Letters to a publisher II: Treat your readers with respect

How should a media executive manage the business during a time of disruptive technological change? Alfonso Nieto attempted to answer that question in his book "Letters to a newspaper publisher," written in 1987 when newsrooms in Spain were moving from typewriters to computers. His comments have acute relevance today.

Alfonso Nieto, University of Navarra portrait

In this letter to a fictitious newspaper publisher, which he titled "The dwarf and the giant", Alfonso Nieto criticized media owners, managers, and journalists for failing to take into account the problems and the needs of their readers. Nieto saw the media industry as arrogant, looking down on the public and their viewpoints.

Beyond that, the media viewed their audiences as merely market segments to be lumped into groups based on age, gender, income, occupation, or other attributes that they could monetize. 

The arrogance

The media used a language, he believed, that emphasized their superior education and social position rather than trying to create a more intimate connection with their readers. This could very well describe the traditional media today, which have been losing readers and TV viewers because they focus much of their attention on the conflicts among political parties rather than finding solutions.

Letters to a newspaper publisher: it's not just the bottom line

How should a media executive manage the business during a time of disruptive technological change? Alfonso Nieto attempted to answer that question in his book "Letters to a newspaper publisher," written in 1987 when newsrooms in Spain were moving from typewriters to computers. Nieto was one of the pioneers in the discipline of media economics, and his writings have acute relevance today, when the media world has been disrupted again by digital technology. He was rector of the University of Navarra 1979-1991, where I now teach. 

Alfonso Nieto, University of Navarra Photo

Alfonso Nieto worked as a consultant to media executives in addition to teaching, and in this book he wanted to go public with his advice without violating any confidential information. So he created a fictitious news executive to whom he wrote a series of letters with some down-home advice. He wanted publishers to think not just of their business results and their investors but also of their publication's impact on employees, the audience, and democratic society as a whole. 

(It is interesting to note that the Business Roundtable, an organization of business leaders in the U.S., recently advocated a major change in management philosophy in line with Nieto: take into account all stakeholders--employees, customers, suppliers, and community--not just the shareholders.)

Media seek 'emotional engagement' of audiences

Sylvia Chan-Olmsted is one of the leading scholars of media economics, and she stopped by the University of Navarra Dec. 13 to chat about some of the trends she is seeing in the industry.

"Media companies need to translate data into intelligence."

Chan-Olmsted, a professor at the University of Florida, singled out three trends:

1. There is a new value chain in media. Content is becoming "unbundled", meaning users can buy individual movies, TV shows, or songs without having to pay for products they don't want. 

Content is becoming crowd-sourced, meaning that consumers are recommending things to each other through social media.

And the major media companies are harnessing their data about users to recommend media products and even create content based on their customers' tastes.

Media platforms like YouTube, Apple, Amazon, Hulu, and Facebook are all starting to invest billions of dollars in original content to challenge Netflix, whose business model has disrupted the movie studios, TV networks, and cable services.

The audiences are in charge: are publishers listening?

Recently I was invited to give a lecture at the University of Malaga--"The audiences are in charge: Are publishers listening?" The audience had students in their doctoral, master's and bachelor's programs, as well as a number of faculty.

Below is a summary of the presentation.

1. The marriage of convenience between advertising and journalism is over. For proof, look no further than the graphic below, which shows that newspapers in Spain have lost more than 500 million euros in ad revenue since 2009, and that includes the revenue they get from digital. (The U.S. is very similar.)

In the future, news media will need to develop a deep relationship with their users. The important thing will be not the quantity of eyeballs reached, as measured by page views and unique users, but the quality of the relationship with the users.

Versión en español

Jarvis's new role for journalists: be the organizer

Jarvis: think first of the community

Several years ago I was working in Belarus, a former Soviet republic, where independent newspapers have a hard time surviving. The government denies them access to state-monopoly newsstands, overcharges them for their newsprint, and harasses them at every turn.

We looked at one publisher's website data to see if he might have an opportunity to generate revenue online. Turns out the website's most popular page contained the community's bus schedules. And what's more, his community spent more time on that page -- 5 minutes, 30 seconds per visit -- than any other. This publisher, a journalist, was humbled to see that a simple list was more important to his readers than the journalism.

The Belarus example came to mind as I was reading Jeff Jarvis's new book, in which he talks about a new role for journalists: "Helping a community better organize its knowledge so it can better organize itself." 

Building your audience: tips from a pro

Versión en español aquí.

Mi Li, audience development manager for Fiscal Times in New York, recently spoke via Skype to my multimedia business journalism class at Tsinghua University about how to build an audience.

The online publication, which focuses on fiscal, budgetary and economic issues, launched in March 2011 and has grown to 1 million unique visitors and 6 million page views monthly.

One of the key elements of her strategy when she started at the publication a year ago was to develop a daily newsletter to create audience awareness and drive traffic to articles. This was a strategy that also worked well at American City Business Journals, a chain of weekly business publications, where she was previously marketing manager.