From Advertising to Presence

THE CATSKILLS — There's an ad in every pennysaver that never seems to change. The hardware store runs the same little box. So does the plumber. The insurance agency. The funeral home. The ad is updated infrequently, but is ever-present.

By modern advertising standards, this is a little strange. There is no campaign to optimize, no click-through rate to measure, and sometimes no particular offer at all.

So what's being purchased?

Presence.

Patrons are saying something both simpler and perhaps more important than buy this today:

We're here.

A pennysaver understands something about local business that we think is still true, but the challenge is that the machinery it uses to provide that presence has become increasingly difficult to afford.

A Model That Worked

For decades, a pennysaver wasn't a bad business model. It was an ingenious solution to a practical problem.

A local business needs some way to reach nearby customers. Printing something inexpensive and putting it into thousands of mailboxes did exactly that.

Businesses pooled their advertising dollars to finance the publication and its distribution. Readers received something filled with local retailers, services, announcements and bargains. Advertisers gained access to a geographically concentrated audience.

And it worked.

There's an important feature of the arrangement: the reader isn't the customer.

If 10,000 copies are printed and bulk mailed, the cost of producing and delivering those copies exists whether every recipient wants one or not.

Ten thousand deliveries are not necessarily 10,000 readers or customers. The advertisers are the customers, and their advertising dollars ultimately have to support the machinery required to create the audience they're trying to reach.

The trouble began when the economics around this model changed. Paper, printing and postage became more expensive. At the same time, local businesses gained countless other places to spend their advertising dollars.

When advertising demand weakened, publishers faced an unpleasant choice. They could reduce distribution, weakening the reach they were selling to advertisers. Or they could lower advertising prices in an attempt to keep the pages full.

Lower prices meant fewer dollars to support the same physical machinery.

Mailing the publication to thousands of local homes was the very thing that makes a pennysaver valuable, but was also one of the most expensive things it has to do.

The problem isn't necessarily that local advertising has stopped having value, but that advertising had been asked to pay for everything.

Putting It Online Wasn't Enough

The Internet seemed to offer an obvious solution.

Put the publication online!

Many publishers did.

There is an important difference, however, between putting a publication online and building a custom enterprise digital platform that integrates workflows. If the website is essentially another version of what appeared in print, the product has been digitized, but the underlying system hasn't necessarily changed.

The process can still amount to creating a publication, selling advertising around it, distributing the printed product and reproducing some or all of it online.

We've been experimenting with the opposite approach.

Instead of beginning with a printed product, begin with the community itself.

People. Businesses. Organizations. Places. Events. Articles. Photographs. Announcements. Advertisements. Archives.

Connect them.

Then print and digital become different expressions of the same underlying information network.

The website isn't the digital version of the newspaper. The newspaper isn't the physical version of the website.

Both emerge from the same living record of the communities they serve.

A Story Doesn't Have to End at the Story

Imagine reading an article about a summer festival.

The organization holding the festival has a profile. From there, you find its upcoming events and an announcement about a fundraiser. The fundraiser is being hosted by a local restaurant. The restaurant has its own profile, where you discover another event happening next month.

Months later, you search for something unrelated and encounter the original article again.

None of these pieces is particularly remarkable by itself. Their value comes partly from remaining connected.

The organization isn't merely a name mentioned in an old story. The event isn't simply a calendar entry that disappears after its date passes. The restaurant isn't an isolated advertisement.

Each becomes part of the context surrounding the others. Every week, journalism adds more of those connections.

This person joined this organization. This business opened in this town. This board approved this project. This organization held this event. This happened here.

Over time, thousands of those connections begin to resemble something larger than a directory or an archive.

The newspaper helps the community remember itself.

What About Social Media?

At this point, there's an obvious question.

Isn't this what global social media already does?

In some important ways, yes!

Facebook demonstrated the extraordinary value of connecting people, businesses, organizations, events, photographs and conversations instead of treating each as an isolated piece of information.

We use those networks, our readers use them, and the organizations we cover use them. They're exceptionally useful for discovery, conversation and distribution.

We don't think a local network should try to replace them.

A global social network and a local newspaper begin from different places.

A global platform begins with its users. People and organizations join, create accounts and decide what they want to contribute. The resulting network can span nearly every subject and place imaginable.

A local newspaper begins with a place.

The town board exists whether anyone from the town board creates an account. The fire department exists whether it claims a profile. The local business, school, church, historical society, restaurant and community organization remain part of the region whether or not someone representing them happens to participate online.

If they matter to the communities we cover, they belong in the record.

In practice, that means we add profiles as coverage requires them: when a journalist writes about a group that doesn't yet have one, or when a business places an advertisement without one. At any time, an authorized representative of that organization can create a free account, claim the profile and begin managing it at no cost.

That creates an important distinction between participation and representation.

Participation is voluntary, whereas representation should strive for completeness.

