Here's a piece I wrote for The Sunday Telegraph pointing out some things that even in these tough times, folks can feel optimistic about in the newspaper business — including an ever deepening market reach and readership and plenty of opportunities.
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There's good news and bad news for newspapers these days. Media is in the throes of radical change, and change is hard – even when it's for the best.
The problem is lately we're only hearing, and reporting, the bad news. Every time you turn on the television or radio or open a magazine, you get another schadenfreude-inspired riff on how newspapers are "this close" to going out of business, how they aren't relevant to readers, how they didn't notice the changes wrought by the Internet, etc.
What's worse, newspapers do it to themselves – with all the navel-gazing self-pity of 13-year-old Hamlet writing morbid poetry on his MySpace page.
We run stories about the challenges the business is facing and forget to mention why these stories, whether we write them or they come from some other media channel, matter to begin with.
So, why do all these stories matter? Because newspapers – or maybe I should say newspaper companies, their products and their business models – still matter. Maybe more than ever.
Newspapers have long striven to tell all the sides of the story. So, here's the positive side: Newspapers, including this one, your humble servant for 176 years, are not going away.
Newspapers are not ignoring (and never did, at least en masse) the changes that have been brought about by the Internet and digital technology. We're adapting swiftly while remaining focused on the jobs, both new and traditional, our readers and advertisers need us to do for them.
You've heard that paid print newspaper circulation is declining. But did you know that overall readership of the products produced by this newspaper is growing?
The Telegraph – as a multi-channel, multimedia news, entertainment and information company – is serving more readers than it ever has. And the fact that those readers aren't all paying for a copy of the print edition doesn't mean there isn't a viable business model. Selling advertising, not copies of the paper, has always represented the largest portion of our revenue, anyway.
Let's take a look at some of the numbers from a February market survey done by Belden Associates, a national newspaper research and consulting firm:
Almost 70 percent of Southern New Hampshire area adults read The Telegraph online or in print over a 30-day day period. This doesn't even take into account some of our other Web-only products, such as NH.com or NHEvents. com or some of the other niche print products we produce. Individual cable channels or radio stations wish they had that kind of reach in a given market.
And we're still growing.
If we look at our total readers, print and online, and get rid of any duplication, our total readership is 106,080 area adults. (Belden February survey.)
Our average weekday print readership of The Telegraph as of February 2008 is 64,000 – that's 9,000 higher than it was in 2002. (Belden.)
In print, we have 7 percent more readers per copy than the national average. (Belden and Newspaper Association of America 2007 data).
Over 30 days, the Web adds a new, unduplicated 7 percent of folks in this market to the print newspaper's readership. (Belden.)
Looking beyond our core readership area into Manchester, the rest of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New England and beyond, 36 percent of Web readers are unduplicated readers – not reading the print product (Nashua Telegraph.com registered user data).
Traffic on our Web site is still growing robustly. Comparing page views for the first three months of this year over the same period last year:
• Overall traffic (all our sites) is up 27 percent.
• Traffic to our core news sections is up 37 percent.
• Traffic to our forums is up 250 percent.
• Traffic to our local search business directory is up 118 percent.
We continue to roll out new sections and tools for readers, new products for advertisers and enhancements of existing products, including our traditional classifieds, such as jobs and autos.
What does this all mean?
Newspaper companies, at least some of them, are growing in reach and relevance, not shrinking.
Local newspaper companies are still the only ones that will spend what it takes to cover your hometowns in depth and give you the tools you need to be an informed voter, taxpayer, homeowner, parent and resident in your community.
Can you envision a day when people don't need this kind of information anymore? No.
How about a day when people don't get this kind of information from a print product anymore? Sure, at least to some degree.
But the delivery channel doesn't matter. What newspapers uniquely do – deliver the timeliest, professionally researched and meticulously crafted hyper-local content to local readers – will continue to be indispensable to the civic, political and social life of the communities they serve.
And because of that, and because of their incredible penetration in their local markets, newspapers remain a great value and key tool for advertisers looking to reach local customers.
Does all that mean everything's sunshine and lollipops in the newspaper world?
Nope. In a few years, not all of the papers here today will still be here. These are tough times that call for tough, creative, lean organizations full of people who not only embrace change, but who feed on it; people who like long odds and a just fight; people who can each do the work of two or three normal people and who can acquire new skill sets and bodies of knowledge on a weekly – heck, sometimes daily – basis.
Luckily for us, that sounds like a pretty good description of many of the newspaper people I know.
So with apologies to conservative icon William F. Buckley, who famously stood athwart history yelling stop, let's get up, stand atop the history of the companies that write the first drafts of history, and yell "Bring it on."
Ernesto Burden is vice president of digital media at The Telegraph. He can be reached at 594-6458 or eburden@nashuatelegraph.com.
