It's sad to watch the newspaper dinosaurs thrash in the marketplace's tar pits, but the Boston Globe's latest branding campaign is destined to become fossilized before the gunk dries.
The paper is all but extinct: its parent, the New York Times Co. (itself troubled), gave it one of those cut-off-your-legs-or-die threats when it demanded $20 million in cost concessions from the unions. Like the topsy-turvy craziness that lends much of the Conventional Wisdom on Detroit's woes to suggest that legal obligations to former and current workers are the reason nobody wants to drive American-made cars, the dare to the Globe was all but a formal announcement of the paper's demise.
Then, only a few days later, word leaked out that the paper will run a branding and subscription campaign. In other words, it set its feet firmly in the tar.
The ads will be headlined with "One Story," and will talk about the Globe's storytelling and photography in print and TV spots. Interestingly, it seems that the entire campaign will run on Times-owned or controlled media (NESN TV, the Globe itself, and a free communter tabloid). So thank goodness it isn't actually paying for having helped along its own extinction.
But the branding, like the paper (it seems), is doomed. It didn't have to be this way.
I know that brighter bulbs than I have been struggling with the challenges of newspaper circulation and readership for years now, and with little success to show for it. Marketers have tried every possible invention to garner interest, short of holding a puppy hostage and threatening to kill it unless people renewed their subscriptions. None of it has done much to stem the slide of these great, old beasts into the muck.
That's because I don't think the problem is that more people need to appreciate the beauty of the Globe's stories and photography. Its problem isn't that folks don't feel fond thoughts for it (the Globe is an institution, after all), or that they don't realize that at least some content in the paper is available nowhere else (though that number has been shrinking significantly). There's nothing that marketing can tell people that they don't already know, and no amount of creativity or sincerity will change that fact.
The Globe has to become relevant to its readers...no, it needs to be needed...and that would require a rethinking of the paper itself, not just its branding.
Here's a for instance:
- Instead of simply rearranging the paper's sections to somehow appeal to the aesthetics of Internet consumers, why not do something that the Internet can't do?
- How about deliver objectivity and truth?
- The POV of the paper, from its editorials to beat reporting, would get refocused to become arbiters of fact, providing assessments of the prior day's news in a truly (and uniquely) fair way. It would shift from reporting the news to assessing it
- So, while the Internet torrent of quasi-news and gossip swirled through the alimentary canals of readers' screens and mobile devices, the Globe would be the resource that everyone wanted to check every morning...a reality check on what was said, who said it, and what it meant
- In this way, the newspaper wouldn't have to operate as a competitor to online noise, but rather recast itself as an augment and necessary pallative to it
Better yet, this purpose would be nearly impossible for other entities to copy or do better. The Globe would be utilizing its unique qualities -- great reporters and editors, and processes for vetting truth from fiction -- instead of dismantling them in order to mimic the breezy irrelevance of online news
Coming up with the branding campaign for this evolutionary step would be a hoot! And if this version was a dim bulb idea, I'm sure there are other ones that would have been worth pursuing.
Extinction wasn't inevitable. But the latest branding campaign, without any real, relevant, needed changes to what the Globe hopes to accomplish, means that its hopes of survival are all but spent.
Splish, splash. That tar pit sound is sad.
If content/relevance is the issue, could we old-fogie print lovers someday see a customized Globe with editorial content specific to my interests and requests? Where do I sign up?
Posted by: Bob Boucher | April 22, 2009 at 03:48 PM
Carson, I think you're onto something...the globe and philly sites look like generic websites, almost as if the strategy had been to 'disconnect' them from their paper progenitors. This strategy also impacts the choice of content, which also attempts to mimic online...as if the answer to newspaper readership were to 1) give up every reason why anybody read them in the first place, and then 2) go online and try to do what online sites do, only not as well.
Doesn't seem like much of a survival strategy to me. I agree that the NYTimes site does a great job of carrying the look-and-feel over to the Internet (or on my iPhone, for that matter). It also comes closest to that 'authority' content strat I outlined in my post.
BTW, thanks for listening in to the Fizzinar!
Dude Stro, I share lots of your cynicism about the literary tastes of anybody who doesn't read as much as I do, but I still think there's a role for 'authoritative/truthful' content...even if it's cut up in bite-sized pieces for busy, distracted people. I guess my POV is that newspapers don't suffer from a format/distribution problem as much as a content/relevance issue. That's why all the 'fixes' for the former have resulted in, well, nothing.
Funny you mention the commode. Talk about great utility for my NTimes iPhone reader...LOL...
Posted by: Jonathan | April 17, 2009 at 01:26 PM
I work in publishing and agree that the medium of print imbues content with a certain authority that online can’t really match.
As a web analyst, this brings up a lot of interesting questions for me about what the online identity should look like. My colleague and I were just discussing newspapers that have rebranded themselves online. Many papers feel the need to drastically change their branding to match the online space.
But, would it not make more sense for the online version to mimic the print look more closely? For example, I think the NY Times does a great job of translating the authoritative print look/feel to its online graphic design.
Compare the NY Times with the Philadelphia Inquirer, simply branded as philly.com. Or Boston Globe's boston.com. These sites are very generic, virtually indistinguishable from any old aggregator. They are asking for Google to eat them up!
PS it was fun to hear you on the webinar the other day
Posted by: Carson | April 17, 2009 at 01:07 PM
1. People don't read.
2. People want short, dumb sound-bytes (and "thought-bytes" that don't require thinking).
3. Video/TV are the media of choice; the newspaper isn't entertaining -- it's full of analysis and information.
4. The serendipity of reading a newspaper has vanished; it used to be that you couldn't take a laptop to . . . ahem, the commode and read-away. Now, I suppose, people do. Or again, they just don't read.
5. Libraries have become "Museums of Information."
Why do you think that pro (and college) sports promotions and events have had to change?
--> "I want to be entertained. I don't want to have to think! Thinking is hard work."
Posted by: Dude Stro | April 17, 2009 at 12:41 PM
Jim, I can't find any evidence of a paid version on the Globe's site.
As for whether online junkies care about 'the truth' or not, I'm not sure I know the answer. My gut tells me that 'truth' has been redefined by 1) the moment, and 2) the volume of participants, so it's this running narrative of opinion more than truth, at least the way I'd define it.
What I like about utilizing the print medium (instead of trying to work around it) is that it literally forces a 'snapshot' of reality -- it trades immediacy for more durability, or ease for relevance? -- and thus the channel helps define the purpose and utility of the content?
Thanks for your thinking on this one...
Posted by: Jonathan | April 17, 2009 at 08:45 AM
Jonathan, we've talked a little about this idea before but this post of yours crystallizes the essence. Newspapers should be: arbiters of fact, and shift from reporting the news to assessing it
I do hope at least one newspaper tries this.
Question is: do they also produce a digital (paid) version?
Or is "the truth" not something online junkies care about, they preferring to slog through the wisdom (cough) of crowds?
Posted by: Jim Novo | April 17, 2009 at 06:45 AM