Publisher meeting recap

Business will be tougher at the Spokesman-Review this year, but the company will keep working at it with some new ventures, W. Stacey Cowles and a handful of managers said at a noon meeting today. An hour wasn’t enough to get into detail, but there was time for a rundown on the state of the news industry and some previews on new S-R projects.

There’s plenty of bad news:
• Industry and company advertising revenue is down because advertisers are finding new ways to spread the word, because consumer habits are changing toward web
• Substitutes such as Craigslist detour readers from buying ad space
• Online advertising e.g. Google will charge for readers who actually click, compared to readers who look at paper
• Fewer young people are using newspapers everywhere, and current subscribers are eventually going to die
• There are many information sources to choose from in the world

Some of the efforts for the year:
• Making alliances with other outlets, increasing sensitivity to advertisers’ needs, marketing solutions and not space, controlling cost
• Working hard to keep the subscribers (and revenue) that S-R already has
• Taking more journalistic risk, promote the Spokesman-Review as a source of information and not just as a newspaper
• The radio initiative, which will also help promote print coverage and enhance S-R as a brand of information delivery
• S-R.com redesign, new web sites for specific audiences, some Voices expansion coming soon, multimedia in news
• Also, the innovation team had a good first two months with multimedia production and interactive features. Our Kids Our Business will continue this year also.

There was one notable item from the Q&A:
How can the S-R capitalize on the deeply local policy-changing journalism such as Otto Zehm? Cowles and Higgins responded that the cross-platform promotion would benefit the newspaper in general, and it would highlight the efforts in print. Although generally, many reporters and editors might add, tough investigative and policy-changing journalism also results in plenty of subscription cancellations.