Newspaper starts video podcasts, trumps TV
washingtonpost.com has loaded its first video podcast up to iTunes.
Newsagents lose out to Coles Myer on the iTunes deal
Bill Express, a major trading partner of newsagents, has announced to the ASX today that they are providing electronic vouchers that can be used on the internet to acquire and download products from Apple’s iTunes Music Store.
While it is likely that Bill Express were brought to the table by Coles Myer after they did their deal with Apple, it is appalling that newsagents have been cut out of business which should be ours. We have the technology network and we have the connect with the iTunes demographic. What 15 year old wants to go to a supermarket to get an online voucher. They’d be happier in a newsagency where they can get music magazines and other products.
I hope that Bill Express robustly represented newsagents as a better recharge outlet than supermarkets.
Australia Post privatisation (by stealth)
Rather than just blog about the franchising of the Australia Post PostShop network and how the government owned business is taking sales from independent small businesses like mine I have written to Helen Coonan, Minister for Communication, Fran Bailey, Minister for Small Business, Phil Barresi, MHR for Deakin and the Chairman of Australia Post. I will be interested to read their responses.
Google Base taking on newspaper classifieds, Craigslist, eBay et al?
While Craigslist and eBay have been a frustration for newspaper publishers, Google Base will be the biggest disruption of newspaper advertising yet. It will cause an urgent response from publishers. There are several reports online about Google Base including: This report at Business Week. And a more detailed report at searchenginewatch – this includes details of an official Google announcement.
Based on the database entry screens, Google Base is gathering all the data it needs to compete with newspaper classifieds and the major online portals like tradingpost.com.au, reasestate.com.au, carsales.com.au, seek.com.au etc. So, not only will newspaper publishers need to respond but so will online classified portals.
Consumers like free. The obvious pitch of the paid sites and newspapers is the strength of their brand. They’ll say people will use Google Base as an ad-on. Maybe so. At the lower end of the market if Google gets its offering right and can connect with the community it will be game over in terms of online and newspaper models.
Tale of two government businesses: Telstra vs. Australia
Why is the government demanding that Telstra compete in an open marketplace while it protects the best stores in the Australia Post retail network from open competition?
Why has the government allowed Australia Post to aggressively pursue product lines sold by small business newsagents?
Why has the government demanded that newsagents deregulate (in 1999) yet refused to open the sale of postage stamps to the same retail competition?
Is the government prepared to compete with all small business sectors or will it restrict its enterprises to competing with newsagents?
How does the government feel when its employees visit small business newsagencies, note retail prices for items and return to their PostShop and adjust sales prices?
Does the government have a small business policy which is pro small business?
Why will the government not set a policy of selling off the PostShop retail businesses to local small business people?
Big W does not sell for less
Roger Corbett of Woolworths has been gracing TVs again reminding us that the Woolworths Big W network sells for less. I price checked ten stationery items yesterday and found that we beat their price on nine of the items. Based on this small sample I’d say that they don’t sell for less, certainly not on all lines as their advertising implies.
Mary works for the second day in a row
Princess Mary and her new baby have propelled New Idea and Woman’s Day to strong sales on day two of their seven day on sale period. My small sample of newsagents suggests between 6% and 30% growth with New Idea leading in growth.
Coles Myer beats small business to iTunes
It is disappointing that Apple has chosen to partner with the giant Coles Myer retail chain for the sale of prepaid cards for its iTunes store than partner with small business newsagents. Apple has shunned a wonderful opportunity to demonstrate its support for independently owned small business stores but has instead decided to support Australia’s largest retailer.
Newspaper M-F sales figures hide some potholes
I’ve been looking at day of week sales data for newspapers in several states and am seeing some interesting trends of specific days of the week which are contrary to the dat reflected in the Audit figures released a couple of weeks ago. While for many a Monday through Friday view of sales is okay, I find this day of week data more valuable. For example, a fall, year on year, in sales for a capital city daily of 12% would be news I would have thought.
