USN&WR: December issue will be last printed monthly sent to subscribers (Dinosaur Media DeathWatch™)

From: Kelly, Brian To: INSIDE Sent: Fri Nov 05 15:31:30 2010 Subject: Digital Strategy

To: U.S. News From: Bill and Brian RE: Completing Our Shift to the Digital World

Colleagues, We're finally ready to complete our transition to a predominantly digital publishing model with selected, single-topic print issues. This will allow us to make the most of the proven products, useful journalism, and great audience growth we've been sustaining. Thanks to all your great work, we've been able to maintain our core values of creating high-quality content while establishing a new, healthy business model. This puts us in a strong position to continue building the U.S. News brand in the new media world. As you know, we've been a leading innovator in adapting to the changing environment -- and we don't intend to give up that lead.

The December issue will be our last print monthly sent to subscribers, whose remaining print and digital replica subscriptions will be filled by other publishers. Going forward, our non-subscription print offerings will be for newsstand sale and targeted distribution. They'll include the college and grad guides, as well as hospital and personal finance guides. In addition, we’ll publish four other newsstand special editions, focusing on history, religion and some of the other subjects that have been a success for us in the past. And of course we’ll continue to expand our audience and products on the various usnews.com channels and grow the digital U.S. News Weekly.

All of us at U.S. News Media Group have been aggressively responding to the changing habits in the media marketplace, and these latest moves will accelerate our ability to grow our online businesses and position ourselves to take advantage of the emerging platforms for distributing information such as the iPad and Android tablets. We'll discuss this in more detail in meetings starting next week.

With an average unique audience of 9 million and counting, we've become a significant publisher in the digital space, creating content that people want and an audience that advertisers will pay for. Each of our channels -- Politics & Policy, Education, Money, Health, Autos, and Travel -- are now fully-formed business units that are developing on their own best course. By working both in the vertical channels and horizontally across them, the company has diversified its revenue beyond display advertising to include e-commerce products, lead generation, licensing and other sources.

Our emphasis on rankings and research content is the right path, making us an essential information source in a commoditized marketplace. We provide information that helps people make important decisions. Whether they're picking a college or voting for a senator, it's clear from the response of our users that accurate, searchable information is something they value highly. The proof is in the audience. People come to us every day, all day, for information they can’t get anywhere else.

We can't sit still. We have to keep improving the existing products while selectively creating new ones. In addition to upgrades in college and hospital rankings, we’ll refine and expand the data and tools that allow consumers to evaluate mutual funds, high schools, cars, online education, health plans and more. Travel is getting ready to come out of beta. Politics & Policy is developing its extensive database allowing citizens to examine the records of every member of Congress and is part of an expanding group of public policy tools. The iPad and the next generations of tablets and mobile platforms will create a brand new set of opportunities for us. We know that the creative energy and team spirit of everyone at U.S. News will continue to keep us ahead of the pack.

http://gannettblog.blogspot.com/2010/11/week-nov-1-7-your-layoff-comments-part_06.html#comments

Anonymous said...

11:26 a.m. -

The problem is more advertising than it is quality of the product. Advertisers that once flocked to newspapers in spite of the quality are now choosing to sound their ad budgets in other places in spite of quality. I left Gannett a couple of years ago and am now in PR. Our firm was recently marketing a new service to Gannett community and we had $20k in advertising money. That amount is not small but It wasn’t huge either. We had to make some difficult and calculated decisions about where we were going to spend the budget and get the biggest bang for our buck, to be cliche. We cast a wide net and spent the money in a number of places, including the Gannett newspaper, Facebook, digital platforms, etc. The campaign was largely a success, but when we asked people where they learned of our service, not a single person said the newspaper. Facebook and Google ads were 100 times more effective and cost us considerably less. Why were they were more effective? Targeted audiences. The way those software programs target your ad buy to a very specific group of people who have the highest likelihood of engaging your product or service is more valuable than any news content, no matter the quality. The next time our firm has $20k to spend, I can assure you we will spend every penny we put into the newspaper this time around expanding our online approach through search engines and social media targeted advertising. Multiply that statement by 1 million times and you can begin to understand why newspapers are losing revenue. The quality of the content has nothing to do with loss of advertising. It’s unfortunate too, as a former journalist and a newspaperman at heart, it makes me sad to know that is the case. Good luck everyone. It’s hard to watch these layoffs come to good newsrooms, even if i am no longer a part of one.

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