Mar 13 2009
What is the core product of a newspaper, anyway?
A post by Yelvington yesterday sparked a little bit of a debate about what it is that newspapers actually sell.
Yelvington claimed it is not print and not news. It’s readership.
“Your core product is a commercially relevant audience,” he said in bold type.
I chimed in on the comments at his blog:
…your product is not newspapers, or news or information. It is readership.
Another commenter said he totally agrees.
But then two other commenters had differing opinions. One agreed that newspapers sell readership to advertisers, but “for our readers, the news is the product.”
Another made a distinction between core product and core business, saying “our core *product* is news (or more accurately “news and information”), our core *business* is using that core product to deliver a commercially relevant audience…”
I was intrigued enough by these differences in the understanding of what the core product of a newspaper is to conduct a Twitter survey. I asked, what is the core product of newspapers? Discuss.
Now, this is by no means scientific. I got four respondents. (I’m not Scoble; my Twitterverse is small.) And I was interested in who gave the answers, and how what they do for their livings relates to the answers they gave.
Here’s the list, starting with Steve Yelvington and the commenters on his blog.
- Steve Yelvington, news website developer: audience.
- Tim Burden (that’s me), news website developer: audience.
- Dan Thornton, marketer: audience
- Chip Kaye, news website developer (papertrane): news for readers, audience for advertisers.
- Marc Matteo, news website developer (SacBee): news is the product, audience is the business.
- Dave Coleman, marketer (Spreed): brand
- Gary Hilson, freelance writer and PR: news with context.
- Kim Champion, newspaper editor: audience.
- Stanislav Bender, j-school prof: it’s an ecosystem.
- Zac Echola, news website developer: audience.
Zac wasn’t part of my Twitter survey, but he wrote a post a short time ago making the claim:
The newspaper business has never been in the journalism business. Journalism is a means to an end (an end that unfortunately may no longer support the luxury of “wasteful” spending on bureaus and months long investigations that turn up little to no news). The true core business is not newspaper production and distribution, it’s advertising.
If this were a vote, audience wins. The core business of a newspaper (or any other news organization) is selling eyeballs to advertisers.
What do you think? What’s the core product of a newspaper? And why does it matter? (Hint: it’s crucial.)
13 Responses to “What is the core product of a newspaper, anyway?”
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What is the core product of newspapers? A small survey. Join in! http://bit.ly/HFFg
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
The core product of a newspaper is content, IMO. Unfortunately, merely providing the product is not enough. Just like any other business, the product has to be of high quality, relevant, better than competitors, and something that consumers will pay for.
I agree with Shafqat, above, on the point that your product has to be high quality, engaged and desirable to your advertisers. That product, of course, is your paper’s readers, and if your advertisers are willing to pay to connect with them, you’ve got a business.
A newspaper isn’t in the business of selling advertising, or news and information for that matter. It’s in the business of selling readership.
News content is the core product. Advertising is the core business.
Focusing on increasing the output or relevance of the product doesn’t solve the advertising problem facing newspapers. The product is already relevant! The ads, however, are not.
Like I said in my post, traffic to news sites is overwhelmingly good and getting better every day, but the audience has not been appropriately packaged and sold to advertisers. I’ll follow up with my post with a few more over the next few days.
The product is audience – but we can’t think of them as a static audience anymore – they are a communities that interact with each other and we must cultivate that.
Thanks for all the comments, everyone.
@Shafqat do we sell content or do we sell ad space? Isn’t the product the thing that is sold?
@Kim Champion good point: the audience has to be high-quality. It’s true. That’s why some companies are trying to reduce the percentage of traffic coming straight in from Google.
@Zac Echola Looking forward to seeing your posts on packaging the audience. Normally we think of packaging the content, but since audience is the product, it makes sense that that is what has to be packaged properly.
@Digidave Yes, active, engaged communities. Ties in to Kim’s point above. And my post on developing community over here.
Getting some good comments on my post asking What is the core product of newspapers? A small survey. Join in! http://bit.ly/HFFg
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
My “core product” post http://tinyurl.com/c5h574 spawns a conversation. http://tinyurl.com/buzcfs
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
This is a great discussion.
I really like the perspective that a media enterprise is engaged in two functions, as a service and as a business.
Look, up front, I’m a journalist. But I’m also a publisher. So I understand and have even been rather successful at the business side of all this. I preface my post this way so that, when I use the word journalism in the next paragraph, you don’t automatically categorize me as “one of those” and stop reading.
