Opskriften på at vende et mediehus fra fallit til overskud

The Journal Register driver 170 tidsskrifter, heraf 19 dagblade, og mere end 150 websteder i 10 stater i USA. I 2009 gik selskabet i betalingsstandsning, nu giver det overskud.

John Paton tiltrådte som adm. direktør i begyndelsen af 2010 og redefinerede den journalistiske arbejdsgang, inddrog læserne og udskiftede dyrt software med gratis tjenester på nettet. Det kaldte de The Ben Franklin Project.

Forleden fortalte John Paton, hvordan de havde vendt virksomheden: John Paton’s Dec. 2 Presentation at INMA Transformation of News Summit in Cambridge, Mass..

Det er bestemt værd at læse. Her er den korte udgave:

It is a story of how you can change newspaper companies to survive the inevitable shrinking of print revenue dollars and position them to grow as news companies.

Look, if Adobe and other companies can figure out how to make a living when the market has driven them to give away for free their core products, then we can figure out how to make a living by piling the dimes into dollars. If print dollars are becoming digital dimes, then we better start chasing the dimes. And we better do it cost effectively.

Stop listening to newspaper people. We have had nearly 15 years to figure out the web and as an industry we newspaper people are no good at it. No good at it at all. Want to get good at it? Then stop listening to the newspaper people and start listening to the rest of the world. And, I would point out, as we have done at JRC – put the digital people in charge – of everything.

And in a world where the competition and the audience know so much more than we do – we have to experiment. While we encourage all of our employees to do that, we actually pay some of them to do just that – experiment. We call it our ideaLab.

There are no rules.

Jay Rosen challenged news organizations to consider the “100% solution”. That means you cover everything that happens on a particular subject in a particular area. Our guys are trying to do that with high school sports. Using the crowd, Twitter, Smartphones plus Google Docs to manage it all, they are attempting to create real-time game coverage of high school sports via Twitter. That’s every game in real time.

You can’t do this alone. The new eco system for news is too big and no one has the resources anymore to cover it. You have to partner. If you don’t – in your communities you will be out of the loop and out of business.

Do what you do best and link to the rest.

We will no longer be dependent upon out-of-date thinking. And we will no longer be dependent on costly systems that are outdated before they are even successfully installed.

We have built sales support systems using an iPhone and free Google tools. We have successfully printed pages on a press using only free web tools. The next time some rep comes to your shop brandishing a $20M system – tell the price just went down. Way down. Our capital expenditures have been reduced by half. Half. But more importantly – we have harnessed the power of our employees. And are starting to create a culture where they are empowered to experiment

We share all of the information and tools publicly. Go to the Ben Franklin site.

So, how are we doing after 10 months of this new strategy?

As of Q3, year to date, the Journal Register Company is handily outpacing the industry as compared to figures provided by the Newspaper Association of America.

More importantly the Company’s digital revenue has grown from negligible to 11% of ad revenue in November – in less than a year.

And all of that with less costs. We are chasing the dimes. Cost effectively.

Perhaps a better marker of our success – certainly for the long-term health of the company – is that we now have a revitalized company whose employees are focused on the future.

The real challenge now, if you care about journalism, is to deeply understand the new mediums as well as we understand the old.

Very little is being done to position legacy media companies to be OF the Web. We are still limited, on the newspaper side, of thinking of the Web as a pipe and confusing it with the internet. Clearly, this is so much more than a distribution platform. We are still learning how to deal with a medium that is more than uni-directional and thrives on collaboration more than it does on competition.

Se også: Aviser og at tænke det utænkelige.

Foto: Andy Arthur.