INMA's Earl Wilkinson on newspapers: Change needed for a risk-averse industry

Marking this week's INMA/OPA Europe Outlook-2010 conference in Liverpool, Journalism.co.uk is cross-publishing edited versions of interviews with speakers from the event.

The latest in the series is with Earl J. Wilkinson, executive director and chief executive officer of the International Newsmedia Marketing Association (INMA), who will be speaking at the conference on the opportunities and challenges facing news organisations in the current climate.

The original article written by Marek Miller, who will be blogging from the conference, can be read on the forum4editors site. You can follow Marek on Twitter on @Marek_Miller and @forum4editors.

forum4editors: What do you expect for newspapers in 2010? Do you believe that after two bad years for the industry, there is better to come?
[EW] 2010 will mark the year in which newspapers decide what they want to be post-recession. Real economic growth will return in 2011, as will further disruptions to the status quo such as the semantic web.

The newspapers that shifted expenditures to marketing, sales, research and digital entrepreneurship in 2009-2010 will be the ones who succeed in turning danger into opportunity.

I fear most newspapers simply scaled their expenses to the revenue reality - across the board. And as you know, we don't have 'across the board' challenges in our industry. Our challenges are unevenly distributed.

What I've learned from studying newspapers for a long time is that when they see the light at the end of the tunnel, the opportunity to change goes away. By this time next year, I suspect the light at the end of the tunnel will be upon us.

What are your suggestions for newspaper publishers? How can they use this recession to their advantage?
My suggestion for newspapers is simple: hurry up. Your editorial departments are too big and too unfocused. Change it.

Your advertising sales forces need to sell integrated packages across platforms. Change it.

Your internal cultures are not market-focused. Change it.

You spend little to nothing on researching your market. Change it. You have the capital base; do something with it before it's too late.

In your Outlook for 2009 [Wilkinson's annual industry report for the INMA] you said a theme for the year was converting bandwidth, cultural bandwidth, into innovation. What do you think is the theme for 2010? What's the key issue for publishers now?
I'm not sure yet of the 2010 theme. It might very well be 'the clock is ticking'.

As for key issues facing publishers, I'd say the big one is understanding what being a multimedia company really means. Key issues stemming from this include:

• What value does content have to different audiences on different platforms? Long-form narratives have one value in print, another value online, and still another value in the mobile space.
• How do consumers interact with our brands across platforms? Does being a multimedia company mean we have to invest more in brand development, because the product or platform becomes secondary?
• How do you sell marketing solutions (advertising) across print, online, and mobile platforms? Can we sell the true value of each medium? Are we shaping our answers to the emerging cross-platform questions coming from the advertising community?

I think that 'newspapers' have simply become a hybrid medium in recent years, adding platforms without really knowing how they worked. If we're going to be poised for growth post-recession, I suspect 2010 will be the year in which we do a lot of growing up as an industry.

Many people seem to be very pessimistic about newspapers' future in general and their business model in particular. Can you spot any trend, event or idea from this year that has made you feel more optimistic?
When Rupert Murdoch declared that content has value and that giving it away destroys value, I think it created a healthy tension among newspapers to truly confront their value propositions. The digital gurus have been using old-school arguments about building total audience without truly putting a value on audiences; the content that newspapers produce; or the varying platforms that are now being used.

Murdoch's declaration brought newspapers out of their shell. I'm optimistic that 2010 will be a year of experiments - good and bad. In a risk-averse industry, that's a big step.

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