The newspaper in New Orleans is laying off a third of its staff and shifting to three-days-a-week publication in just the most recent example of that industry’s decline. Meanwhile, Politico is hiring 20 journalists to beef up its coverage of the economy and the military. The easy analysis of their diverging fortunes is that the Times-Picayune primarily is in print and Politico is online, but it’s more complicated than that. The real reasons are familiar to marketers, or at least they should be.
Newspapers like the Times-Picayune aren’t dying solely because they’re in print. They’re dying because they failed to hold onto their audiences in profitable print and rushed free content online under the mistaken premise they could sell advertising there. Politico isn’t growing just because it’s online. It’s growing because it’s found an audience, built value with that audience, and extracts that value with a subscription model.
Does Politico share free content? Sure it does, a lot of it. But it doesn’t share everything. That helps increase the value of the content not shared with everyone. More importantly, Politico has found an audience that places a high value on its content, and it’s asking that audience to give something for it.
Find an audience that values what you do and build rapport that audience. Do that by sharing, but don’t share everything. Ask consumers to give you something in exchange for your best work. Sound familiar? It should. It’s the basic roadmap for effective content marketing.
It took some time, but she steadily improved as a reporter and writer. She could write a nice feature story, and cover breaking news. Then Valerie and colleague Matthew Haag learned about Exide Technologies, owners of a lead smelter that has been operating outside Dallas since the 1960s. These days Exide — and the lead pollution it creates — are surrounded by a fresh-scrubbed suburb, Frisco, Texas, one of the fastest-growing places in the country.
HEADS UP: What the New Pope Is Teaching Us About Marketing
The Catholic Church’s problems are well-chronicled, led by the painful clergy-sex scandal, its lingering effects, and more recently the tales of stolen records and Vatican misconduct. But these days, the Church’s problems are mentioned only in passing, as in this story from Reuters:
But that’s the fourth paragraph of a story that focuses instead on something new. Here’s the lead:
That’s just marketing manna from heaven: The pope is busy. He’s telling priests to help the poor and suffering. (Who can be against that?) And he’s telling priests to get out there and help people instead of sitting around in “introspection,” which is a nice word for squabbling.
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