Interesting news from The McClatchy Co., one of our former clients, and a well recognized company that publishes newspapers across the US, including The Miami Herald and The Sacramento Bee.
McClatchy has announced that it has chosen Youngstown as a test market for a new digital only newspaper. Why Youngstown? Well, it is here that the 150-year old family owned newspaper, The Vindicator, announced that it is ceasing operations. The new digital news service will be accessible through a website, app and online newsletter. The website will be designed to accommodate readers without broadband connections, as broadband penetration is limited in the region.
I am trying to find out more about this story, which I find interesting. My first reaction upon reading the news over the weekend was that this is the way more publishers are going to approach new ventures: digital only newspapers.
In my own experience, however, I have been involved in the creation of two fascinating digital only newspaper projects that eventually did not make it (yet) when they came up for approval by the board of directors. In each case, I think we have a revolutionary new product, one of them a Sunday digital newspaper. However, newspaper boards are usually inhabited by conservative, traditional types for whom anything that does not have a print component is NOT good enough.
That is why I am so intrigued by the McClatchy experiment, and I hope it happens and paves the way for others.
Leaving the print ghosts behind
One word of caution: let those planning this new digital only product to make it exactly that, a digital product totally conceptualized to be consumed digitally, with no legacy from print in the picture. What comes to mind immediately was that ill fated product, The Daily, the first paper to be created to be consumed on the tablet, but the ghost of tabloids past and present strangled a lot of it, among other factors.
This is what I wrote in this blog when The Daily ceased to publish:
To me, The Daily was always The New York Post with a little of a regional newspaper (located who knows where?) thrown in. That was the problem. It suffered from what television did in the beginning, the so-called “radio days syndrome.” The people who went to do television came from radio and took radio strategies with them: anchors sat at a table in front of a microphone and talked, with no movement. It took years for these people to start moving around!
The Daily suffered from the ghost of the newspaper that it wanted to be so desperately.
When we create for digital we must do so in earnest. There is little from print that can be applied to a digital product, except the definition of what a good story is! Aside from that, how we read, our retention levels, and the interruptions are all very specific to digital.
Digital products have to have a voice. That voice needs to adapt to what audiences today expect from their news & information sources. Especially the young, who are quite interested in news, and who are likely to be great consumers of this new digital McClatchy product, expect news determinants that are not the traditional ones. We discussed those in this blog recently:
- Teens clearly prefer a visual medium for learning about the news
- Teens rely on social media for a lot of their information. So any new digital only newspaper should be a great companion to social media.
- Teens love YouTube—and videos generally. This new product should tell many stories via video.
- Audio will be important too, and a new digital product born in almost 2020 needs to make audio an essential part of its storytelling.
Keeping an eye on The McClatchy digital product. And hoping it is a success that can be a model for others. Maybe 2020 is the year when we begin to look at digital, and mobile specifically, as the way to go, without the ghosts of print in the picture.
My chat in Monocle’s The Stack
My interview with Monocle’s Fernando Pacheco for The Stack will air Saturday, Sept. 14, live at 10am London time. Available to download/stream straight after it goes live-
https://monocle.com/radio/shows/the-stack/
My interview with CNN en Español
I was a guest in the program Encuentro, hosted by Guillermo Arduino daily at CNN en Español. The interview was about how we read on mobile devices and my introduction of my new mobile storytelling book, The Story, to a Spanish-language audience.
Mario’s speaking engagements
Keynote Luncheon Speech: Ad Club of Toronto, Newspaper Day
October 25, 2019
Keynote presentation: Business Information & Media Summit (BIMS).
November 12, 2019
Order print edition of The Story from Amazon
You can order the print edition of my new mobile storytelling book, The Story, from Amazon already here:
Pre-order The Story
The newspaper remains the most powerful source of storytelling on the planet. But technology threatens its very existence. To survive, the Editor must transform, adapt, and manage the newsroom in a new way. Find out how, pre-orderThe Story by Mario Garcia, chief strategist for the redesign of over 700 newspapers around the world.
Order here:
https://thaneandprose.com/shop-the-bookstore?olsPage=products%2Fthe-story
The Story will also appear in print
I am happy to announce that we will, indeed, have a print edition of my mobile storytelling book, The Story. I thank you for expressing your interest to our publisher, Thane Boulton, of Thane & Prose. Now the print edition will be a reality, and you can already see the cover and back cover here:
An interview of interest
http://www.itertranslations.com/blog/2019/3/11/fd60ybflpvlqrgrpdp5ida5rq0c3sp
TheMarioBlog post # 3111