Trusted voices of light and knowledge

      

• You can’t make (enough) money online (to justify the investment).
• The MBAs and academics have great theories but no practical experience.

You’ve heard these and many more objections to embracing digital media. Add your dozen missives here.

So former Harvard whiz kid and key researcher on disruptive innovation, Clark Gilbert, left the ivory tower to put his hands and feet where his mouth (and writings) had been. On the front line: running the Deseret News’ various media operations, print, broadcast, digital.

If you were predicting a nasty train wreck, you’d be way wrong, and we should be glad of it.

His prior research shows that disruptive innovation has thus far affected every industry much the same. There are lessons to be learned, not from theory, but from the data collected. Each industry may be different, but they all tend to respond the same to disruptive innovation.

Some 92 percent of operations survive disruption. But 100 percent of those survivors start new, separate initiatives to move forward. Gilbert believes that’s exactly what the news industry must do.

New competitors don’t immediately attack your core market, he says. They start just outside your core market(s). They are likely inferior products or services so we ignore or dismiss them. Yet they come to work every day asking each other how to do it better, faster, simpler. And pretty soon they’ve encroached on the edges of our market(s). As they do improve, simplify, they further encroach into our market(s). Pretty soon, they’re serious competition, if they haven’t actually eclipsed us. Think Monster.com, Craigslist, Groupon.

(As an industry) “we’re getting killed in online ad revenue,” Gilbert says. “Not by other traditional media (TV, radio), but by the digital pure plays.”

“Many of us approach the Internet as a lot to lose when we should be thinking about it as a lot to win.”

His advice: build new groups to pursue that disruptive space. Do NOT partner with the digital pure plays such as Groupon. “They take the good parts of your business, leaving you with only the bad parts.”

Control your costs, do what you do best, link to the rest. He asks if you know the cost of a story in your news product(s). He says your competitors (Patch, Huffington Post and the content farms) are producing thousands of stories a day at about $12 a story. Traditional news media is likely paying $250 and up per story. Those $12 stories aren’t of the quality of your $250 stories? Maybe so, but those lesser quality digital operations are generating more traffic at much less cost. They’re building bigger audiences at less cost. If you’re selling audience to your advertisers, how’s that going to play out longterm?

Do what you do best, link to the rest. Consumers can get international, national, state, much specialty news elsewhere … and they do. Do what you do best: investigative, in-depth, distinctive local voice, focus on local values … and link to the rest. The Deseret’s vision: “Trusted voices of light and knowledge reaching hundreds of millions of people worldwide.”

All theory and no substance?

Gilbert’s Salt Lake City TV station website grew 75 percent last year; is projected to grow 50 percent in 2011. It has 64 percent of the market’s web traffic. Those businesses may not have much to do with the newspaper, “but I can use that traffic to promote what’s new, which subsidizes the old.”

Read Brian’s earlier post from SNPA/SNA/Inland here.

Brian Steffens is the director of communications at the Reynolds Journalism Institute. Read his other blog posts here, and talk back at steffensb@rjionline.org and @BrianSteffens on Twitter.