Manners maketh the newspaper

While major metropolitan newspapers howl about the changing market that has resulted in advertising slumps and circulation struggles, local and regional papers are not suffering the same way.

Part of the reason is undoubtedly the lesser impact of the internet on the local market – smaller businesses that are the bread and butter of local and regional papers are slower to jump online.

When your market walks past your business every day, there’s often not a strong reason to invest your advertising dollars heavily into online just yet - especially when local newspapers are extremely affordable in their advertising charges. In Australia, the fact that online access in the bush is generally so woeful is another key factor. And why place an online job ad when a note in the window of your shop works just as well?

But even when the bandwidth along the backroads improves, I don’t believe there will be an almighty exodus from local and regional papers.

The reason for this heresay is that local papers understand and play a key role in their communities, so much better than their big city cousins. In fact, so much better that snooty, sophisticated suits from the big smoke could certainly learn something from them.

The bigger the paper, the bigger the bureaucracy, the more difficult the connection between the advertising sales, marketing and the issues and events of the day.

But place an ad in any local paper and the owner of the business “knows” it works – because he saw it, his wife saw it and his kids’ teacher in the local high school mentioned it to him at bowls.

In bigger papers, the degrees of separation are greater, and as such they are exploited as excuses by the lazier and deluded among us.

In a local newspaper, a story tip off is quickly acted upon, shared with the sales team for any “special report” opportunities, and if the event is big, suddenly an entire edition is promoted and swung behind it to bring in extra readers. If an important local identity or advertiser calls the paper, senior staff “hup two” and get back to them.

In fact, all phone calls are returned, and serious emails addressed because let’s face it, you’ll probably bump into that person down the pub if you don’t and they’ll give you a hard time for ignoring them.

As a local newspaper publisher, some of the best advice I got about how to improve the newspaper and business came from advertisers or local identities who cared about my paper to give me lots of gratuitous free advice. The trick was the swallow the pride and return the call first though.

On big city papers, we hide behind siloed job descriptions and department definitions so that we can excuse our refusal to engage. We don’t return calls because in our eyes, they’re not important. (how do we know?). We ignore emails both internally and externally because there’s just so many of them. We tell marketing or sales that it’s not our job to meet or talk with advertisers because they might “pollute” our editorial purity. As such, we rely constantly on the same sources and contacts for our information. We close off our ability to be surprised from left field. We insist on viewing an increasingly connected world according to our own entrenched and self important delineation.

And our readers and advertisers shake their heads in confusion as they walk away.

Metropolitan newspapers need to stop being so obsessed about the journalism, and worry about the connection and care factor. We need to return to the common courtesies that decide the quality of a community. Even if we do only bump into people to be called to account once every six months, rather than every six days, we should behave as if we might. We should act as if we care and maybe we really will start to.

If we’re not happy with our readership numbers or the dollars we’re bringing in, the question is not “how do we sell this harder?”. The question is “What is our own behaviour doing that shows we feel far too superior to give a damn?”.

First published in the Panpa Bulletin. See www.panpa.org.au