The Next Engine: Beyond Campaign Thinking

There’s an interesting post in the New York Times’ Bits blog today about a way to possibly keep newspapers from tanking even faster than they already are. We already know that newspapers are losing millions to sites, and Craig’s list has decimated classified revenue. Kodak’s printing technology gives newspapers a means to customize editions for specific neighborhoods, to a degree not possible before.

“Kodak is benefiting from the moves that some publishers are making to recoup at least some of those lost advertising dollars. He notes that the Chicago Tribune and some others are trying “microzoning” — printing several versions of the paper in the same city, each with ads aimed at a specific neighborhood. And, he said, newspapers all over are using more color…”

It may be too little, too late to save the newspaper business. I read the paper every morning. One good thing about doing that is that it gets me out of my own little web cloud - I get exposed to subjects that wouldn’t show up in my RSS feeds. Much of what I read, of course, I had already read the evening before online. But in many ways, local newspapers are indispensible. We’re in the middle of a Mayoral scandal here in Detroit, and it probably never would have come to light without the work of the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News.

But the culture’s changing. I’m old enough to remember evening papers. My son will probably never get in the paper-reading habit, no matter how microzoned our newspapers get.

Tags: culture, Newspapers