NewsBeat

12 NewsBeat June 2018 Paper cuts: a digital terrorist inside the turbulent world of newspapers By LINCOLN MILLSTEIN Lincoln Millstein, the self-described digital terrorist referenced in the headline above, is senior vice president and special advisor to the CEO of the Hearst Corporation. Formerly he spearheaded the development of the highly-acclaimed Boston.com and then reinvented NYTimes.com, as COO of the New York Times. Lincoln was a luncheon speaker at NYPA's spring convention in Albany. His presentation is summarized below: amiliar with the phrase, "we have met the enemy and he is us"? It's no secret that many industries have been disrupted by digital innovation, but no other industry disparages its own core the way the newspaper industry does. We'd do ourselves a huge favor if we'd stop talking loudly and often about the impending death of print newspapers, declining print revenue, newsroom layoffs, and fake news. The internet didn't cause our problems and the internet won't solve our problems. The internet didn't load us up with debt, and "digital first" is a fatuous promise. As digital experimentation and "innovation" continue to suck revenues from the profitable print product, display revenues and circulation continue to decline at publicly traded companies across the country. They should be less worried about how to keep their stock prices growing and more concerned about sustaining their publishing legacies to serve their communities. Under the heading off, "its not rocket science," its all about paid print subscribers – its NOT about paid websites. The eyeballs of print subscribers are worth more. Its time to reboot the paid print product. Readers want and deserve more. Kill marginal products. Remind journalists to be enterprising – sitting in their cubicles emailing and texting is not enterprising. Journalists should do journalism and nothing else. They should find stuff out about their communities that readers can't find on their own. Everything else –food, travel, fashion, money, puzzles, opinions, gardening, etc., can be done using wire services and social media. Real local journalism cannot. Be competitive. The fang companies (Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) are NOT your friends. Unplug from Facebook and Twitter. Use digital media – don't let it use you. Apply your unique assets against your rivals –identify and understand your differentiation and exploit it to your advantage. Your greatest assets: your journalism, your reputation (trust), your insider knowledge of the local community. Retain customers — relentlessly manage churn. Share, share, share, then share some more. Collaborate, partner, and take advantage of other people's resources. About a dozen years ago the death knell began ringing for printed books. Amazon and Kindle tried to kill them. E-books raced up the charts. But the book industry exploited digital technology –making publishing much more accessible to author wannabes. Today, books are beautiful products that cover a much broader range of interests than they did 20 years ago and print book sales are on the rise – vastly eclipsing e-book sales by increasing margins in each of the last three years. Newspapers took an opposite tack. They cut the paper quality. They cut their journalism. Their customer service was abysmal. They made the product less good and raised the price. Book publishers intelligently understand what readers value. Newspapers must do the same. Newspapers MUST: • Exploit the quality of their relationship with readers • Know the probability of canceling for each subscriber • Know which subscribers will not be influenced by retention treatments • Give readers more of what they value • Make their products sticky and addictive • Research and mine their audience data • Second to talent, audience data will be the most valuable company asset in coming years F

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