Who Reads Newspapers Anymore? You’d Be Surprised

I’ve always loved newspapers, and it stems from childhood. My family always got the daily newspaper and we shared it among the five of us. We could count on my mom to completely trash it. She never put the sections back together, so we had to reconstruct it before we could properly read it. I promised myself that when I was on my own, I’d buy my own paper and be the first one to touch its crisp, pristine pages.

Like most newspaper devotees, there’s something ceremonious about this. I read the sections in a certain order, beginning with the sports page; when I’ve finished I feel better able to understand my place in the world.

Even as Trump harangues journalists, circulations are on the rise

Sadly, with the rise of digital, we’ve seen newspapers around the country steadily going out of business, and many think the industry is dead. Not so fast. Even as Donald Trump continues to harangue journalists and label excellent, iconic publications like the New York Times and Washington Post fake news, their circulations have risen. What’s happening may be a backlash to Trump, but thoughtful people still want to know what’s going on in the world, and they know they’re not going to comprehensive information from FOX.

Those newspapers that have survived are adapting and filling a need. They’re finding new ways to reach their audiences. Publishers are taking digital strategies and applying to them to their print operations.

1. Deepen the focus on local markets

Hearst Newspapers has acquired dozens of newspapers since 2016. A big part of their strategy is staying local, placing an emphasis on regional excellence. Hearst started as a family newspaper, and it has stayed true to these roots, even as the chain has grown to a huge, diverse media company extending to 150 countries, generating $10B in revenue.

2. Deepen the engagement

Combine the newspaper with a digital offering, creating free and premium websites. An example: San Francisco has sfgate.com and sfchronicle.com.

The SF Gate is fast and buzzy, run by a separate digital editorial team while the Chronicle is run by the core newsroom. By freeing up those sites to be more competitive editorially and more savvy on sharable content. The traffic has grown from 20 to a whopping 60% reach through this strategy.

3. Building market-specific products

Hearst has more than 4,000 employees across the country, publishing 22 dailies and 64 weeklies, but they’re committed to building products. Example: In San Antonio, Hearst started an effort called Spurs Nation. Neither a website nor magazine, it’s a whole platform, with a print product and a local Sunday TV show and digital video. The Spurs actually ended up working with Spurs Nation.

4. Leverage data to

identify audience preferences

Hearst is investing big in data, because they want to know as much about their users as possible. Understanding their market means that they can continue to offer the right kind of content at the right times. Fundamental business intelligence is critical.

5. Speed to market with comprehensive news and information

You have to have something worth paying for. Breaking news might be one function; deeper analytical journalism another. There’s room for both. People are still reading. They’re curious and want to stay informed. There is still a need for information beyond the 140-character sound bite.

Hearst is on the move

Hearst is driving its own success through creative use of digital tools and social media, plenty of metrics and good old-fashioned reporting. We’ve come full circle. The delivery of news is really what newspapers are all about.

Are you ready to outsource your content marketing program? Talk to us at Top of Mind Marketing. We’re writers and content marketing experts.

Tired of Fake News? Facebook’s Disputed News Tag Goes Live

Unless you’ve just crawled out of Sleepy Hollow, you know that there’s a bit of a controversy going on with the news these days—especially the news that’s coming out of the White House. We’re accustomed to never quite trusting our politicians, and while we’d like to have faith that our journalists are entirely objective, the times clearly have changed. The days of Walter Cronkite, the most trusted man in America, are over. People these days are getting their news from the internet, and they assume that because they read it, it’s true. But scan the morning news, from Breitbart to the venerable New York Times, and you’ll begin to see that the “news” varies dramatically, depending on who’s writing the headlines.

As our journalists report on the news coming out of the new Trump administration, the White House counters the facts with what they call “alternative facts”. What? There are no alternative facts. If we do our due diligence, we find that the White House is just plain lying. Again. We’ve never seen anything like this, and it’s lowering the bar on truth and integrity.

Facebook responds to alternative facts

Facebook has decided that, as a public application that reaches more than 1.86 billion monthly active users, they have both influence and a responsibility, so they have created a new Disputed tag that will appear beneath news stories on the site that have been deemed inaccurate.

• Facebook has added a new Help page outlining how the system works.
• Stories flagged as fake by users will be reviewed by independent fact-checking organizations, including Politifact and Snopes.com.
• Those organizations will be signatories to a “Fact-checkers’ Code of Principles”maintained by the journalism nonprofit Poynter Institute. The principles include nonpartisanship and transparency in sourcing and funding.

Disputed posts and rankings

There’s no indication yet whether the Disputed designation will have a direct impact on how a story is handled by Facebook’s ranking algorithms. The thinking is that users will be less likely to share stories that have received the Disputed tag, reducing their likelihood of being spread.

A dependency, of course, is that the flagging process itself can take several days, which is plenty of time for a story to get plenty of attention. We all know that a story that is topical and sexy, accompanied by an attention-grabbing image, can go viral within a few hours. The internet and social media have made global communication immediate. One big dependency of the Disputed tag is its due diligence: it takes time to research the verity of a fact.

What does Facebook have to gain?

There’s another imperfection of this system that will likely satisfy nobody. Despite huge public pressure to tackle fake news, particularly from the political left, Facebook has no real motivation to tell its readers what to believe.

Potential for reduced user engagement

From a business perspective, filtering or flagging disputed news stories could reduce user engagement among those who had previously enjoyed a steady diet of alternative facts. The move has already invited scathing criticism from the right, potentially actively alienating a huge swathe of Facebook users who apparently feed on the fake news coming out of the White House.

A final thought: It’s an initial effort by a medium that reaches billions of users/month. While it may or may not be effective or completely successful, it may set the stage for other social media applications to look for ways to censor the rise of alternative facts.

Do you need help with your content marketing program? Talk to us at Top of Mind Marketing. We’re writers and content marketing experts.