20 Tips For Newspapers During Recessions

Even though I usually concentrate on the newer media forms, lately I’ve been in touch with some newspaper editors and I believe I should answer a question I’ve been asked several times: “What should be done in these times of crisis?”

Through my work with the press in Western and Eastern Europe as well as in the Americas and occasional forays into other emerging markets, I’ve come up with these 20 pieces of advice especially suited to the current situation. They do not mean to be comprehensive. Instead they intend to cover actions that, in my opinion, are usually overlooked.

When facing such a challenging economic situation it’s in one’s interest to keep some fundamental concepts in perspective to avoid guesswork and to not waste the opportunities that all crises can afford us. As I concluded in a previous post ”crises serve a function in the life of corporations and markets. It’s clear that among other things they prompt us to rethink projects and strategies, while making cost cuts, but also to kick start new tactics that will be very beneficial once the sun shines again. And a crisis is too expensive and scarce to be squandered.“

1. Don’t let the crisis drive your project
-The seasoned pros can be differentiated from the novices, who react to events as they come along, in that they’ve lived through similar situations and are able to detect common patterns and pre-empt them with adequate responses. They know how to adapt to rough weather without losing sight of the final destination. Lots of dailies are merely reactive and waste the great potential of a crisis.

-Don’t be reactive, don’t base your decisions on past data. Instead, forecast a fall in income for the next six months and adjust your costs to this new scenario. Otherwise you’ll always lag behind events and they’ll end up getting the better of you.

2. Cut costs aggressively
If you’ve tried for years to cut costs and have always had to proceed timidly now’s the time to get rid of that fat that all businesses tend to generate. This should be done for two reasons: if you don’t do it now, when the crisis ends you’ll be a lot worse off than those competitors who did; if in the case of HR you don’t take the initiative you risk losing your best talent and staying with that deadweight which will be unable to carry the business into the future.

3. Renegotiate everything
Your suppliers know you’re going through some tough times and will not want to lose you now. If you rent facilities ask for a 25% rent cut, if your distribution includes routes that are now of little use, reorganize them. If delivery trucks or vans do not carry enough weight due to union restrictions, negotiate it; speak to your newsprint suppliers and get price breaks or better financial conditions. Others are doing it. Check the cost of your supplies including ink, phone bills, connectivity ….. absolutely EVERYTHING. Negotiate also internally; too many concessions were granted to unions that now make no sense and destroy value. Now is the time to turn common sense into common practice.

4. Optimize your distribution
Manage your point of sale (P.O.S.). Lots of dailies think it’s the distributor’s job and nobody does it. Wrong! Managing your P.O.S. affects positioning and exposure of the daily in the street, your relations with the paper stand owner, the spotting of problems or information about areas to be improved. Among the people you could do without choose one who gets on well and train him to do this job. He should be supervised by someone who believes in P.O.S. management and is willing to use the inputs.

5. Waste less time (and money) on your press
It’s not your core business and will only distract you from it. If you don’t have one, OK. If you already have one, don’t think of investing more in it. Team up with the competition to reduce the investment or better yet outsource the printing. If you have a modern printing plant, consider spinning it off into a separate company to obtain new income from new clients. A press is only hardware that doesn’t pose an entry barrier and instead distracts managers from real strategic tasks and employs scarce funds for non strategic activities (while there are so many investment requirements to build bridges into the future).

6. Either have a Vision of the Future or sell your daily
Any decision you make should be a part of a larger project to avoid desperate and counter-productive actions. The much trodden “Strategic Plan” has contaminated us through overuse. I recommend you focus now on your company’s “Future Vision”. It shouldn’t be something you pull out of a hat but rather the result of having attended conferences, visiting the best examples around the world, hours of reading the best informed bloggers, conversations with specialized consultants….. and should constitute a product of team work shared with the talented members in your company. The words crisis and future may seem an oxymoron but they aren’t at all. If you can’t conceive a clear vision of the future, sell your daily or else it will end up being a costly liability.

7. Turn your vision of the future into roles that your daily should fulfill
As with any other consumer item, a daily should aspire to develop certain roles in the community. In the case of the more geographically limited press, -local, regional-, find out what roles your company should fulfill in the future. Do this using by using your imagination, analyzing your positioning, other dailies’ experiences, gaps in the market and your capabilities….etc. In the end, you’ll be dealing with an ambitious project that will compel you to define those roles and to imagine the new community relationships you’ll be progressively focusing on thanks to your vision and the skills your people will need to deploy. If your only role for the future consists of news, “game over” (this point requires further explanation but is not the objective of this blog).