A social network can reasonably say, Here are the people and organizations that chose to join us.

A newspaper of record has to ask a different question: What is actually here?

That also means the two systems can complement one another.

An organization might announce an event on Facebook, discuss it with its followers there, and use those global networks to reach people far beyond our own boundaries. That same event can also become part of a permanent local record which is connected to the organization, the place where it happened, related journalism and other events in the community.

Social media can help information move.

The local network can help information remain.

One is not required to defeat the other for either to be useful.

In fact, we think the strongest model connects outward while remaining grounded locally: participating in the enormous global networks where people already gather while maintaining an independent regional record organized around the people and places actually here.

What A Pennysaver Got Right

Which brings us back to that little advertisement that never changes.

What is the plumber buying by running it every week? What is the funeral home buying? What is the hardware store buying?

Not necessarily an immediate sale.

They're buying familiarity. Continuity. Recognition. A place in the local landscape.

They're buying presence.

We think a pennysaver was right about that.

So rather than discard the idea, we've been asking whether modern publishing technology allows us to preserve it without rebuilding the expensive economic structure that once surrounded it.

One way we're testing that idea is through something we call a Benefactor Sponsorship.

A Benefactor is a business or organization that maintains an enhanced, ongoing presence across our print and digital network while helping support the infrastructure that makes that network possible.

It resembles the old standing advertisement in one important respect.

It says: We're here.

Presence no longer needs to exist only as the same rectangle printed week after week. It can be connected to the organization's profile, its announcements, its events, the stories in which it appears, the places it serves and the history it accumulates over time.

It can live, learn and adapt.

As more of the community becomes part of the network, the presence of one participant adds context to the others. A story leads to an organization. An organization leads to an event. An event leads to a business. Tomorrow's story adds another connection.

No participant creates the network alone.

Together, we'll make it more useful for everyone.

Three Different Questions

Separating presence from conventional advertising allows us to ask three groups of people three very different questions.

A subscriber tells us: Is the journalism worth paying for?

Someone has voluntarily decided that what our journalists produce is valuable enough to purchase.

A Benefactor tells us: Is ongoing presence within this regional network valuable enough to support?

That tests whether businesses and institutions place economic value on the infrastructure and relationships surrounding the journalism.

An advertiser tells us: Is additional attention worth purchasing right now?

Maybe there is a sale this week. A grand opening. A job vacancy. A special event. A political campaign. A new product. Someone has something they want more people to notice.

Advertising remains useful. But it doesn't necessarily need to do everything else.

Subscribers support journalism. Benefactors support presence. Advertisers purchase attention.

If those three things can support themselves in different ways, local publishing becomes less dependent upon any one of them carrying the entire institution.

Print Should Follow Demand

Paper, ink, printing, postage and delivery cost money. Rather than incur those costs simply to manufacture a circulation number for advertisers, we think expensive physical distribution should increasingly follow demonstrated demand.

A print subscriber has made a wonderfully clear request: Send me the newspaper.

The subscriber helps pay for the physical form they chose. A digital subscriber makes a different choice and can be served at dramatically lower distribution cost.

Neither choice is inherently better.

Print isn't obsolete, but unwanted print is expensive.

That distinction allows us to preserve print without asking advertisers to subsidize thousands of copies nobody requested.

The Ground Gets a Vote

There is an important qualification to everything we've just written: this is an experiment.

We believe journalism has enough value that readers will voluntarily help support its production. That businesses and institutions receive enough value from persistent local presence that some will voluntarily help support the infrastructure providing it. Advertisers will continue to pay when they have something they want additional people to notice.

Believing these things doesn't make them true. Readers and local organizations get to decide. This is one reason we want these three sources of support to remain distinguishable, rather than asking any one of them to answer for the others.

A sustainable institution cannot be built indefinitely by insisting that people ought to value something they repeatedly demonstrate they don't.

The ground gets a vote.

And if the experiment works, the opposite will also be true.

Readers will have demonstrated that local journalism is worth supporting. Organizations will have demonstrated that persistent local presence is worth maintaining. Advertisers will have demonstrated that additional attention remains worth purchasing.

Not because our theory says so.

Because people will have chosen to pay for each of them.

Being Here

There's an irony in all of this.

Digital technology was once expected to make local newspapers obsolete, but perhaps it can instead help us preserve the thing they do that was hardest to replace: being here to cover news in and about the community we serve.

Presence is not created at the moment it becomes useful, but accumulates beforehand.

Subscribers will tell us what the journalism is worth. Advertisers will tell us what additional attention is worth.

Benefactors will help answer a different question and it is one that may decide a great deal about what locally owned publishing can become next: What is presence worth?

We don't know yet, but we're here to find out.

Be Part of the Experiment

Local publishing ultimately depends on people and organizations deciding that it's worth sustaining.

If you value the journalism, subscribe.

If your business or organization values an ongoing presence in the communities we serve, learn more about becoming a Benefactor.