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Ironically, it is not so much between the eyes now, but more like sewing seeds that will flower into conversations and references that lead to purchases. The implication for print publishers of this sophisticated and growing trend in advertising is the urgent need to get online and engage. If they do not appease their advertisers the only certain thing is that the competition will.

Not surprisingly then in this media-scape, content management systems (CMS’s) are on fire! Publishers, both professional and novice, are looking for affordable content management solutions that allow them to compete with the major media publishing companies and really bridge that online / print chasm. The good news is that there are plenty of smart options out there. The bad news is that it is time to bite the bullet and look at new ways of doing business. As Rupert says, “it will be the quick and the nimble media players who change the face of media.”

So, where to start? What to look for? How to weigh up the pros and cons of your favourites? CMS software, even narrowed down to newspaper or magazine software, is still an extremely wide and deep pool with a lot on offer. Research strategies that may help you determine the best fit for your needs include:

Online surfing: think of at least 7 different keyword searches you might use for your software search. Remember, the company that has built your ideal match is also doing its best to guess what words you would use, what benefits are important to you.

The wrapping: be careful of ‘pretty’ sites and keep focused on functionality. This space is on fire and filling up with plenty of players, from cowboys to experts. Some of the best publishing software I bought was from fairly average looking sites, while conversely some of the silliest products I trialled have been from flash Web 2.0 sites that appear to have spent all their dollars on marketing.

Play around: get into their demo newspaper or magazine websites. Start to compile of list of the functions, product implementation factors, support etc that really hit the right chord for you. As you build your wish list, give specifics weightings so that you are prepared to add more or knock some off in order to get the right one for you. You will need less and less time in news sites the more you do, because you will see quickly how a company’s product compares to your wish list.

Beginners: be clear about how much computer knowledge is required in order to get full value out of your new software. Thousands of businesses have erupted in recent times as software companies or open source groups pump out excellent products that need professional programmers to really unlock the power of the systems.

Free publishing software: take a good look at what you can get for free. Often there may be advertising or other requirements when you accept the free software, but these are minor points. Be sure the free versus paid software (sometimes even from the same company) stacks up with your wish list and that it is easily implemented. There is a lot of excellent free publishing software on the market and well worth a look.

Blogs and forums: type “blog: (key words)” into Google and this will take you to plenty of sites where others are discussing the good the bad and the ugly of all manner of solutions. Very handy!

Trial it: if on the surface everything looks about right, get in there, sign up, roll up your sleeves, grab a coffee and a sandwich and trial the vendor’s software! A lot of people think that if they sign up and then do not use the software, they will be plagued by newsletters and contact forms. Others are still in the land of ‘download’ and risks associated with that – web based CMS’s, represent 95% of newspaper or magazine content management systems, which mean no downloads, only ‘switch-ons’.

Contact the vendor: got any questions, get them answered! Just because you are buying online does not mean no customer service. If the company is overseas, email them and ask your questions either in writing or have them call you.

Contact one of their customers: most websites selling websites will show a sample of customer websites. Often the vendor will not be responsible for the final look of their customers’ sites, so check out a few and contact one that looks good. Ask why they went with the software you are seriously considering, the level of support they have received, what they would improve etc. You might hear things you had not considered and well worth adding to your wish list. Not only will you get some invaluable feedback on the product, you will make a good industry contact.

Buying the right content management system for your newspaper or magazine is a big decision. There are many web based or ‘software as a service’ products out there that are surprisingly affordable compared to their unwieldy client server counterparts, relics from another era that would have cost $60k only three years ago. So price is unlikely to be as big a purchase hurdle as the fact that you, your staff and your readers will need to learn a new system and once you get rolling with it, you are unlikely change horses for a while. That is a BIG job.

Happy CMS hunting for all you publishers and have some fun. You will be blown away by what is out there and how it will revolutionise your business.

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Sending a publication to press is a BIG DEAL. After all the pressures and deadlines, who wants to then spend half a day updating their website with this content?

Wouldn’t it be wiser to simply take the common point, the PDF, and enable publishers to trawl through these documents, selecting articles they would like to see on their websites, and at the press of a button export these to the live site? EzyMedia already provides a seamless content management system that runs concept to web toprint , encouraging journalists to get rid of Word documents and write content directly into the CMS (content management system). But, this is a BIG step for most.

