By Chris Brennar

The signs of crisis in the newspaper industry are all around. Headlines about plummeting stock prices, bankruptcy filings, widespread lay-offs and newspaper closings have become common place in the past two years. It is also not hard to find the immediate causes of the crisis.

The explosion of the World Wide Web has dramatically changed the way most people get their news, undermining the newspaper business model in the process.While most newspapers have developed significant web-based readerships to offset declines in daily papercirculation, web-based sources of revenue have failed to make up for the dramatic decline in traditional retail and classified advertising revenue.

Compounding this longer term structural weakness, the current recession is crippling advertisers and increasing the pace of job cuts. The result is a crisis from which many newspapers may not survive.

But this crisis doesn’t just present dangers. It also presents opportunities - for a new, restructured and revitalized journalism in this country. Identifying and taking advantage of these opportunities, however, requires a deeper understanding of the reasons why newspapers have had such a difficult time adapting to the changed media environment, and using this understanding to guide new business models and new roles for newspaper industry stakeholders.In investigating these deeper causes and solutions, this report makes three central points.

First, the reasons most newspapers have had a difficult time adapting to the technological and economic changes in the media environment is rooted in "three Cs" associated with their organizational structures and  practices:

Ÿ a culture of hierarchy and assembly line production that has stifled innovation and experimentation.

Ÿ a deficiency of local community ties, rooted in a largely undifferentiated approach to consumers and the resulting minimal understanding of the information needs and desires of much of their consumer base.

Ÿ and sources of cash that are structurally disconnected from the quality of their primary product.

Second, an alternative future for the newspaper industry is possible, and this future is likely to includesome elements of the following three factors:

Ÿ a network enterprise model, with multiple revenue sources, interactive network relationships and value-added data and information, in which localized, tacit employee knowledge is a critical component of the competitive advantage newspapers have.

Ÿ entrepreneurial reporting and salesmanship, in which journalists leverage their community knowledge and relationships to take a greater role in identifying new revenue opportunities and business models, as part of their information gathering functions, and advertising salespeople help leverage clientrelationships and community connections to co-create new individualized business models with advertisers.

Ÿ hybrid ownership, in which the dual functions of newspapers, as both for-profit businesses and important public services, are more directly reflected in the ownership structure of the newspapers.

Third, the California Media Workers (CMW) union can and should play a significant role in contributing to this promising future in the newspaper industry, both in Northern California and nationwide. As the representative of the most valuable asset newspapers have—skilled workers—and with important ties to community stakeholders who care deeply about the quality of local news, the CMW brings a unique set of assets and perspectives that can be an important part of the future of journalism.

Successfully achieving this role would require some significant changes in organizational practices and roles of the union itself, involving the Guild playing a more active role as a business partner, as a liaison with community stakeholders (including former employees, freelancers, and potential future employees), and as a source of ongoing training and skills development.

The challenges the CMW faces in realizing these ambitious goals are essentially the same as any union whose members work in an industry undergoing a wrenching structural change: figuring out how to move beyond business as usual and reacting to crisis, towards directly addressing the industry changes and the impact on its members.

But the union is already making innovative strides in this direction, building on the ideas represented in Figure I. These efforts provide hope for a new and revitalized next generation union for the newspaper industry in the internet age, and could provide guidance for other unions addressing substantial industry changes.

Home based businesses are always a gamble. There are seemingly hundreds of thousands of offers, scams, get-rich-quick, 0-to-$1mil programs that promise fortune and favour to those who dare. Remember, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. And if you can make $350 a day from home working for someone else, why wouldn't they employ someone at $25 per day to do what you are doing?

The only factor common to any home based business model is YOU. You are the one common asset for any home based business you choose. So it is therefore important to ensure that you personally and professionally have what it takes to succeed in a home based business. 

Qualities you personally want to score highly are:

·         Self-discipline - ability to stay focused without constant supervision

·         Time management - a week can look empty or overflowing, depending on how well you manage your time

·         Passion – does the business quench your drives and needs? Or is it just something you think you might enjoy? Best to start with a lot more conviction than ‘might enjoy’.

·         Confidence – you need to be ready to believe in yourself. A pay-check from a boss regularly affirms that we are doing well and that the world likes us. Generating your own pay-check, while incredibly more rewarding, is not so guaranteed and initially will be not so regular.

Qualities your situation should score highly are:

·         Space – do you have a quiet space to do your business? Will you forever be fighting with housemates, children, partners or animals to etch out two lots of 2-3 hour-spells every day without disruption?

