Predictions of doom and gloom for newspapers are everywhere - even in newspaper headlines. In October 2005 The New York Times reporter Katharine Q. Seelye wrote about the startling number of layoffs in prominent newspapers across the country. “Industrywide, ad revenue is flat, costs are up and circulation is eroding.” These were the reasons she gave for the massive cutbacks.

An August 2005 Nielsen Monitor-Plus study on ad revenue growth showed that in the first half of 2005 newspapers lagged behind all other media, with the exception of network radio. As broadband usage grows, more and more consumers are getting their news online. As a result, advertisers are shifting their budgets away from hardcopy newspapers.  

Now for the good news. Change in consumer behavior presents an opportunity for newspapers to reinvent themselves. That does not mean that newspapers will become online-only publications. Print will continue to be a strong medium for subjects other than general news. This is the reason your publishers keep giving you new, specialized sections to produce. Special sections, however, are only an interim fix. Reinvention requires thinking outside the box. For attracting ad revenue, that means taking off the newsprint-colored glasses and putting on a marketing hat. It means seeing advertising from the advertiser’s point of view.

Think marketing

You already know the reasons marketers shy away from newsprint. You simply cannot deliver the resolution or color assurance required to convince a Lanc™me or Estee Lauder to feature their newest lipstick shades in the new Beauty section.

You might be able to convince them if you upgraded the paper for that section to magazine stock, started using alternative screening technology and offered scratch ‘n sniff patches for their perfume collections. But you would also have to show such advertisers how you intend to get the new Beauty section in front of their demographic targets.

On behalf of American Business Media, Forrester Research Inc. conducted a study last August among business-to-business marketers to learn what media they found most effective for branding and lead generation. Respondents from a wide variety of industries said that the most effective branding vehicles were in-person events, public relations, industry-specific magazines, and online media, in that order.

Industry-specific magazines traded places with public relations as the No. 2 in lead generation. The study also showed that fewer marketers will use general business magazines and newspapers as they shift toward trade magazines and online marketing.

Now think about this. Knowing that business-to-business marketers value industry-specific or trade publications for both branding and lead generation, how difficult would it be to offer such advertisers subscriptions to the newspaper’s business section? This specialized business section could be a weekly round-up of business news with an article or two on industry-specific topics that gets mailed to the advertiser’s database. What this does is repackage the newspaper’s intellectual properties into a branding and lead-generating marketing vehicle.

Consider new technology

The technology necessary to turn you into a marketer is yours for the buying. Digital presses, like Xerox’s iGen, will allow you to reproduce, at reasonably high speeds, high-end inserts on stocks that range from 16-pound text to various cover weights. This gives you the opportunity to offer your advertisers more than space. Offer them a printed product (promotional brochures, etc). You are then in a position to provide them with all the vehicles they need to round out the marketing mix.

Some of the most innovative marketing tools I’ve seen in a long time come from a company called XMPie (www.xmpie.com). The New York and Israel-based company provides products that let you collaborate with advertisers and their agencies to deliver highly personalized dynamic content across various media - print, Web and e-mail.

It lets you customize advertising according to geography, section, or individual. You can change an ad, the content of the ad, or the color of an image in the ad. It also works with digital presses, such as the iGen.

These are just a few of the technologies that can allow newspapers to engage with their advertisers in developing the marketing mix. These are the means to true reinvention.    

Rosemarie Monaco is president of Group M Inc., a marketing communications and consulting firm specializing in the graphic arts. Send comments and questions to rmonaco@groupm.org.