Federal Government policy hurts small business
The Australian Government owns Australia Post. Of its 4,474 outlets, 863 are government owned and operated. These PostShops don’t look like a post office. They look like a stationery / greeting card / services shop. In fact, many look like a newsagency. Except that newsagencies are privately owned and have been in the greeting card and stationery space decades more than Australia Post.
The current Federal Government has presided over Australia Post dramatically increasing its competition against small business newsagents. Not good credentials for a Government which claims to care about small business. Last week it was revealed that in the 2004/05 financial year Australia Post increased revenue in this area including stationery and greeting cards by 8.0%. Some of that increase will have been at a cost of small business newsagents.
Yesterday in (I estimate) tens of thousands of mail boxes Australia Post increased the pressure. It came in the form of a glossy eight page catalogue. This catalogue is promoting “big savings†on printer ink, computer printers, copy paper, printer toner, shredders, calculators, blank CDs, blank DVDs and phones. Not one postal item. Now their “big savings†are not that big for the items I checked. For example, we beat them on price for the toner, paper and blank CDs. Good I hear you say, that’s competition. True except that I do not have guaranteed traffic. I do not have any exclusive products or services in my shop. Australia Post has stamps and a range of postal related services. This guarantees foot traffic and while people are there in line down the middle of the store they are faced with all these products and posters saying “big savings†and, well, people being people they will think it’s a good deal.
This is my government promoting these “big savings†when newsagents near these post offices probably offer better prices like mine. But our voice is tiny compared to the might of the government owned Australia Post.
These Federal Government owned PostShops are trading off their exclusive and protected postal services traffic and reputation and turning into stationery and greeting card businesses. The only difference between their business and mine is that I have newspapers, magazines and lottery products. But hey, they have been chasing magazines so don’t think the current situation will last forever.
The move revealed over the weekend of Australia Post franchising some of its PostShops does not address the situation. The Federal Government is still profiting from competing against small businesses. They are still allowing the postal service well deserved and good name to be used to support the development of their general merchandise retail network.
This is a policy issue for the Government. The Government has no businesses owning these retail businesses.
Here’s what I want to happen: Australia Post to immediately stop its franchising moves; PostShop businesses to be put to tender for nearby similar small businesses to purchase and integrate with their businesses; the Government to exit the retail channel; Australia Post to focus on postal services and leave stationery, greeting card and other retail products and services to private enterprise.
I don’t hold much hope as the Government does not seem to care about small businesses.
Maybe the closure of some small businesses as a result of Australia Post competition will get them to take notice.
Princess Mary sets sales records
Day one of a very important seven days for magazine retailers and magazine publishers is over. In my own newsagency and several I have spoken with first day of issue sales of Woman’s Day and New Idea set new records for the year. I’m hearing of first day sales increases of between 8% and 30%. By all accounts New Idea is achieving greater growth. In my own case Woman’s Day is up 8% and New Idea 30%.
Our Woman’s Day display at the entrance.
Our New Idea counter display.
Australian media naval gazing at an all time high
Since my post earlier today about the Andrew Jaspan, (Editor-in-Chief of The Age) speech covered online at theage.com today, I’ve had a chance to catch up with more internet / newspaper related coverage in The Australian, the Australian Financial Review, The Age and the Herald Sun. There is more I am sure. This transparent naval gazing is welcome. Online will impact newspaper sales. In developing their online models publishers will benefit from working with the existing supply chain. To do otherwise will encourage the existing supply chain to turn their back and pursue their own interests.
Podcasting … more and more a mainstream channel
All around the Net there is evidence of growth in podcasting.
In the US, movietickets.com has launched a podcast service to provide synopses and alerts.
At Kankakee County in Illinois the Daily Journal is podcasting.
The Electrical Trades Union is using podcasting to get its message out regarding the Australian Federal Government’s workplace reform changes.
Odiogo has introduced an application that lets users listen to the latest news content from hundreds of news sources and blogs via MP3 players, PDAs, phones, or laptop computers. More at podcastingnews.com.
And then this story about the University of Washington testing podcasting for delivering lectures.
Sure there are plenty more and podcasting is growing daily. My point is that it’s use is diverse and companies, especially media companies, need to embrace it to ensure relevance.