Today’s newspapers are a commercialization of journalism. It is the same way that hospitals are a commercialization of medicine and colleges are a commercialization of education. I’d be happy to go on about the unique position of the processes of education, medicine and journalism in society but that’s for somewhere else. Just roll with me here for a moment longer.
If audience is a newspaper’s core product, then by that logic sick people are the core product of a commercial hospital. So then the thing that commercial hospitals want to be successful at more than anything else is attracting and making the largest possible group of sick people available to the drug companies and all the medical practitioners and specialist who use the hospital as a vehicle to gain access to those sick people for the benefit of their own businesses.
Now there might be people out there saying, “Yea! That’s exactly what fracking hospitals do.” But is that what you think they ought to be doing? Is that how you want your hospital thinking about you? Is that why you pick a particular hospital to go to, so that you can be packaged with other similarly sick people and channeled to the hospital’s actual clients? Is the quality of the hospital’s medical care just to lure you into being part of the real product it delivers to its actual clients?
Or at the core is a hospital, for good or bad, really about medicine, and a newspaper really about journalism? Isn’t a hospital’s core product really the systems it has created for connecting people with medical care in a way that it can make money, i.e. the commercialization of medicine? Then a newspaper’s core product is its systems for connecting people with journalism in a way that makes money.
If you are a publisher and you consider your core product to be audience, I’m not saying there is anything wrong with that, but then you’re in the publishing business, not the newspaper business, IMHO.
It’s not that newspapers are dying. It’s that publishers stopped being newspapers — and apparently they haven’t figured out how to be good at it like other non-journalistic publishers.
Or it could be that this form of commercialization of journalism has simply run its course, been disrupted by technology and changes in societal patterns, and that other commercialization models are on the rise.
Because journalism, like medicine and education, is not going away. It is the process that society created to inform itself, not something that someone woke up one Saturday morning and invented. As long as society needs to be informed, there will be journalism. Make a living from it if you can. That’s what I’m looking for, not necessarily some way to preserve a particular commercialization of it. Because, call me naive, but the audience is not our product. They are our purpose.
Disclosure: I am a journalist and publisher of a community newspaper, magazines and a community website. All of these have news and information as its foundation. Even with new product rollouts, it’s always been about news that touches our communities. It earns us a certain amount of respect that we get invited into their households. The more we veer from that goal the more tenuous our role will be in our communities.
If it were all about growing audience, do we toss aside our civic obligation of why we are in this business and why news organizations receive extra protection in our judicial system?
Would would fall into the same trap CNBC fell into with its financial “reporting” (or is it entertainment)?
If it were all about audience, would we throw off our professional inhibitions and concentrate more on filling up our pages (websites) with more titillating entertainment features and gossip that has become the mainstay of TV “news.”
Some major city TV stations started filling up their broadcasts with crime reports to garner higher ratings. Admittedly while, in some sense, it is news it is easier to cover than trying to explain why a city council’s debate of a particular issue was relevant or be made more interesting to understand. It also is not providing a “well rounded report” of what is happening in our communities.
News people understand this because they talk to and are a part of their community every day. If we treat them as a commodity, we would be seen as hucksters not as part of their family. At what point do we sacrifice the goal of increasing or maintaining our credibility — as fragile as that is now — to just increase numbers.
Advertisers don’t just want an audience, they want a quality audience and those that are interested in news and in their communities are that quality audience.
Lastly, let’s not lose sight of what is really pushing this discussion. It’s not loss of readership that is hurting newspapers (not for community newspapers anyway), it’s advertising revenue — the same advertising revenue drop that is hurting TV, Cable and Radio.
Here’s a further expansion on various thoughts about audience or news as product. http://tiny.cc/F1hMz
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
@Kerry and Jim
The product is the thing in the value chain right before the conversion to cash. It is the thing the quality and quantity of which sets the price you charge. That’s the audience. Make sweet journalism all day and all night if you want, without audience you have no way to make money with it.
It’s not hucksterism. It’s a reality. In fact I would reverse Marc Matteo’s formulation above, and say audience is the product, and journalism is the business model: the particular route news organizations chose to build audience, as opposed to, say, how-to publishing or celebrity gossip.
This isn’t a morally bad thing. Nurturing an audience, taking care of them, protecting journalistic credibility, empowering them, transparency: all go toward growing and maintaining a healthy audience. Stuff like journalistic objectivity, being a strong editorial voice, and so on disconnects newspapers from their audiences and is arguably responsible for some of the industry’s problems once Web 2.0 broke out.
Audience first and foremost. Not a bad thing.