EzyMedia has now launched its PDFT, or PDF Trawler. This world-first software will scan any standard PDF and allow the user to select sections, mark content and export this to their website! Imagine being able to keep your website up to date with 50+ articles each cycle, in a matter of minutes!!

Please note, you need Adobe Acrobat Professional 8.1 or later to operate this technology.

EzyMedia is changing the business processes behind publishing.

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Inevitably, the first characteristic most publishers look for is price. Advances in printing technology allows smaller, independent publishers to rightly demand low prices for lower print-runs. Document transfer speeds and transport logistics mean a monthly publication can effectively be printed anywhere in the world and be delivered to the publisher’s doorstep or their distribution channels within days of uploading the print-ready PDF’s.

Most printers aim to run their expensive machinery 24/7 – every hour short of this is lost money. This means if you are prepared to be flexible on your timing and turn-around times, you can negotiate excellent prices. As a rule of thumb, Tuesdays/Wednesdays with a 2-3 day turnaround will get you the lowest newsprint quotes, and A4 magazines with 5-7 days flexibility will get the best magazine printing deals.

Other important factors include pre-press service, account management software, billing cycles (many printers will not concede even a 30-day account until after 6-12 months, and instead demand upfront payment), and of course, quality!

Quality will be effected by:
* Type of stock you select – you get what you pay for on this one
* Types of inks used – not as relevant today as it was a few years ago, with machinery and software playing a larger role in the output result
* Experience and expertise of the printer’s pre-press team
* The publisher’s own graphics team – the quality of your files will be the most significant influence on the quality of your printed product. There is a lot to learn here and your printer should supply you with a detailed specification document covering registration, colour settings, shadow/highlights, contrast, saturation etc. If there is anything in your first print run that concerns you, ask!
* Attention and account management given to you by the printing company

Do not be shy about searching out of your territory and squeeze the printers for a good price. Some will tell you that your print size is too small to really draw any deals or discounts – you don’t want to do business with these sort of printers. Your printer needs to believe in your product and respect it as much as they do any of their big clients.

Keep your printers on their toes and re-evaluate all your suppliers at least annually.

Happy printing!!

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How has this happened? I believe it is a combination of diminishing returns on the old ‘rivers of gold’ (once controlled by the big end of town), with the advent of a glut of media channels and technologies for new delivery models. The financial ‘backbone’ of traditional newspaper publishing was always the classifieds, real estate and automotive, along with per-copy purchase revenues.To start a newspaper or magazine you needed to already have a dozen other titles in the stable, invariably launched by your father’s father.

Then the internet hit. Initially the impact was minimal, but in the last few years as readers start looking elsewhere for their information, the industry has been whisked into a storm of panic. Suddenly Dear Dolly does not have all the answers. Suddenly the same news on the homepage of a $1.50 newspaper is available earlier online, with related links, videos and community opinion for free!
When was the last time you bought a paper specifically to view classifieds, real estate or automotive listings, or to learn more about a news item someone mentioned in passing? How many of your friends subscribe to daily or even weekly delivery of a print newspaper? Now think of how many newsletters you and your friends subscribe to, or how quickly you get your news from online search engines, news websites or registered communities.
Concurrently with changes in end-user viewing patterns, technologies exploded, affecting no industry more so than the media space, which is on fire! Information is the most heavily invested commodity on this planet, far exceeding oil, gold or construction. Efforts to tap into this multi-billion dollar industry are breeding new wealth and plenty of fresh ideas.
Faster internet connections, the rise of some terrific content management systems that allow even the layman to get online and become master of his domain in a matter of days, the online social media phenomenon and the ready access to support all augur well for the imaginative entrepreneur. Young business people no longer compare engines under the bonnet or boyfriends, instead websites, hardware and online careers.
Inevitably the more technology poured into the media-scape the more players flock to discover gold, which in turn further inspires the public to be even more discerning in its consumption of that media. But we all know this – what is the opportunity?
So here is the punchline – the bigger the toybox and scope of possibility, the more we see end users wanting to dissect their information chunks, making these chunks smaller and more relevant to their personal interests. They want local news about their neighbourhoods. They want to pick up a magazine from the coffee table that invites them into a community of other Brazilian Pink-spotted Lizard lovers, and they want to know that they can feed into their media of choice, contribute some of their own insights, integrate.
The opportunity therefore is simply to facilitate this trend, grease the track and clip everyone’s ticket as they pass through your gates. Grab a local news, magazine or community news website. Fill it with enough content to create a starting point of interest, and there is plenty of free or very cheap content out there, then hit up your local or niche community for their own contributions. Get the balance right and you will hit that magic ‘critical mass’ where your news or magazine site starts taking care of itself. You may always have to login and approve the articles, but the online ad revenues should help sweeten things.
In a nutshell, you are running a multi-user blog, without ever having to submit a blog of your own. The successful publishers of tomorrow will be those media entrepreneurs who get the content balances right, whereupon the advertising dollars will follow. When they see their local news, magazine or community website succeeding, they may very well press the ‘Export’ button and go to press!

