Newspapers in the information business?

This post first appeared in Newspapers & Technology in January, 2007.

I don’t know how many times in the last year I’ve heard someone with their feet mired in the traditional ink-on-paper newspaper business try to argue that he is really in the information business.

Some of those characters even believe it. But the cement around their ankles and thought processes keeps them slogging away with the old models and methods while the world changes quickly around them.

Tim McGuire, editor and senior vice president of the (Minneapolis) Star Tribune, is quoted on the subject in “The Art of Leadership in News Organizations” by Shelby Coffey III.

“Many people have heard the old story about railroads and how they should have realized they were in the transportation business in the same way newspapers ought to realize they are in the information business,” according to McGuire. “I heard someone else say a few years ago that in fact the railroad people knew they needed to be in the transportation business. They just loved the railroads so much they couldn’t make the change. There is a lot of that in our business.”

Indeed there is.

Under attack

From adapted news cycles, changing views in objective journalism, and generally trying to come up with new ways of paying the bills, traditional newspapers quite correctly feel like the business is under attack.

And what is the natural reaction when under attack? Usually, hunker down in a hole and keep your head down. But if it doesn’t look like that is going to work, maybe it is time to try a counter-attack, or, alternatively, come out of the hole with all guns blazing.

In a world of instant feedback and precise, automated ad targeting — a lot of us waited far too long before coming out of that hole with guns blazing.

It is a bit like the scene in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” where the whole Bolivian army is waiting.

“The losers are likely to be those companies that try to make money by pouring old-media wine into the new Web bottles,” notes Business 2.0 magazine in its March edition. “The winners will be the players that invent new ways to tap into what the Web brings to the party; instant feedback, instant analysis, and the collective wisdom of a billion users.”

Advertisers and the agencies that represent them have become much more savvy in finding out what works and what doesn’t — in a very short amount of time — and they vote with their wallets.

We have gone way past the days when someone could say, “Half of my advertising works like a charm and half does me absolutely no good, but the trouble is, I’m not sure which half is which.”

For example, ad agency Ogilvy & Mather now uses a software optimizer that runs 5,000 to 10,000 calculations every time it evaluates how well an ad campaign is working.

Dynamic results

With that data, the agency is able to pull non-performing ads right away or adapt the campaigns on the fly. And some advertising vendors on the Web have gone to a pay-for-performance program in which publishers only get paid for advertising if it sells product or creates verifiable results in the form of leads or an order.

Imagine if newspapers went to such a system.

The unfortunate truth of the matter is that newspapers, with a few exceptions, don’t even do a very good job of keeping track of their own vast stores of information, much less data tracking readers and how they use the information provided.

For that reason, I think a lot of the rhetoric about being in the information business is perhaps just wishful thinking.

###