May 18-20 in Chapel Hill

You're doing digital all wrong

That's one of the messages at next month's conference

Posted

Judging from Steve Gray's plans to challenge his audience, people attending next month's SNPA/UNC conference might need to buckle up.

Gray, the director of strategy and innovation for Morris Communications, finds two huge flaws in most newspapers' audience and sales practices.

First, presenting the news is not enough. Second, the advertising side is not pursuing the vast majority of businesses.

"What I intend to do is reframe the opportunity – reframe the opportunity in terms of local audience, and reframe the opportunity in terms of local business customers," Gray said.

Steve Gray

Gray is one of the presenters at the conference, "From Disruption to Transformation: New Strategies for Prosperity in a Digital Age," to be held May 18-20 in Chapel Hill, N.C. The conference is a collaboration of SNPA's Traveling Campus and the University of North Carolina's School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

Without giving away too much – after all, executives should want to go to the conference – let's just say that Gray's premises for the future of digital news are both startling and based on Morris Communication's own research.

"What I'll be doing is challenging the newspaper industry to recognize that the available audience time and attention is far greater than what you can capture with news," he said. Newspaper websites aren't competing only with other news websites, but with everything else on the Internet.

"If you look at how much time people are spending on content, then suddenly you see that you're in competition with Google and Facebook and YouTube and everybody else," Gray said. "And you discover that the people you are trying to target are spending much more time on other things than they are on news. It's no wonder we have trouble generating sufficient digital revenue."

Gray plans to offer a short list of subjects that can attract larger local audiences but are barely covered by most newsrooms.

He will also talk about how newspapers do business in a digital world.

Morris Communications looked at the number of advertising customers it was doing business with in its 11 daily markets vs. how many businesses were potential customers. The results, Gray said, were shocking.

Over the last 40 or 50 years, Gray says, newspapers have priced themselves to the upper range of businesses and sized their sales forces to that small number of customers. As a result, the number of customers they serve has been in almost continuous decline for decades. But with digital advertising and marketing solutions, they can open up the rest of the market.

By reframing their markets in both audience and sales, Gray says local media companies can change the game and turn from shrinkage to growth.

Or, he says, "You can keep selling to the top-end businesses and stay focused on news to the exclusion of most everything else – and keep watching your business shrink."

Only a few places remain at the conference; register today to guarantee your spot.

Steve Gray also publishes a blog, mediareset.com, in which he discusses these and other issues. Email him at steve.gray@morris.com.

SNPA, UNC, digital, Gray
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