Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Sometimes it feels like the 1970s in the New York Times and Washington Post newsrooms: reporters battling each other to break news about scandals that threaten to envelop the White House and the presidency of Donald Trump. Only now their scoops come not in the morning edition but in a tweet or iPhone alert near the end of the day.
It is like old times in another way: both newspapers are getting readers to pay, offsetting advertising revenue relinquished to the internet. After years of giving away scoops for nothing online, and cutting staff, the Times and Post are focusing on subscriptions—mostly digital ones—which now rake in more money than ads do.

Their experiences offer lessons for the industry in America, although only a handful of newspapers have a chance at matching their success. A subscription-first approach relies on tapping a national and international market of hundreds of millions of educated English-language readers and converting a fraction of those into paying customers. With enough digital subscribers—Mark Thompson, chief executive of the New York Times, believes his newspaper can get to 10m, from 2m today—the subscriptions-first model could (in theory) generate more profits than business models dependent on print advertising used to.

...For example, many evolving markets are seeing the “death of the middle.” The winners in these markets either offer the broadest breadth or the deepest depth. In evolving markets neither the broadest nor deepest is in trouble, but the middle market is withering. So it is logical to expect the big winners in the news business to either be the broadest or the deepest: To go maximum mass, or maximum specific.

With that as a backdrop, here are eight obvious business models for news now, and in the future. This isn’t a pick one model and stick with it prospect, news businesses should mix and match as relevant....

The Independent has unveiled a unique app based on reader feedback that combines the best of newspaper design with digital interactivity, making the most of tablets or smartphone technologytechnology

... Christian Broughton, Digital Editor at The Independent, said: “Most apps make do with a fairly static main edition. If they offer rolling news, it’s usually hidden away in a separate area. We’ve built breaking news into the very core of The Independent app. Our readers want and deserve breaking news, and they want multimedia too. But they also tell us that they like the feel and texture of a newspaper – nothing is simpler than flipping through pages. In geek-speak, that’s the ultimate intuitive UX! This app gives readers the best of both worlds.”

In October 2012, just 23 percent of Americans told Pew they read even one newspaper the previous day. So who in the world could possibly want or need unlimited access to 2,500 of them?

Alex Gruntsev, EVP and chief innovation officer of PressReader, made a compelling case in a phone interview that his “Netflix-style” subscription service — $29.95 per month — fills a niche in online news publishing by presenting news in a form that many automated aggregators cannot.

PressReader, formerly NewspaperDirect, has long provided PDF replicas mainly as a specialty business, but now it’s focusing on a wider consumer audience. “For just your morning routine, to open a PC was difficult,” Gruntsev said. “But in 2010, with the first iPad, the experience of reading dramatically changed, and it became way more appealing to the average reader.”

Now, PressReader users online or on tablets don’t just get static images of newspaper pages; they can jump into individual stories by clicking headlines. That launches PressReader’s SmartFlow mode, which allows for a seamless stream of stories scrolling left to right....

When we at HuffPost Media started talking about what 2013 was like in the media world, we kept coming back to one word: "insane." It's a sentiment that's almost always hyperbolic, but, in this case, we're sticking with it....

If the DOJ's operations showed how dangerous the White House apparently considered journalists to be, the publication of the Edward Snowden leaks by the Guardian, the Post, the Times and other outlets around the world—including, in one instance, The Huffington Post—provided a perfect example of why. People searching for a better case for the impact journalism can have would be hard-pressed to find one.

The revelations sparked international outcry and debate, turned journalist Glenn Greenwald into a global celebrity, and led to an eye-poppingly brutal response from the British government.The UK's hostility towards the Guardian was breathtaking, even to Americans who had just recently been condemning their own government's excesses. Prime Minister David Cameron's government dispatched civil servants to the paper's offices, where editors were told in no uncertain terms that they could either destroy the hard drives containing the Snowden documents or face crippling legal action. (The paper complied, since it had copies in other countries.)...

Newspaper reading habits have changed in the past few years…….. no one would argue that point. But it is often human nature to exaggerate the pace and degree of change. That of course is good if you need the push to re-invent yourself but less helpful if you are the one who has to manage the transition...

As President Donald Trump wages daily war against the press, millennials are subscribing to legacy news publications in record numbers—and at a growth rate, data suggests, far outpacing any other age group.

Since November's election, the New Yorker, for instance, has seen its number of new millennial subscribers more than double from over the same period a year earlier. According to the magazine's figures, it has 106 percent more new subscribers in the 18-34 age range and 129 percent more from 25-34.

The Atlantic has a similar story: since the election, its number of new subscribers aged 18-24 jumped 130 percent for print and digital subscriptions combined over the same period a year earlier, while 18-44 went up 70 percent.

Newspapers like The Washington Post and The New York Times typically do not share specific subscriber data, but according to a Post spokesperson, its subscriber growth rate is highest among millennials. A New York Times representative relayed that the paper was “seeing similar trends” in subscriptions and pointed to public data on digital traffic that showed its online reach among millennials to be up 9 percent from the same period a year ago.