The Key For A Newspaper’s Survival Is For It To Decide What News IT Owns – Its Franchise -- And Then Devote All The Resources Necessary To Doing Exactly That On All Its Platforms.

Philip M. Stone March 23, 2007

The reason so many print newspapers are losing circulation is that they have lost touch with their mission statement -- their reason for being. To just exactly what precise audience is the newspaper targeting itself – the audience it considers its own – and is it willing to dedicate all the necessary resources on various platforms to protect that core journalistic and advertising platform?

The New York Times, for instance, has made very clear to its readers that New Yorkers are not its prime consideration. Its franchise is national. It is to a national audience that its journalists write, and its advertisers target. Other newspapers naming their hometown city in their logo may well decide their target instead is that city’s readers. Either way, that franchise has to be clear to everyone – readers, journalists, advertisers – for survival is based on how well the newspaper protects that franchise, how well it protects its turf. The problem today is that many newspapers are not protecting their turf well enough.

Small town community newspapers have never lost sight of their target audience. They know it is the local reader wanting to know the local news that directly affects the local pocketbook, that directly affects the local quality of life. Those newspapers OWN their news world, they have very little competition. How they display that news is up to them – print contains the analytical and featurish stories plus the births, deaths, anniversaries of which everyone wants to make clippings, and the web site can give breaking news of the local council’s decisions. And for those newspaper who believe their readers want to know from them what is going on in the outside world, they can buy in brief regional, national and international news from the news agencies usually for less than the cost of one reporter.

How much of “this” goes in the print platform and how much of “that” goes online is always a bit of trial and error until the formula is nailed down, but at least editors know their franchise and their problem is not having the right material for their franchise, but rather how to display that material best on what platform. .

Go the metropolitan newspapers, however, and what exactly is their franchise? Now you’re getting into more than one city council – their may be many councils within the circulation area, what’s of interest to one reader in one suburb is not of so much of interest in another suburb. Metropolitan newspapers used to handle that problem via zoned issues – special supplements about particular areas that went to just those subscribers – but for the most part today zone issues are passee.

The trouble with zoned editions, of course, was that the accountants didn’t like them.  Journalists devoted to just part of the subscription area, having to keep an editorial office in each of those areas, those costs just kept getting bigger and bigger and the popular view was that it wasn’t worth all the effort. Well, if newspapers aren’t willing to invest in own their “franchise” then others will certainly step in to take over ownership, but then the newspaper shouldn’t cry later that it is losing readers.

There is something to be said for those metropolitan newspapers that are cutting back on their circulation areas. There are some outskirts where it just may not be worth the money or effort to service. It really all boils down to the resources necessary and the resources available to own that franchise. The less the resources, the less the franchise.

That’s why all the arguments last year at The Los Angeles Times about cutting back the newsroom from 1200 to around 800 and could more cuts be made, is really the old “How long is a piece of string” argument. You can cut that newsroom to 600, to 400, to 200, whatever number you choose, but at the same time management must also agree upon the “franchise” for those journalists remaining and it’s no use crying later about lost circulation from those people who now fall outside of the new franchise because of the cuts.

Naturally there is always the hope that management actually gets it really right – it gets the size of the franchise right and it maintains the necessary editorial resources to OWN that franchise. If anyone wants to know what is going on within that franchise from births deaths, who is in hospital, to what the local government says, then that newspaper OWNS that franchise. And with franchise ownership comes advertising ownership.

At The Los Angeles Times getting the franchise right has long been a chore; the reason its circulation still has not stabilized is because it still hasn’t not figured out its real franchise, even after so many years of trying. Its golden opportunity was in 1989 when its rival Herald-Examiner went out of business and long before anyone had ever heard of the world “Tribune”.

There was The Times in its downtown Los Angeles building surrounded throughout the metropolitan area by smaller, daily newspapers aimed at particular communities – The Long Beach Press-Telegram, the Pasadena Star-News, the Progress-Bulletin in Pomona to name just three – how could a newspaper in downtown Los Angeles, up to some 40 miles (65km) away compete on the local level with those newspapers? Should it even try?

The Times decided it would compete and along came the Ventura County Edition, an edition for the Inland Empire (where this writer grew up, and remembers well as a boy how it took two hands to carry from the driveway to the house the Times’ Sunday edition), a San Diego County edition, and just to prove it was as good as anyone else in the country it even came up with a national edition just for sale in Washington, D.C. and in San Francisco.

By the time the “Tribune” accountants got their fingers into all this, out went the National edition, and only the Inland Empire (having grown up in that area still find that world “Empire” unbelievable, but that’s for another story) and the Ventura County editions survive. The newspaper still does some zoning by including Times Community newspapers – local newspapers that the Times had bought when it had the money for such a buying spree many moons ago – that are inserted depending on delivery location, but it would be difficult to say the newspaper owns those particular delivery areas.

The Project for Excellence In Journalism tackles this kind of problem head-on. “The move toward building audience around “franchise” areas of coverage or other traits is a logical response to fragmentation and can, managed creatively, have journalistic value. To a degree, journalism’s problems are oversupply, too many news organizations doing the same thing.”

But the project warns, “Something gained means something lost, especially as newsrooms get smaller. There is already evidence that basic monitoring of local government has suffered, Regional concerns, as opposed to local, are likely to get less coverage.”

Among the questions it asks – warning at the same time that the wrong answers could hasten the decline of news organizations – are: “Does localism means provincialism? Should news organizations, so as not to abandon more high-level coverage, enlist citizen sentinels to monitor community news? To what extent do journalists still have a role in creating a broad agenda of common knowledge?”

Deciding exactly what you intend to be to the community you have chosen to serve is a newspaper’s first order of business. Once you know who your audience is, and have decided on the type and quality of product you then intend to produce, the next step is to go out and do it on the various platforms available.

The major error for newspapers today is that they are cutting back and cutting back on money and people and still expect those who are left to provide the same standard of work to the same audience as before. It’s simply not going to happen. As the cutbacks occur newsrooms need to reorganize to take the resources that are left and use them to ensure they continue to OWN the core franchise and then see what’s left for anything else. Publishers must be willing to accept that cutting back financially usually must mean a cutback on the franchise the newspaper owns.

And the most important lesson that publishers continually forget – the public is not stupid. It recognizes when there are cutbacks, it understands the real reasons behind changes made and the PR spin is seen for the nonsense it is, and if the public is abused too much well, as many publishers have discovered to their chagrin, there is a lot of competition out there for their franchise, and reader loyalty is not all it once was.

Then again publishers seem more loyal these days to their bottom line rather than to their readers, but it is the truly smart publisher that understands that being loyal to the reader in turn is being smart to the bottom line.

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