New Jersey Newspaper Bucks The Trend And Wins 

I’ve written about how newspapers are struggling to survive as advertising revenue on the print side plunges and the online revenue doesn’t make up the difference.  

Well, one community newspaper in New Jersey made a decision several years ago to stick to print and not go online. Here’s the story on TriCityNews of Monmouth County, New Jersey.

At the core of their decision was —you guessed it— how to best serve the needs of their Target Market and still turn a profit.  Their decision was to offer competitive advertising rates and then do everything in print and not give any content away for free online.  The result has been profitable.  Advertisers like it because the model works for them and the paper can remain a going concern.  Sometimes the future is building on the best things from the past, and often marketing is at its best when it is narrowly targeted.  My guess is that we’ll be seeing more of these highly targeted local marketing efforts in the future.

But there’s more to learn from this operation.  Let’s remember the buggy cab manufacturers.  When the car market began to develop, there was still a need for buggy cabs, but not enough for Fisher Body, a leading manufacturer, to continue to grow in the same way.  What did Fisher do?  It joined forces with General Motors and started to make cabs for cars.  Fisher realized that the fundamental of their brand was not horses, but cabs.  It didn’t matter if the compartments were being propelled by horse or engine.

What’s the connection between Fisher Body and a small newspaper in New Jersey?  It’s this: always remember what you are selling.  This newspaper is selling local news and information, and that is what creates a valuable platform for its advertisers.  It needs to stay local and stay small to stay strong as a brand and a company because its roots are in the community it serves, and that community is what makes it relevant and profitable.

The Internet wouldn’t add value to their product — at least not yet— and just because you can put all your content on the Internet doesn’t mean you should if that’s not how you’re going to reach your Target Market.  By the way, you can argue that this is where Gannett has made a big mistake with its model.  In the quest to find big balance sheet “efficiencies,” they’ve forgotten the value of being micro-local, even though that’s the kind of product their regional newspapers ought to be providing (and the product the newspapers they took over traditionally offered).   

Stay tuned... we might just be seeing how newspapers are going to evolve by going backward with marketing that works.

And remember, it’s always easier when you keep marketing and branding in mind.