The Catalyst Code

By David Evans and Karen Webster

The following is an excerpt from an article originally published in ideas magazine. To download the full article, click here.

The newspaper business is being disrupted by the same phenomenon that gutted so many other businesses in recent years: the internet. It has given younger audiences a more familiar medium by which to access information. It has compressed news cycles from 24 hours to 24 seconds. With its many blogs and niche sites, the internet is blurring the lines between news and opinion.

It has also broadened the ranks of news reporters. News can now be reported by almost anyone with a camera phone and an internet connection. Younger audiences likely place as much importance on the information they get from YouTube as they do from CNN.

Perhaps the internet’s greatest impact has been the profound change to the business model it has forced and the new expectations it has created among users. Newspapers are catalysts, making profits by bringing different groups of customers together onto the same platform at more or less the same time and helping them to interact. Until the rise of the internet, advertisers were willing to pay for the privilege of reaching newspaper readers because newspapers made it easy, convenient, and cost-effective for advertisers and readers to form a bond.

Newspapers, like many other media catalysts, perfected a business model that got lots of readers on board via low newsstand or subscription prices and high quality content so that the advertising community would place ads in those newspapers. The cost of production was mostly offset by the prices readers paid. The real money was made on the backs of advertisers.

That dynamic — lots of readers, and advertisers who wanted to reach them — was critical to how newspapers earned their profits. Ironically, it has become the source of great conflict in the newspaper world today.

The above is an excerpt from an article that appeared in the September/October edition of ideas magazine. Download the full article here, complements of ideas magazine’s publisher, International Newspaper Marketing Association (INMA). The INMA is a non-profit association with 1,200 members in 80 countries worldwide, dedicated to promoting advanced marketing principles within the newspaper industry. The organization’s website is http://www.inma.org.