From Print to Digital: Transform Your Business
And that's how Affinity Express stays fresh and innovative: because its leaders are willing to embrace ideas and to encourage employees to push forward in creative directions.
JRC's Register Citizen is opening up doors (literally) to the community by starting a "Newsroom Cafe" where the public can walk into the cafe and have their coffee with reporters and editors working nearby. This space is physical, but it emulates the culture of the online world where worlds overlap and readers comment on stories.
The Omaha World-Herald surveyed their readers to find out what they wanted, and then gave it to them.
"complaint: newspaper dollars becoming digital dimes #naamxc11 - response: start stacking the dimes" #stopwhiningaboutreality #naamxc11 #jrc
"The market has changed: deal with it. You're business leaders. From now on, we'll have to have a lot of silos, a lot of stacks of dimes, to earn big revenue streams . . . and do all of that with less money than you spend today."
I have written before about how businesses need to stop whining about how the internet has disrupted their business model and focus on how they can use the internet to their advantage. The internet isn't your enemy: it's an immensely powerful tool that can transform lives and businesses for the better. It brings people closer, it enables businesses in different locations to compete. Broaden your market: you can go after many people in the world who are looking for, say, help in creating their resume, rather than the few hundred job-seekers in your part of town.
Newspapers like Star Tribune and the Press-Enterprise are building content around local high school sports, appealing to students, parents and teachers in their communities.
Serve Customers Who Know Less Than You Do
"I would say that probably the biggest epiphany for me is that if you think we don't know anything about digital content and digital sales being in the old newspaper companies, on a local level, the people who know less than us are our local advertisers. And so that meant that we would have to learn more about what they need and help them make that transition on to the web. Hence we build all their ads."