Andrew Jaspan, Editor-in-Chief of The Age on the Internet and newspapers
The Age today offers online a copy of a speech delivered Oct. 14 by Editor-in-Chief Andrew Jaspan. Jaspan delivers some gems including:
Newspapers in terminal decline ? I think not.
That is not to say there are not challenges for media companies like The Age. There are.
There are ferocious pressures on newspapers to reinvent themselves.
For a long time people, in part, tended to buy newspapers for ads and classifieds.
In a sense this masked circulation and sales issues of some newspapers.
This may have also masked journalists’ opinions that readers bought papers purely for the journalism.
Not often you hear a newspaper person in Australia speaking in such a forthright way.
Then there is this indication of their future focus:
We are not in the business of slowly managing decline.
It is about managing the transition to a new environment while rejuvenating and capitalising on The Age’s traditional strengths.
I thought that Arthur Sulzberger Jr, publisher of The New York Times had it right when he recently said “we will follow our readers where they take us. If they want us in print, we will be there in print. If they want us on the Web, we will be there on the Web. If they want us on cellphones or downloaded so they can hear us in audio, we must be there”.
It is good that we have an editor of a major Australian daily putting these issues on the table in a public forum and now through the resources of their newspaper. This invites discussion and that’s what I hope follows between newsagents and others in the traditional supply chain and The Age. Jaspan is right to point his newspaper to where the eyeballs are. We need to, wherever and however possible, make that journey with him.
Mary, Mary … the engine driving magazine sales
Tasmania’s Mary Donaldson, now Princess Mary of Denmark, is driving magzine sales this year. This week Mary will single handedly push, I predict, New Idea and Woman’s Day to close to their best sales result for the year.
Footnote: While supermarkets and others will put the product in the usual spot, newsagents will embrace the larger print run and boldly promote the titles.
Free gift lifts sales of The Age
On Saturday The Age came with a free reusable carry bag. The bag had been well promoted in a TV campaign. By day’s end, over the counter sales for The Age sales were up 42% on the average Saturday sales for the previous eight weeks (exclusive school holidays). It was a well executed campaign by The Age. Sales for the Herald Sun were down 10% when compared with the same eight weeks. What I’d really like, from a retailer’s perspective, is a bundled offer I can use to drive sales of both newspapers.
Australia Post to franchise Post Shop outlets
So, the Government owned Australia Post is franchising it’s PostShop network. Is this a Government privatisation when you’re not having a privatisation?
The Government owned Australia Post retail network is being franchised, or at least parts of it, according to this announcement on their website. While I am sure the Government and Australia Post management will have reasons for franchising as opposed to selling – to maintain control over the brand, to ensure service obligations are met etc. – this move further demonstrates a lack of support for small business by the Government.
Australia Post has, over the last 10 years or so moved into areas well served by private enterprise, especially small business newsagents. They actively price compare and compete with newsagents in general stationery. They range compete in greeting cards and many other categories. It is bad policy that the Government competes with small business in this way and that they refuse to engage in dialogue on the matter.
In my own situation I have a government owned Post Office opposite my shop. Two thirds of their floor space is taken up with products which compete with my offerings. They get better rent, better opening hours and better concessions from the landlord because they are government owned. Good on them for achieving this. However, it provides them with an unfair advantage. Punters line up in their shop to buy stamps, because of their monopoly, and while in the line they are presented with products I carry. But since I don’t have stamps I don’t have guaranteed foot traffic. There is not a product in a newsagency which is exclusive. Australia Post has stamps and related product and they are leveraging this exclusive category to achieve consider other business. I’d do the same. However, if I were in Government I would have a small business policy which is real. I would ensure that my Government owned enterprises do not use their exclusivity to unfairly compete with private enterprise – especially at the small business end.
What Australia Post should have considered before this move into franchising is the offering of these businesses to nearby suitable small businesses – to help build back up the businesses hurt the most by Australia Post’s predatory practices. I am sure the business owners would pay a reasonable price. I would.
