format and compensate losses with video stories, just like novels make money out of films. I would, also, be looking into developing a multi format news/ article stories with video + text + infographics as independent components.
Meaning that the text won’t be a translation of the video and the video doesn’t convey the same details as the text. Video and text should be complementary. I don’t think I will be the only one to be compelled to read more detailed information after having been brieft with a summary (some news sellers are already doing this). Also, detail information can be boring to watch and challenging to absorb in a fast format like video. Reading gives the possibility to take time to absorb complex information.
Also, in a pay as you go membership readers can pay once to see the video and if they are interested to read more detailed information pay again to read the details of the story. (…and we are back to solution 1! close cycle! ).
Now, I’m far from being a genius and if I — a layman in media — had 3 solutions to this question in less than 10 mins I can not believe that people in this business have not been able to come up with 10 solutions! The real problem is probably the unwillingness of some media bosses and board committees to make the necessary changes because as humans we like status quo, which is staggering to me. As individuals, we resist to change so strongly but as a species we survive by adapting (changing) — Darwin’s theory for evolution — the survival of the fittest. It’s paradoxical…
Meanwhile as I was writing this article it occurred to me that the pay as you go membership can actually be a bussiness idea. Wanna guess how?
