From the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association annual convention, Austin, TX: Creating Our Future: The New Economics of Journalism
Print isn’t dead, it’s actually quite valuable. This not from a head-in-the-sand legacy media type mired in a deep stage of denial, but from avowed “PRINT JUNKIE” and president of a creative advertising powerhouse: Mike Hughes of the Martin Agency, Richmond, VA.
Martin is known for the pig hanging out the car window singing “whee whee whee all the way home” in the latest Geico TV commercial. And the caveman series of Geico commercials. And the slacker guys singing in the FreeCreditReport commercials. And the Wal-Mart commercials … you get the idea.
But Hughes freely admits there’s a disconnect between his corner office and the media planners that work for him and other agencies: the latter, younger folks don’t know or understand the value of print advertising – and the industry hasn’t been very good at helping them with that. Media planners tell him that newspaper ad staffs are the biggest problem – old ways, old relationships. Newspaper ad reps focus on telling clients why they “ought” to be in their products. Hughes feels we need to give advertisers the information they need to “want” to be in newspapers.
So Hughes convened a “summit” this past year trying to pull together print executives and media planners to open up that conversation. He’ll likely have to do it again (and again and again).
Newspapers need to focus on content, community and causes, he said. We risk a population that is too ignorant to know the value or importance of journalism, we definitely need what newspapers do, he continued.
He’s not a big believer in crowdsourcing, thinking our world needs journalists who’ve developed the skills to determine and share what’s important, what matters.
“I’m surprised someone hasn’t put up a web site with all the stuff on the web that isn’t true,” he said, “with a pull-down menu of all the stuff on the web that’s true, but doesn’t matter.”
Old school, maybe, but there’s some merit in what he’s thinking.
“We need informed citizens,” he repeated. “The end goal: a rational, informed citizenry.”
His answer may not be old school. After touring the new New York Times building, he laments the seeming lack of audible and visible adrenaline in the newsroom, something he feels lacking in many newsrooms. “We need broad-shouldered journalistic passion” and he quotes Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt: “Change won’t come from incumbents.”
Hughes has spoken with some top creative talent from other industries who have expressed a willingness to “help” print media, if print media choose to embrace input from outside their ranks.
When asked what the industry should do first, he responded: “Find new ways to look at things, we need to inspire a Renaissance.”
Other pro-active comments:
- The industry needs an incubator, an innovations skunkworks (he mentioned MIT’s MediaLab … we need to introduce him to the Reynolds Journalism Institute)
- The industry needs to explore new delivery systems, how to increase demand, develop a combination of approaches.
- “Develop an idea, then surround the idea,” he urged. And “we need to engage students and teachers.”
He had more to say, but I can’t do it all justice here. Watch the SNPA website; Hughes will send a copy of his talk to SNPA to post later this week.
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.
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