Audience growing strategies for newspapers

New innitiatives are necessary to grow reach and attract new readers to the newspapers. Efficient combinations of those should be the key element of each newspaper strategy.

Thomas Drensek, Head of Offset Printing, Axel Springer, Germany, and Randy Bennett, Senior Vice President Business Development, Newspaper Association of America, USA, spoke during the first session of WAN’s Readership Conference in Amsterdam in October 16-17, 2008, about their ideas and experience of how to increase the newspapers’ audience.

The current situation of newspapers is not too optimistic. In Germany downwards trends are noticeable, they slided from 27,3 million copies in 1993 to 20,2 million in 2008.

In order to become a trendsetter in a newspaper business – there is a necessity to introduce a model of invention. Axel Springer in Germany brought the idea of starting a quality campaign to avoid additional investments for the newspapers. The campaign is based on two areas: press room and mailing room. Therefore, ASP provides its readers with the following innovations.

Press room:

• special inks (luminescent, aroma)
• special productions (tabloid inserts in broadsheet formats of newspapers)
• special paper (coated coldset which is something between heatset and coldset, on the especially coated paper)

Mail room:

• inkjet (for example to print lucky numbers in every area of newspaper)
• trimming / cover feeding
• stitching
• different kind of inserts
• memo sticks / card glueing

This is, according to the speaker, what print revenue opportunities are all about. All the opportunities mentioned make the product more attractive to the readers.

Randy Bennett began his speech with optimism – newspapers are not in the death spiral. They are not feeling too good, but are still vital.

The challenge for today’s newspapers is to reach the youngest audience. According to studies, online audience grew more than 60% in the last 4 years. Online newspapers can deliver the largest audience comparing to any other media.

What newspapers should do in order to survice and feel well on the market:

• Be a hub of local community: provide information people talk about and want to have
• Give the right product to the right audiences: target geographically, according to age, sex, etc – this attracts advertisers as well
• Reach audience wherever it is aggregating (cooperation with Yahoo was for many newspaper webpages very beneficial)
• Curate content from a variety of sources (ex. Washington Post’s Political Browser)
• Put content in control of users
• Provide a platform of interactivity and conversation
• Re-design and re-size, innovate the printed product as well
• Exist in multimedia / emerging platforms
• Re-organize the company’s structure for audience growth (Sacramento Bee for example has the Senior Vice President of audience development and membership services, plus the entire department responsible only for audience growth).

The future opportunities for newspapers are:

• serving mass and individual needs
• tapping user generated data
• indentifying profitable audience segments
• aggregating audiences beyond newspaper products

In order to see interesting case studies of different newspapers implementing the mentioned advices, go to the GrowingAudience.com

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