8. Map out the key posts
Before going about a harsh reduction of costs, analyze which key positions are necessary for each area, including the newsroom. I’m referring to blank boxes, without names. If these positions are already filled by qualified professionals, let them know you’re counting on them. If they aren’t make sure to fill key posts with top notch professionals. Previously, momentum could help, but now we need “thinking heads” to play the role of locomotives that pull the rest of the team. Build your map with a cool head and in a calm atmosphere. This will avoid talent drain when confusion reigns.

9. Train those who stay aboard
Indiscriminate training for those who don’t actually desire it is expensive, of little use and a complete waste of working hours. Once you’ve got your vision as well as “buyers” for your main strategic lines, train your crew adequately to sail in the rough waters that await us. Not everyone will put into practice what they’ve learned, but have faith in the arrowhead effect. Count also on the positive psychological impact as you will transmit that you aren’t just cutting costs but addressing the challenges facing the company. There are many sources for training, including the internet. Try NewsU.org or any other alternatives to start the journey.

10. Make sure your newspaper only produces what makes a difference
The organization of work in your newspaper was laid out for many reasons many of which are now irrelevant. Depending on the type of daily, -local, regional, national-, and on other factors, there are parameters that are still reasonable and others that aren’t. On many occasions I visit dailies that shouldn’t write so many pages on topics that can be found elsewhere and of better quality but there are always internal arguments for own production. If you’re not dealing with contents related to your territory there should be a precise reason for the daily to produce them. Habit or inertia isn’t a valid answer since all cost should offer a clear compensation. Keep track of this ratio, own production vs. third parties’.

11. External contributors
When it comes to interpreting reality, more so when it’s near us, our journalists have been our only solution. The world changes quickly and there are more and more people out there willing to contribute. Open your windows to the world, there are plenty of examples in other fields that make use of external resources to innovate. Many a talented person would be willing to contribute to the daily, in many cases for little more than warm gratitude. Myself being an example. In Spain I contribute to finanzas.com in analyzing internet and the media without asking for anything in return, as a byproduct of my consultancy work. Building a network of external contributors can be very rewarding work that should be taken up by dailies not just because of the savings it can entail, but to improve the product and bring it closer to the ground. After all, between 87% and 60% of the public (depending on the age group) consider that bloggers (external contributors) add value and discernment in forming public opinion.

12. Play local. In everything. Always
When it comes to analyzing their territories is when our dailies really stand out. Our readers are learning to easily access valid sources with content of their interest, but the press stands out when dealing with everything local issues, analysis, layout, opinion…etc. That’s where your best human resources should be redirected, that may have been distracted up to now on other objectives. Local events, or at least the local effect of events in foreign places, are the objective to seek. Obviously the term local is used here in reference to the scope of the daily, be it local, regional or even national.

13. Narrating what has already happened is no longer the paper’s main function
Other media are fresher and for main stories the paper is always late. Recounting what’s happened is sometimes simply not enough. The daily should add its own differentiating value. Linking stories, discovering trends, gathering expert opinion, offering a satellite view or an accurate dissection depending on the circumstances, discovering the possible effect on the life of the community of an apparently isolated event…etc., are objectives a daily should try to reach to assure client loyalty. Even in the case of reporting a story, there are always a variety of ways of going about it. In a previous post I mentioned a brilliant example to follow, of a North American daily which confirmed its leadership as the information leader of its community just by informing on a local event. Of course there’s a long series of minor stories where the daily acts as a witness and has a narrower margin to elaborate.

14. Take advantage of your media’s advertising capabilities
Let’s suppose your media can use the equivalent of a page per day to promote your own projects. That potential represents a lot of money (multiply the Sunday rate by 52 and the weekday rate by 310 and add them up) and a great percentage is wasted. Again thousands upon thousands of USD, €, or whatever currency are thrown to the garbage every day. Quite often, according o my experience, self promoting ads are the result of negotiations between different parts of the business, and not of wisely made decisions. What is now in line is, with your Vision of the Future in hand, to decide from the top which strategic projects should be backed by all possible means. Don’t throw your money, or your future, down the drain.

