NewsBeat

October 2019 NewsBeat 3 newspapers are the glue that holds communities together and that the community forums that our newspapers shepherd are an essential pillar of our democracy. And to remind ad agencies and clients that association-owned ad placement services provide the ONLY platform for local engagement on a national scale. NYPA's senior vice president for editorial development, Judy Patrick, will develop and distribute a consistent stream of editorial materials, activities and ideas, including an introspective analysis of "journalism thinking" and how it extends well beyond the newsroom. I mentioned earlier that this journey has been a difficult one – and it has. It's hard to break the news to yourself that as an industry we've spent the last 10 –15 years managing our decline by tweaking centuries-old advertising and subscription models then wringing our hands when they didn't result in significant changes. We can't change who we get our money from without significantly changing the products we offer them. Let's not miss our opportunities to grow audience by taking half measures. Reporters need to don business hats. I hate the term "paradigm shift," but that's just what our industry needs. We need to constantly consider the societal good associated with journalism and extend it to all corners of our local economy to enable us to compete in the marketplace. We need to establish journalism DNA in places we never took journalism before. Our local and national advertisers are desperately seeking advertising solutions that work. We all recognize that there is a huge gap in the marketplace, and newspapers should work aggressively to fill it. How? By expanding the newsroom culture. Newspapers should mine and sell their expertise. Using journalism thinking, newspapers can compete with professional development companies, vocational training companies and other learning environments. Newspapers can excel in talent acquisition by using brand marketing to turn traditional recruitment advertising on its head. Journalism can and should be more entrepreneurial – we can fix our broken business models by leveraging our expertise to fill the gap in the marketplace. This will no doubt sound like heresy to some, but it is time to stop thinking of journalism as an industry and start viewing it as a strategy. Newspapers can build advertising businesses that fit comfortably with newsroom values. We can identify industry segments that will benefit from the values of journalism thinking. Let's use journalism strategies to enable commerce, to encourage companies to be good citizens, to recover revenues lost to ad agencies and PR firms, and to radically alter our thinking about what constitutes effective advertising campaigns. The Relevance Project has partnered with Metro Creative Graphics to produce advertising sales collateral materials which we'll distribute weekly to newspapers. The CEO and founder of Metro Creative Graphics has accepted a seat on the New York Press Service board of directors, and we'll work hard to aggregate the collective resources of Metro, AdMall, CVC, Pulse Research, and other state press associations to develop powerful, compelling sales tools for newspapers and state press association-owned ad services. The newspaper association managers are working now to secure funding to engage an independent contractor to execute and manage the project for the next year. We'll issue an RFP in November, seeking candidates for the position, with an anticipated start date of January 1. A Relevance website will be launched, where all support materials for the project will be archived. We've developed quality assurance tools to ensure that the project's outcomes meet the objectives. As an industry we need to be far more focused on product-market fit. We need to carefully assess who our competition really is (Hint: it isn't other entities that produce journalism), and we need to be relentless in educating newsroom employees to wear business hats. Collectively we have tremendous market power. Collectively we can increase community engagement, transparency, and civic responsibility. The Relevance Project seeks not just to sustain newspapers but also, by using our journalism as a tool and employing "journalism thinking," to affect profound positive changes in our communities. Let's not wait for someone else to fix journalism. Let's leverage what we have and use journalism thinking as the strategy for new business models. At its core, the Relevance Project seeks to reposition newspapers as the essential moderators of the community forum. To do this, we need to commit to real change, and we need to spend more time with influencers, ordinary citizens, and clients. Our journalism is the reason we have access to these people – we need to use this access to explain and present our new value proposition.

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