May 08, 2007
Segmenting, New Products Reach Beyond Core Audience
'Audience in Transition' panel discusses readership growth at Annual Convention
Note: PRESSTIME Magazine staffers are blogging for The Digital Edge during this year's NAA Annual Convention, May 6 - 9 in New York City.
Segmenting the audience and developing products that reach beyond a newspaper's core product are two steps newspapers can take to boost the number of readers and advertisers they reach, experts said on the "Audience in Transition" panel Tuesday.
Newspapers need to stop thinking about their market as a block, but rather think about which audience segments they are trying to reach, said Barbara Cohen, president of Kannon Consulting (www.kannon.com). That's true even among segments, such as sought-after 18-to-34-year-olds, for example. Sixty percent of 18-to-34-year-olds have young children at home, making their needs different than singles with no children in the same age category, she noted.
The Roanoke (Va.) Times recently launched initiatives to better reach two audience segments: women with young children at home and college students. Its Big Lick University, a social networking site aimed at reaching the 50,000-plus college students and 20,000 staffers at seven Southwest Virginia colleges and universities, has already attracted almost 1,000 registered users since its launch in February. The site is planning to hold events when students return to campus in the fall and include more multimedia efforts, said Debbie Meade, the paper's president and publisher.
But even as papers like the Times launch new products, the core newspaper makes up "close to 100 percent of our industry's focus today, and that's too much," said Stephen Gray, managing director of Newspaper Next, a $2.5 million innovation project by the American Press Institute (www.americanpressinstitute.org). Developing new products that fulfill jobs that non-newspaper readers and advertisers need done is key, he said, citing several efforts by newspaper companies, such as Big Lick University, to do just that. "We're too often imprisoned by 100-year-old mindsets," he said. "It's breaking out of the mindset that is the biggest challenge."
-- Mary Lynn F. Jones
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