15. Either use your daily or get rid of it
A daily made out of tree fibers hasn’t got an objective in itself. I’m aware that this is a harsh and shocking statement, but businesses should project themselves into the future, not be the administrator of any closeout. Dailies are getting roughed up and sooner or later the current model will die out. That’s why paper dailies should explore the new roads that the medium is bound to follow and should facilitate it by means of economic and other resources, promotions….etc. If your daily is a facilitator in that migration that’s happening and helps you explore it, great. If your paper doesn’t have a clear plan for its future and does not help you in travelling that road, do yourself a favor and get rid of it.

16. When in a crisis, push your online projects
Now is the time to launch those projects which can be developed with very low budgets and which can use these lethargic months to mature. I think of those Web 2.0, or social, ones requiring a rather long time to adjust and get traction. All these initiatives could benefit from something very expensive that your medium can offer at no cost, online traffic and intelligent promotion in your newspaper. Now is the right time to cook those types of projects to have them ready when spring will return.

17. Be ready to deliver your contents in various formats
Most likely your vision of the future includes offering your contents in different media, in as many as necessary and possible. Your technical skills in presses are probably being replaced by technological ones and once your company has reached the standard level, you will be ready to deliver across media. If your site doesn’t offer good iPhone visualization, fix it. The real objective is being prepared to lead your market once one of these new devices starts becoming popular. If at that moment you haven’t travelled the learning curve, sorry, you lose.

18. More than ever, learn from your readers
Dailies in both Americas are more marketing savvy than European ones, while their expertise represents a skill to imitate. Explore your readers opinions as never before, use your subscribers to know what they like/dislike and what they miss in your paper. Find out what they really need and offer them more references and help for their day to day lives. While I was working in Argentina in 2002 the Gross National Product decreased 20% in 18 months and some papers (La Voz del Interior was the best example) were able to reduce their number of pages while increasing their usefulness to readers by offering concrete solutions to their huge difficulties (for instance, how to eat, dress, decorate with little money). Against all odds they were able to retain their basic readership. That reaction was only possible because the papers were experts at listening to their clients. Squeeze the juice out of them just now: they are devoting more time to read your paper, they have more time to talk to you and you need them more than ever.

19. Talk to your advertisers and agencies
While opening your company to your readers you should also talk to your other clients, agencies and advertisers. But before that, you and your team should be convinced that “online advertising is more profitable than it seems” (see post). At this time of limited cash many of your clients are more worried about lowering their stocks than about other image or positioning issues. They are becoming more transactional and they want your company’s advertising to shorten the response time of clients (more on this here). They require a different kind of advertising and if you talk to them they will be happy to provide you with some cues to help both themselves and you. Listen to them, help yourself.

20. Explore new ways to get revenues
I will not go into detail in this post about alternative ways to obtain revenues, but they have to do with online promotions, e-mail marketing, video as a commercial tool for your clients…etc. If you are not acquainted with them or you have not started to use them, now is the time to choose one and start your learning curve in a very stingy way so that when the money returns to the market you obtain a bigger share of it. Do not get obsessed with Google’s might. Many companies just bought the return ticket since, according the New York Times, some keywords have multiplied their price by four during the last 18 months, and they continue to climb.

In brief:
-Reduce your costs energetically since it was an overdue task even before the crisis started. Established media should reduce their cost structure before being reborn in their new roles (isn’t it some kind of Phoenix image?)
-Open up your company. Include more external contents for what is not core, use more external contributors, bloggers and local reporters. Demand your readers’ opinions and requirements in these troubled times.
-Develop the skills of the future: the technical knowledge to work cross media, to show contents and attract revenues in whatever support is necessary.
-Evangelize your people on the above work lines. Help them to understand that now people read differently, that they are now facing a more intelligent reader who demands a different product.
-Explore the digital world: find a solution to online classifieds, go beyond news and practice the new roles you’ll be playing in the future.
-Get closer to advertisers and listen to them because they can help you build the bridge to your future.

In these times of crisis, cost cutting is a very necessary condition but not a sufficient one. Open your mind to new things and explore them. Most big internet businesses started in a garage with lack of resources. Take advantage of your walk through the tunnel to tackle the pending jobs and to start those actions which will carry your company forward.