You might be surprised by this little fact, but I have been in the newspaper business twice in my life. Once in advertising design, and once as an owner of a weekly newspaper. I don’t think that makes me an expert on print, but I do think it gives me a unique perspective given I live and breath the web every day in my personal and professional life.
Why in the world do I think that the Seattle P.I. can succeed where so many others have failed? There are actually two main reasons as well as some awesome opportunities. Last month the Seattle Post Intelligencer had 1.8 million unique viewers with over 30 million page views. That’s some significant traffic on any website, but if you stop to consider the scope…I bet upwards of 50% were from this area…that’s monstrous. The circulation becomes equivalent to the New York Times which is read the world over.
With such an enormous reader base, the newspaper only needs to concentrate on two things, quality content and innovation. Think about it, before writers were told “write me 800 words about this.” Of course there are still limits to how long an article could be interesting, but with no real hard limit on size, images, multimedia inclusions, links and user feedback and commentary, the Seattle P.I. could truly be the first REAL online newspaper that embraces the web as it exists today and become a model for the rest of the newspapers who are in reality waiting in line for their number to be called. Print will die, I am sorry.
Of course we will keep fancy books and such, but magazines, newspapers, newsletters and such are dead, they just don’t know it yet.
Outside of fantastic traffic, the content is really good. They have reached out to some unique writers and perspectives and create can’t miss content. My suggestions as they make this transition would be the following:
- Don’t use sites like CNN, MSNBC or Fox News as a model. They suck.
- Embrace the community with real conversations around stories.
- Make your writers transparent and reachable via Twitter, blogs, etc.
- Reach out to the local blog talent and reprint great stories on relevant topics.
- Don’t become an online entity, still get out in the community and make your presence known.
Take it and run, create the model and then stand on top. That’s what I would do.
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