·         Equipment – if the business model requires a refrigerated delivery van, do you have the money to buy one? What is the balance between what you need to purchase and what is provided for you?

·         Safety Net – if you have to mortgage the house and failure to break all sales records within 12-months means certain bankruptcy, DON’T DO IT! You need to be able to give yourself 12-months to succeed, whether you are starting an ice-cream van business or a magazine.

Qualities your business model should score highly:

·         Concept – 85% of business start-ups fail within the first year! Most of these are because the business concept was weak, there was little or no marketing to support the business, no business plan, not strategy, wrong skill sets or a mismatch of venture and operator. The strength of franchise type business models is that the model is more often proven.

·         Support – good support, whether from a business partner, family, friends and/or headquarters is crucial to successful home based businesses. If you are looking at a franchise model, what sort of IP differentiates them from the competitors? Is it strong technology? Is training and collateral provided?

·         Experience – how long has this model been around? Is it a passing fad? Is business heading the way they claim, or will they be old news tomorrow?

Above all else, talk to your friends, family and colleagues about the venture. If you are looking for a lifestyle change or sick of competing with all the rats for the dead-end jobs, a franchise business may be right for you. Buying a business is buying a job. You are guaranteed to get it, but how long it lasts depends entirely on you.

Choosing a website solution for your newspaper or magazine is at the heart of determining your online publishing strategy. 

Why are you publishing online? Is it because you simply think you must? Your competition is online? You want to reach more readers? More advertisers? Build a new revenue stream from online advertising?

All of the above reasons are very common motives for creating a newspaper or magazine website. A website will allow your current and prospective readers and advertisers to quickly gauge your professionalism or niche at the click of a link. Media buyers thousands of miles away will make a decision on the strength of your online sales pitch, which is working for you 24/7. Worthy content that does not make it to print will be viewable online at zero expense. The benefits go on.  

Ironically, the greatest benefit of moving online is perhaps mostly overlooked – the ability to manage content. Content Management Systems (CMS) are the engines that drive 99% of today’s websites. Simply put, they enable a website owner to easily manipulate their site’s look and feel, upload articles, images, videos etc and publish live at will. No HTML, no coding, no experience needed. CMS technology means everyone and anyone can have an online shopfront.

But the implications for newspaper and magazine publishing are far greater. Publishers manage content and advertising, often through to printed publications. In one 32-page publication there will be 350 – 500 objects (a title, author, image, caption, text, ad, section title etc). Prior to Content Management Systems, smaller publications managed these objects with whiteboards, spread sheets, grids, lists, complex filing systems, a bit of magic and a lot of stress.

Going to press with an image that is missing a caption or an article without a by-line was all common symptoms of the ‘train-crash’ production cycle.

A good Content Management System for publishers should account for the specific needs of print publishing. A CMS for a local car-sales yard wanting to improve sales will vastly differ from a CMS that manages an array of writers, with various user-level approval structures and an export-to-print button.

A CMS newspaper or magazine website should be more than an online presence, it should reduce your workload and streamline your content management processes.

Having started my own newspaper in 2004, I appreciate the inevitable conflict between the artist and the bill-paying end of the newspaper or magazine publishing business. My journalists and freelance writers were always happy enough to attend the press gallery or media lunches, or investigate a dodgy construction contract; but getting them to write 500-words on backyard makeover features to facilitate advertising sales was always a battle.

I think journalists and freelance writers have to let go of any 'precious' attachments to outdated soapboxes and get in the mix. Drop "journalists should get paid more" and "employers should..." from the lexicon and instead start running their your own show.

Accomplished writers with industry experience and a little flair have the obvious jump on their younger colleagues and (hopefully) even better research skills, with a firmer finger on the pulse of this industry. This media publishing space is on fire and media entrepreneurs will be the winners. For better or worse 'pay-cheque journalists' are a dying breed, so asking 'is real journalism dead' belongs to an archaic mindset.

“Authenticity, authenticity!” I hear you screaming. Authenticity and the nobility that has always underpinned quality journalism, indeed quality content at all levels over many centuries, should not be sacrificed. One only has to compare a wasted 30-mins on a commercial news broadcast to the higher quality ABC to appreciate the importance of the 'fourth estate', the ever-watchful eye of media on the powers that pull the strings.

