NDS Newsletter Archives

I prefer talking about improving the content of the newspaper (which goes hand-in-hand with improving your design), but in these parlous times for the industry, worrying about your content without paying attention to your readers and how they think about you may well be a mistake.

Marketing is often considered pejoratively as the “M-word.” Given the competition your newspaper has, however, spending some time on promoting and marketing your “brand” will pay off with more people interested in your paper product and more visitors to your website.

A great website for information about readers and how to get more or keep the ones you have is the Readership Institute (http://www.readership.org). Some of the following information comes from the site.

Your brand is not just the newspaper name or logo or slogan, it is more like the word/picture that people think of when they see your newspaper name. Therefore it must be positive and active. Despite what many old-school newspaper folks think, this doesn’t happen automatically when you publish a newspaper. A good product brand is created.

As always, this means understanding what is going on in the minds of your readers, discovering what they need you to deliver in terms of news and information, and then giving it to them in a way that gives them a good user experience, whether with your print or your online product.

Actually, it has ALWAYS been about that, but being essential in the lives of your readers is more important than ever today.

According to the Readership Institute, only 6 percent of local daily newspapers have a strong, positive brand with readers. My guess is that weeklies do better, but probably not by much.    

Too much time is spent on communicating a “brand” before one exists. Newspapers often jump right in with logos and slogans on t-shirts, umbrellas and coffee cups, but that is just a message, not a true branding activity.

The “brand” must start (here we go again) with the content, with the people in the newsroom and with the product and services you offer your readers. Again, the brand is not your news product(s) or even what you do with them; it is what readers think about you, how they identify you in the information marketplace.

As mentioned in the previous newsletter, if you don’t know what your readers experience when they think of you, read your paper product or visit your web site, ask! Focus groups or small surveys are easily done.

So put in some time in thinking about what you produce in terms of its relevance to your readers’ lives, their goals and their values. Talk to readers. Become essential in their lives, become a part of their lives. Create YOUR brand and personality for YOUR readers. Write out a statement of how you want to be perceived by your readers. Everyone on your staff should re-read it every day.

Getting back to newspaper design, the look and feel of your news products are certainly an important part of your branding work. The presentation must be easy-to-read first and foremost, but it also needs to be attractive and easy to navigate through. Don’t make readers work.

We’ll cover some basic design improvements in the next newsletter.

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Bob Bohle  : :  bob@newsdesignschool.com 

Check out a related post on the Pageshare/Blog.

Hundreds of millions of people access the World Wide Web every day, including more than a few in your town, but you still need to publicize your web site and make it “sticky,” i.e., make visitors want to stay. That is if you want your local audience to stop by on a regular basis.

You probably have subscribers to your paper who may not be regular visitors to your web site because they identify your news product as only the paper. You need to get them – and your non-subscribers – to think of your web site as a “must-visit” site at least several times a week. What are some ways to do this?

Following real estate guidelines, the first three rules of a good web site are content, content, content. You have to offer your visitors content that they want and need. If you don’t know, ask. Focus groups and surveys are relatively simple and cheap to put together.

Build a modern-looking and attractive site. This is easier than ever with numerous companies offering templates at reasonable prices. One example is http://www.joomlart.com, which uses the Open Source content management system Joomla (http://www.joomla.com). Clear instructions help with set-up, and it is reasonably simple to add your content each issue. Your content, a professional look. Perfect.

If it seems a little daunting, grab a local college or high school student to do it for you.

An interesting site for both free and paid web tools to make your site more interactive and fun is at http://www.poppydog.com. Some examples are a forum tool and a visitor tracker tool. You can also set up your site as a membership site, so you can restrict some content to only subscribers if you want. Poppydog has many other tools as well and is worth a serious look. For more free user fun, check out the widgets at http://www.userkit.com.

Next, your content should include blogs from your reporters, and I suggest you get a few from members of the community. In fact, while we are at it, interactivity with your readers is critical. Letters to the editor are not enough. Get your readers involved in the site with their writing and their photographs (another free tool at Poppydog). You get more content – for free – and you gain reader interest.

Other ways to gain traffic are to offer further ways for readers to interact by using polls and surveys; run contests that require site visitors to give you their e-mail address and thereby opt-in for marketing and other messages from you; and be sure to list your web address everywhere: on every page of the website, on rate cards, business cards and everything else you print (including frequently in the paper itself), and in the signature of all staff e-mails.

I hate to say it, but: if you build it – and publicize it – they will come. Often.
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Bob Bohle  : :  bob@newsdesignschool.com