Some business historians say horse-and-buggy companies vanished from view because their leaders thought they were in the horse-and-buggy business. They weren’t: They were in the transportation business, and if they had realized that then they might be manufacturing SUVs today.

The same goes for more successful business adaptations, for instance, AT&T. Realizing that it was in the communications business, the company was smart enough to play down the “telegraph” part of its title and today sells VOIP along with its other services. Or Warner Brothers, which dropped silent films faster than Al Jolson could say “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet,” and today is part of world’s biggest media conglomerate.

Newspapers, as we all know, find themselves in the same straits. Like Warner, newspapers can identify the alternative technologies that are transforming it. Unlike Warner, however, the new technologies don’t seem to present any obvious answers.

Still, some newspapers seem to be bucking the trend. Whether it’s investing in new technologies like social networking, or a more traditional one, such as publishing a market-specific magazine, these newspapers are proving that they still matter in the communities they serve.

To find out what they’re doing, and how they’re doing it, Newspapers & Technology profiled four dailies, The Monroe (Mich.) Evening News; The Huntsville (Ala.) Times; Journal-World in Lawrence, Kan.; and The Palm Beach (Fla.) Post.

“We still have a lot more work to do, but it’s enough to give us hope for the future,” said Dan Shaw, managing editor and director of new audiences for The Evening News. “We don’t feel like we have any answers, but we feel like we have started on the journey.”

Their stories:

Monroe Evening News

A disciple of the American Press Institute’s Newspapers Next initiative (see story, page 33), The Evening News also is a rarity. Not only is it an afternoon newspaper, it’s an employee-owned company (and winner of last year’s ESOP Association’s ESOP Company of the Year). The newspaper’s ah-ha moment occurred when Evening News executives grasped that another “2” revolution was going on, Shaw said.

“Like many newspapers we realized about two years ago that the Web 2.0 revolution, the social networking revolution, was passing us by and we needed to join in or get left behind,” he said. “So when we relaunched our news Web site in November 2005, as part of the relaunch we added a talk forum function, and, like many newspapers, we took the unusual step doing a feed of the last three or four comments on the talk forum right there on our home page of our Web site.

“It took a little while, but once people figured out that they could say whatever they wanted to say and it would show up right on the home page, it started to catch on.”

By May 2007, “We were getting 60,000 page views just on the talk forum. It still wasn’t great. Our Web site was getting like 800,000, so that gives you some perspective.”

This modest result, however, contained a powerful truth: “That was our first recognition of the fact that there’s more going on here on the social side of Web sites than newspapers were catching on to,” Shaw said.

Then, in December 2006, Evening News execs realized, “This blogging thing is getting crazy. We’ve got to join.”

Employing Newspaper Next’s “good enough” philosophy and using open-source software, the newspaper in January 2007 launched a community blog. The best-read presents the thoughts of an amateur chef. No. 2 is the chronicle of dwarfism, which has attracted readers nationally. In last place, a blog written by an Evening News reporter.

From those roots blossomed Monroe Talks.

The chat forum launched last June 19 and by the end of that month, page views soared from 62,000 in May 2007 to more than 190,000 as Monroe residents in the town of 23,000 cast their opinions.

By January, page views grew even further, to 1.4 million, with the typical Monroe resident spending 13 minutes per visit to view 18 pages.

“Some people get depressed about what’s going on (with the newspaper industry’s economic challenges),” Shaw says. “I think it’s exciting. This has to be the most exciting time to be a journalist in the history of mankind, because we’re going through the most rapid change in how journalism is conducted since journalism as we know it was created, with all these new tools.”

Huntsville Times

The Huntsville Times has taken a more traditional approach to its transformation, one also inspired by Newspaper Next.

“We have started a very small in-house department that does niche publications,” explained special publications editor Jim Steele. “And I know everybody is doing that, but we have done some things that are really cool.”

The main “really cool” thing the Times did is launch the Huntsville R&D Report magazine, aimed at the area’s sizable, and demographically attractive, high-tech space, aviation and engineering market.

“We’re using the same overhead, the same infrastructure, the same plant, except for the printing. We’ve already got this overhead and might as well use it to produce as many varied products as we can in this market,” Steele said.

The Times (daily, 50,355; Sunday, 70,520) kicked off the magazine business three years ago with the Publications Services of America product House and Home and later added Better Health and Living and Wedding Vow, each of which adds local content to national stories. The company also published a one-time relocation guide, which “just astounded  us. It ended up being 320 pages and an inch thick,” said Steele.

That gave publisher Bob Ludwig the brainstorm that produced the 68-page Huntsville R&D Report. Published thrice yearly, the 30,000-copy R&D Report is distributed at Huntsville’s Cummings Research Park, the nation’s second largest; to the top brass at Redstone Arsenal; to the city’s top politicos; and, through individual arrangements, to select university engineering schools across the country.

The newspaper has plunged deeper into the magazine business with the acquisition of Growing Up, a parenting magazine distributed at Huntsville area schools.

“They are inserted into packets that go home with the kids and then directly into the homes of parents,” Steele said. “It’s a very powerful advertising tool for people who are trying to reach that demographic. It comes right from the school and it’s being handed to you by your child. That is about the best vehicle you can ask for. The key is, you’ve got to have a great working relationship with the schools.”

No surprise that, “Ludwig and I are already thinking about other publications that we could launch later,” Steele said. “We are blessed with the management here that is constantly, constantly seeking new products.”

Journal-World

The Journal-World (daily, 18,946; Sunday, 19,320)  is a newspaper. It’s also a software company. And it’s a consulting business. All three converge in the newspaper Web site, LJWorld.com, whenever visitors click the button that says, “Marketplace.”

