Author: Mark Fletcher

Publishers control how newspapers are merchandised and sold in Australia – especially in retail newsagencies. It’s how it has always been. Rather than giving retailers a free rein, publishers shackle these businesses with rules. If they relaxed the rules and put financial rewards on the table for real growth I am certain they would achieve sales growth beyond their current projections.

I can understand that rules make it easier to manage a channel of independent small businesses. However, this one size fits all approach is holding the more entrepreneurial newsagents back.

Here are some of the strategies I’d implement right away in pursuit of incremental sales if there was greater reward and if some of the rules were set aside for me:

Display. Stop displaying newspapers on one place and start displaying them at three high traffic locations in store.

Display. Create a free standing spring loaded display box which allows the full front page to be displayed to customers approaching the unit.

Loyalty. Introduce a prepaid arrangement which has built in cover price rewards with an appropriate mechanism to encourage more purchases. (Home Delivery costs more than single copy sales for all involved yet home delivery customers get a significant discount off price.)

Packaging. Pre-bagging newspapers on Saturdays and Sundays to provide confidence that all inserts and included and to eliminate the need for bagging at the counter. Advertising for my business on around 20% of the bag.

Marketing. Use of an electronic poster displaying more relevant and current promotions for the newspaper.

Competitions. Running a competition based on stories in the newspaper over a week with a weekly prize. Designed to engage customers in the newspaper and their purchase location.

Bundling. Experiment with two title bundling for a special price – drawing sales for one title from another.

I’ve been vague with some of these ideas and not listed others because I don’t want to give too much away here.

While News and Fairfax are right to pursue business opportunities online they have, in my view, an excellent opportunity to increase single copy sales if they allow newsagents to make business decisions about how to best retail their product. The reward for the publishers should be an increase in sales and the reward for the successful newsagents bonus commission on each sale. Simple really.

Unleash the entrepreneurs I say!

This is an easy decision for publishers.

A Google AdSense case study on growing revenue from blog based advertising from $200 to $3000 a day.

This is our Alpha display. It’s at the end of an aisle and seen by all our customers. We have over 15,000 customers through our store every week. I mention this to put a value on the aisle end.

The display took us an hour to create and will be up for a week. We’ll sell, through the month, probably 60 copies of Alpha. That’s a $30.00 return.

Like all newsagents we provide this space along with two other display spaces free without cost to suppliers. Okay, more fool us. Supermarkets and others charge. There are historic and contractual reasons why newsagents cannot charge.

I’m not having a crack at News Ltd in raising this issue of promotional space here but rather giving time to another way newsagents are disadvantaged in supplier relationships compared to our competitors. Publishers and distributors have a wonderful asset in newsagencies yet they continue to pursue sales elsewhere and risk killing off the newsagent asset which is so crucial to brand promotion as evidenced in our Alpha display.

Click here for a transcript of an excellent (October 12) discussion hosted by Frank Ahrens,
Washington Post Media and Entertainment Industry Reporter, on the future of newspapers. The whole transcript is well worth reading, especially the discussion surrounding E-Ink and paper thin electronic newspapers. This is not funereal in style but rather an upbeat and realistic on how newspapers might evolve to meet changing times and technology challenges.

Ahrens was one of the first journalists earlier this year to question the future of newspapers.

E Ink Corp. has announced that Philips and E Ink have built a 10.1″ flexible electronic paper display. From their press release:

Less than 300 microns thick, the paper-white display is as thin and flexible as construction paper. With a 10.1″ diagonal, the prototype achieves SVGA (600×800) resolution at 100 pixels per inch and has a 10:1 contrast ratio with 4 levels of grayscale.

E Ink® Imaging Film is a novel display material that looks like printed ink on paper and has been designed for use in paper-like electronic displays. Like paper, the material can be flexed and rolled. As an additional benefit, the E Ink Imaging Film uses 100 times less energy than a liquid crystal display because it can hold an image without power and without a backlight.

