Today, many believe the Internet is leading the way to the demise of the newspaper. In fact, all the Internet has done is what USA Today attempted to do – reposition newspapers as mass media in an increasingly micro-niched world.

While many business moguls might have you think the current problem facing newspapers is its business model, I believe the real challenge before the industry is a marketing one – repositioning (or going back to its roots) as an effective target marketing vehicle.

When radio and TV were first introduced, they were considered a threat to newspapers, but history has proven that theory wrong. The reason it was wrong was that cost of entry (advertising time) was so high and the medium was so different. Network TV is true mass media. Network radio is as well, but radio was first to come closer to the newspaper model with news radio geared to a regional audience.

Cable TV finally broke the TV mass marketing mentality and soon appealed to local car dealers, in particular, followed by restaurants and jewelers whose egos made them adore seeing themselves in their ads. If newspapers can learn anything from Cable TV it should be to encourage entrepreneurs to feature themselves in the ads instead of their products as entrepreneurial egos trump ROI every time.  “My wife’s third cousin saw my commercial,” was a common response I’d hear when accompanying news account reps on sales calls to local car dealers. ROI didn’t enter the ad buy equation, not by that point. The value was more basic.

But as the famous newspaper cartoon line from Pogo goes:  “We have met the enemy and he is us.”  Newspapers have done as much, if not more, to damage their own unique selling proposition than the radio, TV, or the Internet by forgetting who and what they are.

USA Today has done more to change how newspapers are expected to look and their positioning as a mass media and The New York Times and Wall Street Journal are eternally chasing the national newspaper moniker as well.  Meanwhile, regional newspapers are being caught in the middle – never a good marketing position. They have the big guns above them and the micro-niched weeklies, direct mail and Internet sites beneath them.

The goal then, is to move from the middle, and not to regain the higher ground. Papers never had that ground. The answer may be retrenching to lower ground and sticking to the knitting.  Meanwhile, the first order of business is to agree that the middle ground is not the place to be.  Let’s learn from the retail market newspapers cover so well… big box stores do well as do well-positioned boutiques.  Middle of the road stores don’t last long.  The middle is not generally the place to be for long-term market success.

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Recently I was at a newspaper conference where we evaluated how well various papers were engaging in the social media world. The irony is that no one has better or more content than newspapers – so much so that many tweets, Facebook posts and blogs take you to various newspaper stories around the country.   So what are newspapers doing wrong?

I think it comes down to two key things:

1. They provide too much content. A news stream is almost like a wire service firing off story after story until hundreds of stories are posted almost within the hour that the news has gone to press.  As a reader, I’d much prefer perhaps one story an hour, or the story of the day, or the story that’s the funkiest, or even a story from the food section, rather than every story being printed in the main section that day.

2. They are too automated.  Precisely because they have so much content, and because they won’t invest in staff or resources to enter the online arena, the newspapers I’ve seen have automated the process.  Too much of any good thing is too much, and the same is true of automation.

I follow social media sites to get the best ideas a business or marketing guru has to offer. I don’t want every line from every book, or every chapter capsulized.  I want a tidbit for the day that I can remember, think about and take with me on my own business travels.  I also follow a person because of the personal touch.

When the tweets put out by a paper are so highly automated that they have no humor, no irony, no personal touch—well, then I might as well be following CNN.  Even if the news is local, I want some sense that a person has decided to put this particular news item out on the internet because it’s special and not just one item out of a thousand for the day.

Social media is best done consistently and regularly, but is not better served by being over served.  Ironically as newspapers moan that their copy is being stolen for free by the Googles of the world, they have entered the social media arena without editing themselves.  And, editing is their strength!

Yes, give some content for free, but learn the art of the tease.  Stop flooding the market with all the news all the time.  Go back to the art of the headline and tell me what’s most important, most humorous, most worthwhile for today rather than flooding me with everything. It’s just too much information.

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The new CMO, according to social media modernist Brian Solis is a Community Management Officer.  Not responsible for getting messages out, this new position is one of engagement and relationship-building.   As Solis states in his new e-book The Art and Science of Blogger Relations: “they are on the front lines of listening and engaging in conversations across the web.”  If you don’t have a Kindle, you may not be able to read it. Solis is totally dedicated to engaging via new media replete with typos throughout the copy and all.

Unlike ivory tower Chief Marketing Officers with big corner offices in corporate complexes, the Community Management Officer is down in the trenches, trolling the web and providing valuable content in key areas.  It’s a person who tends to be ahead of the times, much like Solis who blog published his Social Media Manifesto in June 2007!

Warning: It’s not a short read — at least 11 pdf pages, in direct contrast to the average blog post.

Recommendation: Read it. It foretells the future of communication.

Since the social media world is all about making the world smaller, I was not surprised to see that Solis had co-authored a book on PR with Deidre Breckenridge, a Jersey girl who heads the PR for PFS Marketwyse, an ad agency that pitched me at the newspaper almost a decade ago.  We didn’t hire them, but they had amazing work.  They showed us an ad campaign for positioning the newspaper that I remember to this day.  We didn’t buy it , but  it was a campaign the newspaper industry as a whole through the NAA (Newspaper Association of America) should have adopted. Perhaps if they had, they’d be in better shape today.

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Publishers. Publishers care about publishing. They want the funds to print another day.  Hence, they are concerned with revenue.  Guess what? Blogs are not great revenue producers — at least at first — and publishers are not patient people. They want the ads in today for tomorrow’s edition.  The result?  They are looking for posts that will bring in advertisers. They keep trying to develop content that the Advertising department can sell, rather than content the community wants to read or engage in.  It’s not a good model and it hasn’t worked.

Editors. Editors are a bit better, but also don’t understand the medium.  Great editors understand the need for personality and the public thirst for the news behind the news.  One of my favorite Sunday columns was a local editor’s post on how his reporters got the latest, greatest story — literally the story behind the news. However, the insights were saved for the precious Sunday paper and not posted on the paper’s website.

Another young editor at a different local paper, started a community blog. She inherently understood the need for community voice on the paper’s website, but didn’t understand that community in the blogging world means individuals not organizations.  She approached non-profits in the State with the opportunity to post on a blog set up for local causes. The result is a series of mini-press releases on golf outings and benefactor and grant news rather than insights into the causes.  I can guarantee you that the only people reading the blog are the marketing folks at other non-profits.  The real community isn’t interested.

Writers. Writers understand writing and followings, but newspaper writers are in competition with themselves. They are saving their stories for the paper, hoping to get in the Sunday edition. Their blog posts are bland and again, tend not to tell the story behind the story.  Why was it a difficult story to write?  How did they get a crying mother to admit her son had gone sour? How did they learn about the story in the first place?  Don’t just tell me you wrote a great story. Tell me why you felt it was worthy of the newspaper. Then, you might draw me to your story in the paper, but mostly, I’m not going to bother to read your current blog. It’s not giving me any insight into your craft.

Newspapers are built for blogging.  They just haven’t realized it yet, or approached it in the right way. I wish they would. I’m a news junkie at heart and would eat it up — as would a huge segment of the online world.

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