Tribune gets digital media right

Newspaper owners have spent considerable time fretting about their general decline in circulation, influence and revenue. Many believe that these misfortunes come at the hands of a Web parasite that ceaselessly and increasingly seeps into a publication’s every pore, then sucks out all the news that’s fit to exploit.

The antidote for this national print media pandemic, publishers seem to think, is to beat the Web monster at its own game: Circle the troops, closes ranks, re-purpose analog into digital content, put a price on it, and sell it before Google can give it away.

Unfortunately, this approach relies on an analog solution for a digital problem. It looks through the wrong end of the telescope. And it fails to answer a fundamental question: “What’s the function of a newspaper?”

Tribune365 Web images

Is a newspaper’s role today the same as it was 100 years ago when Finley Peter Dunne wrote, “The job of the newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable”? Or is the newspaper’s true mission to fulfill the business destiny of delivering audiences to advertisers?

Of course, a newspaper’s goal is an uncomfortable and often rancorous combination of the two objectives.

So, the actual issue is how to reconfigure analog minds — which heretofore were perfectly logical and workable — so that they can function effectively in the digital Internet world. Fundamental questions in this metamorphosis are:

• Does Google charge you to search their servers, or to read what you’ve found?
• Does YouTube charge you to watch video, or to post your own?
• Does Amazon charge you to browse through their vast online store, or to buy products?

Certainly not. But, those guys are big businesses, too, and they have a lot of mouths to feed. At the first of 2009 Google had 20,222 employees and Amazon had 20,700.  (We don’t know exactly about YouTube, but we believe their cast of characters is a lot smaller.)

In contrast to newspapers, these digital properties seek tirelessly to make their sites so appealing, their information so useful, their user engagement so compelling that hundreds of millions of people read, view, buy their products daily. They create no barriers to entry.

This model is well established and taken as gospel on the Web: Give away great content to attract massive volumes of focused (or focus-able) traffic, which a Web site can deliver to advertisers. It’s all about eyeballs connected to brains connected to credit cards.

This new digital world is a very conflicted environment for traditional managers attempting to cope, and predictably yields polarized strategies.

The Media News Group, owner of 54 daily newspapers including the Denver Post, is a major player and its president, Oliver Knowlton, holds an opinion representative of one side in this death struggle. He told AdAge:

“My sense is that we’re not going to make a huge amount of money for premium content, but what’s more important is it’s just not given away free online.”

Those aligned on this side believe it is vital to construction of a pay wall around editorial content and charge for admission, which is underway or imminent at Long Island’s Newsday, The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, Newport (RI) Daily News, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and The New York Times, among others.

The opposite side of the struggle, the one that is more in tune with the Internet model, is held by another massive corporation, the Tribune Company, with such holdings as The Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and The Baltimore Sun as well a couple dozen radio and TV interests and commercial Web sites.

The corporation’s Tribune365 is the “national, cross-platform sales team,” which “is planning to introduce a universal registration system for all Tribune sites this year, with universal registration for mobile visitors in 2010,” according to Advertising Age.

This means that in exchange for access to their journalism properties on the Web the Tribune wants you to register and to provide demographic information about yourself.

This is the same approach that “controlled circulation” magazines take: They will send you free analog or digital copies of their publications in exchange for your completion of a demographic questionnaire. The aggregate results of all of those questionnaires allow publishers to sell highly-focused premium advertising.

The differences between the two approaches are enormous and fundamental.

• The traditional analog approach charges everyone who touches a product, advertisers and readers alike.
• The Internet-driven digital strategy encourages vast free access to content, identifies and segments users, and then makes them available for a price to focused advertisers.

The president of Tribune365, Don Meek, told AdAge that “We are getting such a fine degree of detail in terms of targeting that we will eventually be able to target a physical product to a household address, a digital product to the digital users in that household, and a mobile product to the mobile users in that household.”

This level of research detail allows the Tribune organization to achieve its mission: “To connect our clients with their best customers [using] multi-platform solutions that drive sales through cutting edge digital, TV, radio, print, event marketing and database solutions.” explains Doug Thomas, Tribune365’s SVP, on their Web site.

Obviously, the greater the precision with which an advertiser can target his messages, the higher his margins will be, resulting in greater delivery efficiency. When the advertiser has fewer wasted advertising dollars, he can and will pay more for advertising units.

The Tribune organization’s focus on using technology to optimize the process of bringing together audiences and advertisers faces up to the realities, and opportunities, of a digital media world rather than merely throwing up a wall around content to create information haves and have-nots.

In the Tribune approach, content and mass audience are both seen as assets to be joined and optimized. In the re-purposed analog approach that endorses pay walls, mass audiences are viewed as threats undermining the fundamental value of content and need to be marginalized.

The times, they’ve changed; and the Tribune family of companies gets it.