As many of my readers are aware, the future of news organizations is a topic of great interest to me. Bridget and I have owned a marketing communications business the past 23 years, have undergraduate degrees in journalism from the University of Nebraska at Omaha, and are voracious connoisseurs of news.
The future of Omaha’s “newspaper of record” was on tap at the Omaha Press Club on Jan. 17 as part of the club’s Noon Forum series.
The three-person panel of Omaha World-Herald employees featured at the event included Henry Cordes, Melissa Matczak, and Graham Archer.
Cordes, a reporter, started off the talk by giving a general overview of the state of newspapers today.
He discussed the “double whammy” of declining subscriptions and declining ad revenue for print newspapers like the Omaha World-Herald, and how those trends create a difficult-to-sustain model for daily print publications around the nation.
As the one-two punch deals body blows to publications, the resultant effect has been smaller newspapers combined with higher subscription rates for consumers.
The Omaha World-Herald has a newsroom roughly half the size of what it was a decade ago. That fact has resulted in operators trying to find increasingly novel ways to produce content and sell subscriptions with fewer resources available.
“Times are uncertain for us, but it’s a joy to walk into the newsroom and see us produce a newspaper,” says Melissa Matczak, Omaha World-Herald executive editor.
As society watches the decline of brick-and-mortar retailers like ShopKo, there is a corollary “slow drip” revenue loss for traditional news media outlets like print newspapers.
Matczak discussed the challenges inherent in maintaining a quality print publication (the Omaha World-Herald has been in existence for more than a century) while working on growing digital subscriptions — with a focus on improving the digital product.
When the Omaha World-Herald does a popular piece of “watchdog” journalism, for example, Matczak says it will generally perform well online — and the staff can see in “real time” how online engagement translates into digital subscriptions.
She suggests there is a new focus in the newsroom toward analyzing data and statistics on Omaha.com along with the paper’s various social platforms (Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram — among others).
“We want traffic,” she says, “but it has to be impactful journalism.”
It also has to be sustainable.
Newsrooms in the 21st century can’t be a “general store of the community” she added. The resources are simply not in place to do that anymore. As a result, the Omaha World-Herald has to prioritize what it covers.
Matczak says the paper needs to see a return on what they print or publish. This is a change of mindset at the paper, and there is an increased focus on “why” the piece is important, the “value” of a particular article, and a more stringent “prioritization” of content.
It’s a given that people consume news differently than they did 20 years ago.
“[Reporters are] more like broadcast than print ever was,” Matczak says. In that effort, the Omaha World-Herald works to distribute articles throughout the day — via e-newsletters, social media, videos, podcasts, news alerts, and in print.
Statistical data in the newsroom (analyzing online readerership and engagement) is treated in a similar fashion to “ratings” on broadcast television. Newspapers are having to adapt to this new reality from an entrenched mindset dating back decades.
It is about more than simple “page views” — the focus is on the amount of engagement with an article and the frequency that subscribers visit Omaha.com.
The antiquated methodology and mindset has been a hard habit to break within the Omaha World-Herald newsroom, she said.
The panelists teased about “rogue print meetings” that took place during the initial stages of the shift to digital.
In the past, “news budgets” (content plans for a print newspaper) took priority in the newsroom. Today, the focus is on distribution of content throughout the day at 9 a.m., 11 a.m., 4 p.m., and 7 p.m.
Matczak says they’ll analyze trending stories using a publishing analytics platform called CrowdTangle (I wasn’t familiar with CrowdTangle, but Facebook purchased the company in 2016).
The CrowdTangle platform also allows the newspaper to track popular stories from competitors and create similar content to capitalize on trending topics.
The goal is to distribute relevant content all day long. The Omaha World-Herald is also trying to spur signups for their “e-newsletter” and “push alerts” — so people don’t have to “type in” Omaha.com. Instead, they can simply click on hyperlinks.
Graham Archer, the digital editor at the Omaha World-Herald, works with reporters like Cordes to provide compelling videos and animated GIFs to go along with feature articles.
The goal is to figure out which stories are relevant and whether or not they want to do more of those types of stories in the future.
The Omaha World-Herald has to be more nimble in the future, he said. Emerging technologies like virtual reality and augmented reality present opportunities and pitfalls for news organizations. (I also believe media companies will have to make inroads in “voice technologies” such as Amazon’s Alexa platform down the road.)
As newsrooms become more focused on geeky things like “real-time analytics” and adding in “keyword tags” to online articles, it does make you wonder if entities like the Omaha World-Herald can keep up with the immediacy that “citizen journalists” bring to the table.
It also makes you wonder if they can continue to charge a premium for such content.
The fact that I’m posting this article on my blog mere hours after the Omaha Press Club’s Noon Forum took place is kind of ironic. This blog post will be distributed on Twitter, Facebook, and additional social channels my wife and I control in our business. It won’t be behind a paywall, and it won’t be scrutinized in terms of engagement potential.
Part of the reason I have this blog (along with my UNO Hockey fansite MavPuck.com — which features news stories, a blog, and a podcast) is a responsibility I feel to put my marketing communications skills to use and create useful, informative, and relevant content for an information-hungry public.
It would have been cost prohibitive to do that 30 years ago. Technology has democratized information in our society. Anyone can publish articles, produce podcasts, create videos, and distribute it all online for a paltry sum.
The question is whether or not large news organizations — that are governed by P&L statements — can maintain relevance over the long haul.
Many of you are familiar with the fact that the Omaha World-Herald, which had been locally owned for more than a century, was recently sold to Lee Enterprises.
The panelists today didn’t really dive into the recent effort by employees to form a union.
For those who don’t know, the Omaha World-Herald News Guild is an employee union put in place to try and protect the interests of frontline journalists working for the company (you can read more at www.owhguild.com).
As daily newspapers continue to evolve, some have suggested the editorial content should be more “neighborhood focused” to maintain relevance.
Matczak reiterated that the Omaha World-Herald “can’t be a general store.” She says that efforts in the past to be “hyper local” haven’t had much success (although, she admitted, they couldn’t measure the popularity of those stories in the past like they can now).
“We have to think more broadly,” she said. “More thematically.”
It was also mentioned during the panel discussion that smaller print editions will make it more difficult for public relations professionals (representing businesses and organizations) to get “press release” material into the Omaha World-Herald.
Bridget and I found this to be somewhat antithetical to the newspaper’s goal to push out more content during the day.
It seems like “pre-packaged” content would be the perfect thing to layer into a digital strategy (the stories are basically written for a news publication, and a minimal amount of fact-checking is required).
Some could argue that public relations content verges on being “promoted content” — which might thwart the goal of journalistic purity and integrity.
The reality is that banner ads aren’t a particularly good way for newspapers to make money. So a possible “pay-to-play” model (as we’ve seen with the denizens of professional YouTubers) might become more prevalent.
Bridget and I still have a print subscription to the Omaha World-Herald that includes online access to the content at Omaha.com.
Despite the fact that we enjoy receiving a print newspaper, our content consumption habits have definitely evolved. Years ago, I read two newspapers cover-to-cover each morning — the Omaha World-Herald and USA Today. Today it is a much more eclectic mix of content curated from my Twitter and Facebook feeds.
Hopefully these once great institutions will find a way to survive the raging storm. It is going to be challenging.
The “death notices” for newspapers like the Omaha World-Herald have been murmured about for 15 years or more.
Yet the presses still roll and newspapers are still in print...
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