A conversation on competition
A friend of mine who is in marketing in another industry told me today that those of us at the newspaper were nuts.
A newspaper editor often feels as if he walks around with a "Kick me" sign on his back so I'm used to this kind of opening comment. I asked him why.
"You promote your competition in your own paper. That's like McDonald's having a sign for The Whopper in its restaurant."
"Are you talking about the letters to the editor again?" I asked. We had once gotten into an argument over the value of letters from readers. He told me we were nuts then to subject ourselves to criticism in print. ("No other business does that. Even other media businesses -- television and radio -- don't do it. All it does is erode your credibility.")
"Not this time," he said, "although I'm still right about that. I'm talking about that column by Ed Cone this morning. He's writing about an alternative to the newspaper. Why would you publish that? You also write stories about other newspapers coming to town and competing Web sites. Why would you want to give your customers any information about other sources of news?"
I said: "If you publish a daily newspaper that cares about its readers and wants its readers to be informed, to be smarter, you're going to tell them things that might hurt you, just like you're going to tell them things that they may not want to know or that makes them mad. This is pretty much what we do."
He looked at me as if I had just spent my life savings on lottery tickets. "What do you think advertising is for? Tell them to buy an ad."
"We want readers to know they can rely on us to tell them things they don't know or might wonder about. Besides, competition is healthy. It makes us better."
He still had that look on his face.
"Look, did you know what a blog was until you read Cone's column?" I asked. "Would you have known that ESP was out of business but that another entertainment weekly is about to come into the market if you hadn't read it in the paper? All I'm saying is that it's a reader service."
"Well, it's a dumb one," he said. "You could have done without those stories and columns and I wouldn't have missed them. What if someone reads Cone, realizes they can get news online and other places and drops the paper?"
"Most of our readers are smarter than you. They know they can get national news lots of places. We're local. And before you say it, Cone is talking about micro-local news, and he's right. It's a market everyone is trying to figure out how to reach."
He just shook his head. We've been friends for years, but he's never understood the news side of newspapers. "Well, when you figure it out, how about letting me market it," he said.
Comments (4)
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It seems to me that it's not that your marketing friend doesn't understand newspapers -- he doesn't understand what's happened to marketing as technology lowers barriers to disintermediation.
Or, in plainfolk: Conversations beat branding every day. And people who are honest about their weaknesses and others' strengths are more credible than those who aren't.
I'd prescribe for him a healthy dose of:
Gaping Void (http://www.gapingvoid.com)and
Evelyn Rodriguez (http://evelynrodriguez.typepad.com/crossroads_dispatches/). They helped turn me around.
Posted on December 12, 2004 6:48 PM
I'm sticking with the John F. Kennedy quote that I keep paraphrasing: As you raise the water in the harbor all the ships in the harbor, large and small, keep rising. The big ships remain big, the small ships remain small, but none of them fear dragging bottom. Personally, I wish to thank you, the N&R, Mr. Cone, and the rest of your staff for embrasing local voices rather than shutting us out.
This is the root of supply side, trickle down economics that our corporate CEOs, politricksters, and marketing pros have never dug deep enough to see.
Times have changed and your marketing friend will soon learn that he has the wrong take on what Americans expect from media as well as business. Besides, what would it hurt if your dollar off deal for a Big Mac could get you the same on a Whopper? The fact is: the only ones losing in this revolution are the marketing pros.
After all, a good blog beats "The Sound Of The Beep" any day, any way.
Posted on December 12, 2004 8:20 PM
Disclaimer: These comments were in no way influenced by the story the N&R did on Greensboro101.com last week. Honestly. No, really.
This kind of coverage is good for the community and good for the News & Record. Greensboro is at the forefront of the alternate media revolution; a unique and exciting development that could help Greensboro further define itself as a city of innovation and entrepreneurial spirit. By directly involving itself in the emerging technologies, this page is an example, and by telling the story to its still massive print audience, the News & Record is both keeping up with the times and performing a civic role.
Posted on December 12, 2004 8:53 PM
I recently wrote a letter to the editors at the Charlotte Observer lamenting the fact that you good folks in the Greensboro media, old and new, are, so to say, cooperating, and that you are evolving into a real 21st century powerhouse of information. As Billy said, it lifts all boats, and I'm not speaking in economic terms, although it may do that as well.
I am always running into people here in Charlotte who still do not know what a blog is, much less realize that it may well be their saving grace. Because of the bold vision of your newspaper, the same is probably not true for the people of Greensboro...just as it is surely not the case in New York, Boston, California, and much of blue America...for whom good information, and as much as possible, is what is sought and treasured. Not so bad to be treasured...
Blogs are conduits into the newspaper as well. People all over the world read Ed Cone, Matt Gross and yourself...and through your links you draw this new audience into the newspaper. There is a cross-benefit.
Competition can be a good thing, but cooperation can be a better thing, if evolved properly. Synergy changes much. Ideally, the various medias and audiences are cross-invested, even in those times when adversarility becomes necessary.
You are ahead of the proverbial curve, and your audience will respect you for this. They will trust that they can keep up with the changes, because YOU will keep up with the changes, and share your knowledge with them.
In this way, you do far more good than a mere politician, who may, alas, be in it for themselves alone.
When outsiders see intellection percolating in Greensboro, it makes the city more desireable to those who prize intelligence, and all the other nuances of civility that your paper reflects and provides.
Perhaps you could extend a hand of cooperation to Lew Powell and the good folks at the Observer, and share what you have learned...
Brave!
Dave Beckwith
Charlotte
Posted on December 13, 2004 11:19 PM