The Government ought to adopt a policy of withdrawing Australia Post government owned and controlled stores from all retail categories other than those they offer exclusively. Further, they ought to put the new franchising project on hold until they consider whether it reflects the small business friendly policies they claim to have.
Unleash the entrepreneurs: how publishers can increase newspaper sales in Australia.
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.
Blogs generating good advertising revenue
A Google AdSense case study on growing revenue from blog based advertising from $200 to $3000 a day.
Newsagents versus supermarkets, petrol, convenience and other outlets
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.
Newspapers: The Future
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.
News Ltd extends newsagent contracts: it’s time for newsagents to be unshackled in pursuit of sales growth.
I have received letter from the Herald and Weekly Times, my local News Ltd company, inviting me to extend my distribution agreement for a further twelve months. I expect that other newsagents have received similar letters. This extension of time is most likely due to more time being needed for News to assess the preferred future structure of newspaper distribution in Australia.
I will accept the extension gladly. However, I’d like the year to be used by newsagents as much as News to determine the best road forward.
I’d like a success based agreement with News which rewards me for above average sales growth. Treat me like a business person and not an ‘agent’. Release me from the shackles of current retailing rules. Put some money on the table for real and consistent sales growth. Let me prove what I can do and allow other proactive newsagents to do the same.
Such an investment by News would, in my view, deliver better results than they have achieved recently by putting newspapers in to McDonalds and Big W.
I have five strategies I would implement right away if I were allowed, strategies I am sure most retailers would like to use if they were not hamstrung by a contract and associated rules which have their genesis decades ago when the distribution and retail of newspapers was tightly regulated under an ACCC authorisation.
If I am right and can achieve above average growth for News Ltd newspapers then I become more valuable to them. Surely there is less cost to the company in gaining greater sales from their newsagent channel than placing their product in other retail channels?
If I don’t achieve above average sales growth it costs News Ltd nothing. On the other hand, if I am successful they will reward me for my success and have some learnings to pass on. All I want is to sell more newspapers. Oh, and not have News Ltd appointing more stores near mine to compete while I prove what I can do.
Is News Ltd prepared to unshackle newsagents so they can achieve their full potential? I hope so. This next year is the perfect opportunity.
Electronic newspapers closer? E-Ink and Philips to demonstrate 10 inch paper like display in a world first
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.
Speculation about News and PBL working together on classifieds
In The Australian (a News Publication so you’d expect some knowledge) is this report speculating that PBL and News are considering joining forces to create a “classified advertising superbrand”.
This doesn’t make sense to me. PBL and News have different objectives in terms of their online businesses. News has a print business to support whereas PBL is reasonably new to classifieds and is 100% online. If it did happen the ‘losers’ would be the print classified advertising businesses. Having said that the two have worked together on some significant projects.
What should Rupert Murdoch do?
Mark Pincus, founder of Tribe.net comments about the Adam Lashinsky’s piece in Fortune about News Corp.’s online strategy. Pincus ‘advises’ Rupert Murdoch to throw a ton of money at Craigslist. While publishers around the world would celebrate the move, if it were successful – because of the impact Craigslist is having on classified revenues – it would be a huge risk for News since much of the success of the not for profit Craigslist is due to social goals rather than commercial goals. Translating that into a commercial venture would be an enormous challenge and the Craigslist community would soon find or create another free and socially focused place in which to play.
As a goal though it makes sense for News as do some of the other strategies proposed by Pincus such as using local papers to drive the online business; unleashing existing News media businesses (Fox etc) to leverage citizen content.
I started thinking of what I would do if I was in control of News and quickly my mind turned to what I should do through my newsagency and other newsagencies I might influence as News will take care of itself. (Australia has 4,600 newsagencies. 50% of our revenue comes from newspapers and magazines and around of other sales are as a result of newspaper generated traffic. We have no online component yet.) So, what I would do? Play online; make myself indispensable to publishers; dramatically improve customer service; take a lead on citizen journalism and become a gateway for people to get published; shift my reliance onto other product categories less likely to be impacted by an online model.
While it is interesting to speculate about how publishers should respond to the disruption caused by new technologies, it is equally important to consider how those at the end of the news and information supply chain should/could respond.