There, site browsers can find an unusual degree of detail about local businesses such as detailed maps, coupons (which automatically expire online), photo galleries, product information, business hours, videos — and even text — all free to users.

Launched in April 2007, Marketplace rapidly changed the newspaper company’s approach to e-commerce, said General Manager Al Bonner.

“The original sales plan was to have a separate sales staff, which we have maintained from the beginning and continue to have,” he said. “But the approach we’re taking with it is now is that we’re revolving our entire sales operation around it — primarily focused on going after new business.”

Marketplace’s basic concept was to beat national directories and the local Yellow Pages competitors to the punch by exploring “what we could do locally in the form of a robust business directory,” Bonner said. “But what really drove it was the need to create a new line of business online beside the classified verticals that existed already.”

The Journal-World appears to be making Marketplace work through a semi-Newspapers Next approach. Rather than the initiative’s JTBD (Jobs To Be Done) interview-intensive method, Bonner said the paper didn’t do a lot of preliminary research. Instead, Journal-World polled its younger employees to get their feedback about what a marketplace site should be.

“We didn’t do a lot of research other than some of what we have experienced with our user traffic and feedback from LJWorld.com. We rely a lot on our younger employees and asked a lot of questions of them and ran things by them. We marketed it aggressively and let the users know it was something they could rely on for any business in the market.”

Journal-World wrote the code supporting the site itself, using its Ellington content management software. (Editor’s note: Ellington, which is also used by papers including The Washington Post, is now available commercially.)

The paper also released an open source platform for Ellington, called Django.

“That allowed us to start getting some talented programmers in here, once Marketplace really started to become successful here locally,” Bonner said. “Based on the business experience, and the kind of revenue we were generating, Django quickly moved into becoming another product to offer as a way to generate more revenue.”

Journal-World is also leveraging Marketplace, selling the concept to other newspapers.

“There are many large markets that we’re working on an agreement with right now, so it’s really starting to take off,” Bonner said.

These are beta users, Bonner explained, not because the software needs debugging, but “with us working hand-in-hand with them so that they get off the ground successfully.”

Part of what people get with Django/Marketplace is that, “They can send their managers or salespeople into Lawrence to get trained by the people who are making it work here and learn from all the mistakes and missteps that we made as we were getting this thing off the ground.”

In its first year of operation, Marketplace grossed more than $500,000 in sales and Bonner said the site could have kicked in more had the paper immediately employed more salespeople. The site started with one rep; it now has four.

“We have a very robust online audience that doesn’t ever pick up the paper and never will pick up the paper, but we’ve got them as readers and consumers now,” Bonner said. “It just took a different mindset at the beginning. I won’t say it wasn’t a challenge, but along the way you discover that if you keep your mind open and you keep thinking young, good things can happen.”

The Palm Beach Post

The Palm Beach Post boasts a couple of innovations, one newsy, one not.

The newsy one is a cell phone-based hurricane warning system, using software from CellSigns Inc. “We developed a mobile on-demand hurricane alert system last year,” explained director of digital operations Gina Wilcox. “During hurricane season you can text our short code, and if there are any active hurricanes or tropical activity we do text message with all the specifics — the wind speed, the hurricane category level” and more.

The alert system’s first year has been sponsored by Publix Super Markets, which is now talking to The Post (daily, 145,516; Sunday, 176,643) about signing up for a second year.

The non-newsy, but monetizing, innovation is PalmBeachPost.com’s shopping section, which has worked out well enough to be offered to the public through a variety of media: mobile media, the Web site, and 59 kiosks in locations such as malls, libraries, technical and vocational schools and a couple of McDonald’s.

One of the keys to the shopping site’s effectiveness is that it spans six counties, a considerably larger turf that the print newspaper reaches. The territory is served by the kiosk network, which last year attracted 300,000 unique visitors who viewed more than 4 million pages. “That is also why we are focusing on mobile technology — because it doesn’t have the same boundaries as the print edition,” Wilcox said.

Part of the newspaper’s circulation area-plus approach is based on Florida’s mobile demographics.

Many Floridians move north to Palm Beach from the Fort Lauderdale area due to lower costs and lesser congestion.

“We don’t have our paper being distributed in Fort Lauderdale, but we know that every year people from Fort Lauderdale morph into our market,” said Wilcox. “That’s why we put our kiosk units in several Broward County mall locations where there is high traffic.”

The kiosk network now is under review in order to eliminate underperforming locations and beef up those that are producing higher results.

“In terms of revenue we consider kiosks just as we consider mobile: a distribution method just like online, just like print,” Wilcox said.

Wilcox and her staff now are focusing on mobile technology, which like the kiosks, will feature jobs, real estate and merchandise for sale.

If users have a Web-enabled telephone, they can click a link embedded in the text message and immediately be transferred into a mobile Web browser. If they are not Web-enabled, they can get information via texting, Wilcox said.

One feature exclusive to the newspaper’s shopping site is the combination of local content with national content provided by HarvestInfo Inc. “That enables people to click and buy because they are actually buying from those retailers online,” Wilcox said. “We felt like we needed that functionality in our shopping channel to make it robust, so we were very happy to have this incorporated into a shopping channel with Harvest.”

The newspaper also announced in late February an arrangement with The New York Times through which The Times will share Post real estate ads in order to target New Yorkers and other readers evaluating a move to the Sunshine state.

“The Times definitely has an interest in south Florida, and I believe that we were the first to sign up with them to do this.”

But is it all working? Yes, “but it could be more successful,” Wilcox said. “We are doing well with the new distribution platform. Kiosk and mobile is the direction where things are going.”
 

David Lewis is a Denver-based freelance writer. He can be reached at davidslewis@msn.com