Newspapers must look beyond SEO and Twitter to survive

by Staff, Brand Republic 29-May-09, 11:45

BARCELONA - Newspapers bosses have been told they must do more than adapt their business models to embrace the internet and need to look beyond existing models and trends to ensure survival.

Speaking at the World Newspaper Advertising Conference in Barcelona today, Juan Bascones, Havas Media global chief media investments officer, told senior delegates that newspapers must begin focussing on the way consumers connect with each other.

"Communications is now totally instant, interactive and context dependent. Consumers have taken control of their own conversations and the rate of evolution is so dramatic, it is almost impossible for the more traditional business models found in the newspaper industry to keep up.

"The industry needs to change its DNA, as looking to existing technologies to provide answers will not save it."

Bascones also said that the newspaper industry must focus on understanding and promoting new ways of communicating to consumers and accept the short-term risk this presents to their existing business models.

He said: "We can already see that consumers are calling to brands to widen their sphere of influence. Sustainability for example will become a key issue as we move forward - our research shows that 80% of consumers look to brands to lead in this area and are willing to reward and pay for those who take the lead - newspaper brands are no exception.

"Today consumers' new distribution model is based on conversations. The only way the newspaper industry will survive is for it to focus on leading and facilitating these conversations."

More on Brand Republic

Read Gordon's Republic blog post - Life in the clickstream: The future of journalism

BR's full coverage of the downturn and the US newspaper industry

Comments

video poet - 29/05/2009

Need to move into news discussion arena. Viewsagent.com

Mike Exon - 02/06/2009

Of course media platforms now permit conversational as well as broadcast ways of communication but papers and news organiations need to be smart enough to see when and where to exploit the technology. News makers need to understand the value of what they produce to their audiences first, before going right back to the drawing board with two way models that dilute all that's great about them. It's about what audiences want and need not what other people are doing or what the technology allows. The challenge for print media owners is how to compete with the free content models out there, how to persuade people to keep paying for quality content rather than flicking the freebies. I posted about this recently here : http://blog.digitlondon.com/posts/644