I am not suggesting for a moment that dignity or standards be sacrificed. There will always be an audience for quality journalism and without it we would all vote fascism. The challenge facing quality journalists and freelance writers is how to deliver that quality without a boss. Graduates are lining up for traineeships, writers in the Philippines will fill your website with keyword content at $5 an hour and the old ‘rivers of gold’ are parched.

Experienced journalists have just that - experience! Otherwise, the playing field is wide and suddenly leveled. People will pay for quality content, especially in such a massive glut of garbage. But good journalists can no longer simply put out the hand and expect a pay slip to land. They must be vigilant about updating their tools, seeking new forums and business models that reward quality reporting. While many journalists have fallen prey to the memorizing ‘PR’ carrot, I truly believe ample opportunity abounds for professional, skillful writers to earn an honourable living.

Start your own local news or niche publication – now there’s a thought!    

Local news and niche publishing wrapped in hyper-local advertising are the inevitable future of profitable media. Large publishing companies are going under with the weight of many mouths to feed and long, expensive distribution channels to get their messages to their readers’ coffee tables. As the canopy opens on this space, nimble, smaller, even home based media businesses are sprouting.

How has this happened? I believe it is a combination of diminishing returns on the old ‘rivers of gold’ (once controlled by the big end of town), with the advent of a glut of media channels and technologies for new delivery models. The financial ‘backbone’ of traditional newspaper publishing was always the classifieds, real estate and automotive, along with per-copy purchase revenues. To start a newspaper or magazine you needed to already have a dozen other titles in the stable, invariably launched by your father’s father.

Then the internet hit. Initially the impact was minimal, but in the last few years as readers start looking elsewhere for their information, the industry has been whisked into a storm of panic. Suddenly Dear Dolly does not have all the answers. Suddenly the same news on the homepage of a $1.50 newspaper is available earlier online, with related links, videos and community opinion…for free!

When was the last time you bought a paper specifically to view classifieds, real estate or automotive listings, or to learn more about a news item someone mentioned in passing? How many of your friends subscribe to daily or even weekly delivery of a print newspaper? Now think of how many newsletters you and your friends subscribe to, or how quickly you get your news from online search engines, news websites or registered communities.

Concurrently with changes in end-user viewing patterns, technologies exploded, affecting no industry more so than the media space, which is on fire! Information is the most heavily invested commodity on this planet, far exceeding oil, gold or construction. Efforts to tap into this multi-billion dollar industry are breeding new wealth and plenty of fresh ideas.

Faster internet connections, the rise of some terrific content management systems that allow even the layman to get online and become master of his domain in a matter of days, the online social media phenomenon and the ready access to support all augur well for the imaginative entrepreneur. Young business people no longer compare engines under the bonnet or boyfriends, instead websites, hardware and online careers.

Inevitably the more technology poured into the media-scape the more players flock to discover gold, which in turn further inspires the public to be even more discerning  in its consumption of that media. But we all know this – what is the opportunity?  

So here is the punchline – the bigger the toybox and scope of possibility, the more we see end users wanting to dissect their information chunks, making these chunks smaller and more relevant to their personal interests. They want local news about their neighbourhoods. They want to pick up a magazine from the coffee table that invites them into a community of other Brazilian Pink-spotted Lizard lovers, and they want to know that they can feed into their media of choice, contribute some of their own insights, integrate.

The opportunity therefore is simply to facilitate this trend, grease the track and clip everyone’s ticket as they pass through your gates. Grab a local news, magazine or community news website. Fill it with enough content to create a starting point of interest, and there is plenty of free or very cheap content out there, then hit up your local or niche community for their own contributions. Get the balance right and you will hit that magic ‘critical mass’ where your news or magazine site starts taking care of itself. You may always have to login and approve the articles, but the online ad revenues should help sweeten things.

In a nutshell, you are running a multi-user blog, without ever having to submit a blog of your own. The successful publishers of tomorrow will be those media entrepreneurs who get the content balances right, whereupon the advertising dollars will follow. When they see their local news, magazine or community website succeeding, they may very well press the ‘Export’ button and go to press!

If you thought this article on local news and niche publishing for newspapers and magazines was relevant to your interest set, AND it took you less than 10 minutes casually browsing the internet to find it, I rest my case – local news and niche publishing, whether online and/or print, are winning! Now look around the space surrounding this article – is someone looking to sell you something? Can you see online advertising? Is someone earning an income here?

Hyper-local and niche content is the future of newspaper and magazine publishing.