Memo to P-I employees: Think lean
Publisher Roger Oglesby asks the staff to send in suggestions for how to create a profitable online business model for The P-I.
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s reporters and editors might by excused for wondering if their top manager wasn’t rubbing salt in the wounds when Publisher Roger Oglesby sent around a staff memo Wednesday seeking “Ideas for partnerships, part time models, revenue sharing, freelancing and other creative types of structures that might help us reach our goal of creating a profitable (online) business model in the market.”
Oglesby seemed as stunned as the rest of the staff when Steve Swartz, president of Hearst Newspapers, The P-I’s owner, dropped his bombshell Jan. 9 that the 146-year-old print paper will probably be history by mid-March. But Oglesby is scrambling to catch up. Oglesby noted that Swartz was serious about Hearst’s interest in perhaps converting The P-I to a Web-only operation. Lincoln Millstein, Hearst’s digital guru who accompanied Swartz, is looking for, “thoughts on how to maintain and grow our online audience so we might have the competitive advantage in the market,” Oglesby’s staff memo said. Millstein, he added, would also like to know how an electronic P-I can make more money.
Hearst doesn’t publicly discuss its finances and Swartz and Millstein brushed off staffers’ shouted pleas for more details of future plans for The P-I during their newsroom appearance Friday. But current newspaper industry wisdom says online revenue accounts for only about 10 percent of print revenue. Hearst is looking for ideas for a viable online-only business model for the Seattle market to bridge that gap, Oglesby said.
One idea that probably won’t draw much enthusiasm from The P-I’s grieving employees: how to make good on Swartz’s promise that even if The P-I survives in some digital form its staff of 170 will have to be cut deeply. “Think lean,” Oglesby’s memo urges. “Invent what journalism can and should be at a lean online-only operation.”
Sometimes, however, thinking lean can be tough when you are in survival mode. P-I Managing Editor David McCumber, who achieved modest star status on the video circuit with his cameo as the unhappy backup man during Swartz’s speech, probably summed up best the prevailing reaction to his boss’s pitch-in-and-help memo. “It’s hard,” McCumber wrote in the paper’s daily Big Blog, “to be too upbeat about anything without sounding ridiculous.”
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Comments:
Posted Thu, Jan 15, 7:35 a.m. inappropriate
That's the point others are making as well - Hearst blew it in its announcement by not explaining, as the Weekly puts it, the P-I is only half dead. What the hell, the P-I has always been for sale.
Posted Thu, Jan 15, 1:17 p.m. inappropriate
Here's what I'd consider doing at the P-I:
Keep seattlepi.nwsource.com domain brand - it has all the online search value now, with 80% out of state visitors and 20% in-state, but slowly morph it into a local news site with hyperlocal blogs contributing content and drawing visitors.
Gradually establish a world brand to make good use of the globe, postintelligencer.com or similar, as an affiliate targeting a broader audience using different ad mechanisms.
Use the former to generate revenue from local advertising, with a system that automates ad placement, bidding, and approval. Use the later site to generate revenue from a different ad scheme to display ads local to the reader-- perhaps provided by Google or Microsoft. In either case, automate the advertising process to make it competitive. Establish affiliate relationships with quality third-party content providers (such as Craigslist and action/service sites) where it adds value and makes sense for readers. Analyze the user data to decide what's valuable to keep producing, focus greater effort on evergreen content and keep that which lends cred as a publication, develop a scalable IA and gradually build into it as a long-term venture.