E-Ink has hopes that this product will be the basis of an electronic newspaper in the future. Fascinating to watch this developing!

Read more for their press release here.

A good article from Fortune magazine about the considerable activity within News Corp. since the Rupert Murdoch speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in April this year. The article talks about News’ two pronged approach: bulk up quickly on internet distribution and then add features like video search, instant messaging, VoIP etc. It also talks about Fox TV creating content based on FOX TV shows for access online through News websites. This quote from the Fortune article, including a quote from Murdoch, establishes good background for their acquisitions and rapid integration with existing brands:

When you’ve got a big, expanding world economy, you’d expect a boom in advertising, and it hasn’t been there,” he explains a couple of weeks later in his Los Angeles office, a spacious fifth-floor redoubt overlooking the sprawling lot of his 20th Century Fox movie studio. Even as traditional ad sales failed to boom, he says, small in-house websites like Foxnews.com and Britain’s Times Online started generating meaningful revenue on puny investments. “You start putting two and two together, and we decided to abandon our defenses and get offensive.”

No surprise really that Just Listed has moved back to just an online model. While some newspapers are crowing about this, their energy would be better spent reinvesting print classifieds to build a deeper consumer connect. There could be life left in print classifieds in publishers invested some money in this to differentiate the offering to online.

First up, I’m not a newspaper expert. My comments are more from the perspective of a newsagent and a reader.

I like the new size of The Guardian newspaper. It’s easier to read while traveling. The small size holds together well – pages do not fall away. It seems to be edited in a size and reader friendly way. The smaller size makes it more enticing to the consumer. It does not feel like a broadsheet cramped to fit the Berliner format. This feels different. It retains the quality and the feel of space luxury of the broadsheet but places it in an easier to handle size. For example on the op ed pages they are able to still give an issue good space with good graphics. This is proving to be more of a challenge in the tabloid format.

I like the feel of The Guardian compared to the (relatively) new tabloid Times. As a traditional broadsheet newspaper reader I find The Guardian less of a transitional challenge than what is happening with the The Times.

I took the photo above at a trade show in Birmingham yesterday and it shows the (spring loaded) unit given to retailers. (Many newspapers are retailed this way in the UK.) It makes retailing the product easy and keeps customers happier.

A couple of newsagents I spoke with tell me that the format change has brought customers back to The Guardian and you can see that in the sales figures just released. The challenge is to maintain that growth into next year to prove it is more than just curiosity driven.

Google Local, now live, redefines search and will put the wind up local newspapers and directories. Try it out and enter London newsagents and you’ll get a map of newsagents in London. This link should take you there. You can quickly find what you are looking for.

Google Local is the next yellow pages, trading post, classifieds all rolled into one.

I’m in Brimingham UK and just picked up the Sunday papers. Free today with The Mail, a DVD of On Golden Pond. Free today with News of the World, a DVD of series 2 episode 1 of Little Britain (brilliant comedy series). In some stores their Sunday papers are sealed in plastic while in others they are stacked in holders to keep everything together. A couple of stores I saw where product is stacked without any guide inserts flow to the floor. Two retailers I spoke with are frustrated with publisher obsession with DVD promotions yet they like the sales interest.

Courtery of Kareem Mayan’s weblog is a of a conversation with 5 teenagers at the recent web 2.0 conference in San Francisco. Read the transcript and you’ll get a candid insight into the way this generation is using the internet and some comments about newspapers along the way. Here are aome brief highlights:

Yahoo? What’s that?

eBay? Mum likes it.

MySpace.com? Never use after high school.

Music? Don’t pay for it.

Ring Tones: Pay. Enjoy.

The “Not Happy Jan” TV commercial for the Yellow Pages is still regarded as one of the best according to a report in an advertising industry journal this week.

You coldn’t run the ad today because Jan, having forgotten to place an ad in the Yellow Pages could get more immediate and lower cost success through a Google AdSense campaign or even a Yellow Pages pay per click Bid Smart campaign.

The world has changed.