The Business of Free

Juan Antonio Giner is a provocative and innovative newspaper editor and consultant. He is partner-director of INNOVATION International Media Consulting and his talk this morning was called To be Free and Compact.
He says: "The question is not whether your paper should be free or not free, the question is to read or not to read." Surveys of newspaper readers show this is what they say about us: We are boring, angry, frustrating and irritating. "If we are in the business of satisfying a sado-masochist audience, we are doing well."
Okay, that was fun, but here's the heart of his message — Free and compact papers are a business model. A smart paper that provides intelligent and insightful content will compete.
The problem with many dailies is they think more pages are better, but that not the case. Most readers are only reading 10 per cent of a paper's content. Throwing more stuff at them doesn't help. French paper Libre lll  went from 200,000 circ to 85,000 in five weeks after doubling pages. He cited examples of compact papers that offer fewer pages and gained higher readership.  A paper in Madrid went to 40 from 48 pages and readership increased. Smaller paper, people read more.
He says the internet is not killing us, free papers are not killing us, we are killing ourselves.
As proof he offered several examples of papers around the world and examined their coverage of major stories. The papers were all the same. Same headlines, same quotes, same pix.
When Saddam Hussein was captured paper after paper ran headlines that said: "We got him" the pix was Saddam's head shot. One paper, The Detroit Free Press declared: The Face of Defeat.—  The pix showed someone from its local Iraqi community tearing up a photo of Saddam. The story was intelligent and different and Giner says this is what readers want.
Too many papers are a mirror -  they say their goal is reflect reality. Wrong, wrong, wrong says Giner. "I don't want to reflect reality, I want to understand reality. I want deeper."  Don't record the news, find the news. Giner says be smart and think about what you are giving readers. As an example he showed a story about breast cancer. One cover had a stunning picture of a woman, half-naked and posed from the side. You couldn't see her face, but you could see the side of her breast. It was tasteful and a lovely portrait. He contrasted it with a cover from the New York Times Magazine. Same issue. The pix showed a woman standing, one breast covered by a cloth, the other exposed showing the scar where her breast had been cut off. That's the story, Giner said. The first one — that's soft news. Readers don't want it. The NYT cover — This is hard news. This is what breast cancer looks like, he said.
Quoteable: "We are moving from readers, to audience and audiences to communities."
"The black hole of the newspaper industry today is distribution. We have a lot to learn from free newspapers."
"Our competitors are the 90 per cent of the public who do not read newspapers."
"We need to be better than ever and better than anyone else at collecting, editing, filtering and presenting real information."
"Readers take in 10 per cent of what you produce — 90 per cent is not used."
Juan Antonio Giner can be reached at: giner@innovation-mediaconsulting.com
Blogged by jpscribbler
(The images of the papers' front pages comes, not from Giner, but from the Brass Tacks Design website's "New Rules for Newspapers" where they make very similar points re: being smart and different)

Comments

[Gina Monaco]

Everything old is new again. Maybe this is just me, but when I was in journalism school back in the "day" -- won't say how long ago -- it was all about "hard news" and getting your reader's attention to scoop the competition. Then we had the "soft news" revolution because apparently readers were tired of "sensationalism". I should also mention that straight out of school I went to work for the Calgary Sun, so I know a little but about that. As a reporter I was always asking, "what's the story?" -- trying to find it, trying to find what made it unique, Show the scar, as Giner suggests. So, I guess the message from this presentation is that soft news has put newspapers in readership crisis and hard new is the way to go???...again!