Free Business #1: The Anti-Newspaper

This business idea is going to be shooting off the hip, so if you are going to judge my business-savvy…don’t base it on this….I beg you.

What the heck is the Anti-Newspaper?

It’s a response to the current state of a medium.

In marketing, there is a mantra that is repeated constantly. The mantra is this; if everyone is going in one direction, the way to get noticed is to go the other direction.

As I was sitting at lunch, today, I read the following excerpt from an email newsletter I subscribe to called The Hustle.

How much is a newspaper worth?

On Monday, USA Today owner and newspaper chain, Gannett, offered $815m to buy Tribune publishing, which owns the L.A. Times and Chicago Tribune, among other daily papers.

Is Gannett’s offer high or low?

It’s hard to say because “there’s no such thing as a market price for newspapers anymore.”

Three years ago, Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post for $250m. Last year, Japanese publisher Nikkei paid $1.3B for the Financial Times. So, this deal falls right in the middle of those two.

Then you’ve got the infamous $1.1B the New York Times paid for the Boston Globe back in 1993, only to sell it for $70m (a 93% loss) twenty years later.

It’s a mess out there.

Why consolidate?

Desperation. Over the last several years, newspaper prices have fallen dramatically, as the industry struggles to compete in the digital age.

These moves are a way to cut costs and build scale, while publishers strugglewith “declining circulation and dwindling print advertising revenue.” Think fewer reporters getting greater distribution.

If the merger is completed, Gannett would secure the Tribune’s crown jewel, the Los Angeles Times. But that’s not all they’re after. Acquiring all of the Tribune’s papers would give Gannett control of nearly 120 newspapers across the country to bolster their presence in major metro markets and make them much more appealing to national advertisers.

In response to this news, the Yellow Pages faxed an urgent memo to Geocities.

Opportunity Spotted

Apart from simply providing me with good information on the state of an industry, my mind instantly began to think of the opportunity that is presented here.

The key word that screams “opportunity” to me? DESPERATION. Right there in the third paragraph.

The newspaper industry is floundering, and they have no answers. They don’t know how to bridge the gap in the modern world between what we can already get from our computers, and our desire to have an analog interaction with actual paper.

What the newspaper industry doesn’t seem to understand is that we have the internet now, and it’s WAY better at getting information to the masses than paper will ever be. That is a fact of life now. There is no going back to the time before the internet.

We have collectively let the genie out of the proverbial bottle.

There is no reason for the internet to be the enemy, though. You can let the internet do its thing, and just focus on what paper is great at…creating an experience.

This is where the opportunity lies.

Our brains are hard-wired, after centuries of conditioning, to believe that there is something inherently VALUABLE about words that are printed on paper. This is one of the main reasons people still buy books….despite the astronomical growth in popularity of ebooks.

Books are analog. You can FEEL them. You can turn the page. You can frantically search for your place to read on as the lead character finally learns the fate of their father!

Books are fun. They smell like a book store. They naturally make you think of dungeons, and old grandfather clocks, and top hats.

Newspapers have the same draw.

Newspapers are old news…literally. They are the old way of getting the news out to the masses.

With all of this history to draw on, the play here is not about reinventing the wheel. Really, you shouldn’t even try to change the medium. What you should try to do is INHABIT the medium. Become the medium. Create an experience that people want to have over and over again.

But how do I do that?

You CANNOT be just a news outlet and survive.

You must be more than a news outlet. You have to be the heart, the very pulse of a bygone era when men lounged around smoking pipes, great mustaches hanging from their upper lips, wearing suits, eating steak, and penning letters of business to associates in towns far away.

You have to cultivate the image of the newspaper. Make sure the paper itself is an experience. Cheap stock paper from a giant paper mill? No way. Go get some old-looking, tea-stained kind of paper (the kind of stuff girls buy at Hobby Lobby), and print the headlines in old fonts.

Tell stories people with ACTUALLY care about reading.

Experiment with format changes and try new things constantly. Never let the advertising dollar make the decision.

But what about pictures? Won’t people want to see pictures?

Remember what I said about walking the other way when everyone is headed the same direction?

That applies to pictures, too.

Don’t put even a SINGLE picture on the page. Make it the real deal. Tell people real stories that actually pertain to their daily lives.

If you do a good job, they’ll keep coming back.

Bonus: Write in an old-timy style. Use words that people have stopped using. Force people to exercise their brains. At first, it will be hard. But you will attract the right readers by focusing your efforts on the sorts of people that will appreciate what you’re doing. Language is an easy way to narrow your focus to this group in a completely natural way.

That’s all I’m going to say about this particular business idea.

Here’s the thing, you may disagree or take issue with certain aspects of what I said above, but that isn’t the point. If you’re picking apart the specifics, you’re focused on the wrong thing.

I’m trying to give away an idea.

I want you to take the general idea, put YOUR own spin on it, and make it work.

There’s something to this. The right person could really make it work.

Is that person you?