Find It online classifieds progress
For those interested in the progress of our Find It free online classifieds offering, we regularly update the Find It blog.
Broadband, newspapers and sheep dags
Alan Mutter is, among other things, a blogger passionate about journalism and technology. I referred in a post yesterday to his post about the challenges to the newspaper model. Alan was in New Zealand in March and posted about the problems of poor and expensive broadband coverage. He also labels NZ newspaper websites as being from the 1990s.
If Alan Mutter were to visit Australia he would be even more critical of our broadband coverage. It is slow, expensive and patchy in its geographic spread. How we are expected to be competitive with such poor infrastructure is a question which must be asked of politicians. While it suits me as a retail newsagent because I will benefit from a slower migration online, I get the reality that news and information will shift online – it provides me with an opportunity to reinvent business.
Our politicians MUST fix the broadband mess and quickly. The cost to the economy of our businesses getting left behind because of poor broadband policy will be extraordinary.
What Mutter would like, I suspect, is our newspaper websites. The Fairfax offering is among the best in the world. News Ltd is catching up. Outside of these giants, we also have great sites such as Perth Norg showing what independents can do. Our sites are certainly better than those in New Zealand. We also have a robust online classifieds community including the Find It offering I am behind.
The news and information sites in Australia ought to be a motivator to newsagents to act on their own futures. For that to happen we need to collectively lift our heads out of the sand and see what is happening – slow broadband or not.
Alan also blogs eloquently and humorously about “dags“.
Tattersalls and The Age promote together
The Age and Tattersalls have banded together. Anyone purchasing a Tatts card gets a four week weekend subscription to The Age free.
As a retail only newsagent it is frustrating that I may lose some of my Saturday and Sunday sales of The Age. What is in this for me?
Since this promotion is really about boosting Tatts Card sales I’d like to see a robust reward for newsagency employees who make this campaign a success.
As the promotion currently stands I would not expect a big uptake. We will promote it through posters and brochures as required but the feeling among our team is that connecting The Age with Tattersalls products is not the best cross promotion they could run.
Great ad foodland
Take a look at the brilliant full page ad Foodland ran in The Advertiser in Adelaide last week.
We have run a similar but much smaller campaign across the counter of our newsXpress newsagency using flyers. The customer support against the behemoths of supermarkets, petrol outlets and c-stores is excellent. Australians want small businesses to thrive.
Newsagents ought to consider such a campaign promoting their retail channel. It’s not a new proposal. I put it forward in 2002 and had 150 newsagents offer support. None of the newsagent suppliers would get behind it nor did the associations at the time. Maybe it is time to revisit such a campaign. However, I suspect that this is now best executed at the marketing group level where discipline can be managed.
Newspaper front page advertising
The American Journalism Review has an good article by Donna Shaw about ore advertising getting onto the front pages of newspapers.
Page-one ads may net premium prices, but they’re distasteful to many journalists who believe they violate the purity of page one and the sacred wall between news and business. From a design standpoint, they can detract from the flow and order of a page. They also eat up space that otherwise could be devoted to stories, particularly in an era of dwindling newsholes.
I wonder what Shaw would make of the post-it type ads which Fairfax sticks on their mastheads here in Australia. These stuck on ads are more intrusive than front page ads.
Newsagency training for IT people
Daniel Kenny joined Tower Systems on Monday of this week to work out of our Brisbane office. Dan has spent time this week working behind the counter at our newsXpress Forest Hill store. I bought this newsagency in February 1996 to provide practical experience to me and the team at Tower as we pursued better software for newsagents. Daniel is the latest of many from the Tower Systems team to be trained at Forest Hill. Usually, new team members like Daniel have several stints at Forest Hill before we let them loose with clients. This practical experience augments the more formal training in our software and serves to provide valuable context for what we do.
Online vs newspapers
In $2B in newspaper print ads periled, Alan Mutter has an excellent post about the challenges to the print newspaper model. While the perspective and numbers are from the US, they relate to the Australian experience except that we are behind in terms of online migration and benefiting – in terms of publisher action – from this. As Mutter says:
Publishers may get away with short-changing loyal newspaper readers for a time, if they can successfully reposition their businesses, rapidly recover their profitability and use some of the new earnings to refurbish their tattered core products. Failure to do so, however, may irretreivably damage a business that once seemed so preternaturally invulnerable.
Newsagents need to read what Mutter and others have to say to be fully informed in planning for their future. By understanding the position of publishers we can better set our own direction.
Paul Gillin has written an excellent article on the consequences of what Mutter had blogged about.
My concern is that newsagents don’t get it. They don’t understand the iceberg in front of them and the impact on their business whey they hit it. Publishers do and are reacting. Newsagents, however, are expecting publishers and other old media partners to “look after” them.
This has been on my mind as I prepare my presentation for the ANF Convention next week on the Gold Coast. I’ll be talking about the Newsagency of the Future with a focus on IT best practice providing a roadmap. But more on that here another time.