If you thought this article on local news and niche publishing for newspapers and magazines was relevant to your interest set AND it took you less than 10 minutes casually browsing the internet to find it, I rest my case – local news and niche publishing, whether online and/or print, are winning! Now look around the space surrounding this article – is someone looking to sell you something? A product related to publishing? And you are here… If someone earning an income here so can you.
Hyper-local and niche content is the future of newspaper and magazine publishing.

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What to look for in you, your situation and your business model

Home based businesses are always a gamble. There are seemingly hundreds of thousands of offers, scams, get-rich-quick, 0-to-$1mil programs that promise fortune and favour to those who dare. Remember, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. And if you can make $350 a day from home working for someone else, why wouldn’t they employ someone at $25 per day to do what you are doing?
The only factor common to any home based business model is YOU. You are the one common asset for any home based business you choose. So it is therefore important to ensure that you personally and professionally have what it takes to succeed in a home based business.

Qualities you personally want to score highly are:

* Self-discipline – ability to stay focused without constant supervision
* Time management – a week can look empty or overflowing, depending on how well you manage your time
* Passion – does the business quench your drives and needs? Or is it just something you think you might enjoy? Best to start with a lot more conviction than ‘might enjoy’.
* Confidence – you need to be ready to believe in yourself. A pay-check from a boss regularly affirms that we are doing well and that the world likes us. Generating your own pay-check, while incredibly more rewarding, is not so guaranteed and initially will be not so regular.

Qualities your situation should score highly are:

* Space – do you have a quiet space to do your business? Will you forever be fighting with housemates, children, partners or animals to etch out two lots of 2-3 hour-spells every day without disruption?
* Equipment – if the business model requires a refrigerated delivery van, do you have the money to buy one? What is the balance between what you need to purchase and what is provided for you?
* Safety Net – if you have to mortgage the house and failure to break all sales records within 12-months means certain bankruptcy, DON’T DO IT! You need to be able to give yourself 12-months to succeed, whether you are starting an ice-cream van business or a magazine.

Qualities your business model should score highly:

* Concept – 85% of business start-ups fail within the first year! Most of these are because the business concept was weak, there was little or no marketing to support the business, no business plan, not strategy, wrong skill sets or a mismatch of venture and operator. The strength of franchise type business models is that the model is more often proven.
* Support – good support, whether from a business partner, family, friends and/or headquarters is crucial to successful home based businesses. If you are looking at a franchise model, what sort of IP differentiates them from the competitors? Is it strong technology? Is training and collateral provided?
* Experience – how long has this model been around? Is it a passing fad? Is business heading the way they claim, or will they be old news tomorrow?

Above all else, talk to your friends, family and colleagues about the venture. If you are looking for a lifestyle change or sick of competing with all the rats for the dead-end jobs, a franchise business may be right for you. Buying a business is buying a job. You are guaranteed to get it, but how long it lasts depends entirely on you.

Starting a magazine or newspaper at home

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In addition to growing pressures on the purse strings for businesses and buyers, we all hear that consumer markets are becoming more discerning. Fussy. It is not enough anymore for your newspaper or magazine advertisers to simply tell the market that they have the best product, the biggest ad or the best customer sales service. Retail customers can now compare product/service prices and guarantees with ten of your advertiser’s competitors in less than a minute. Indeed, many don’t even care about customer service, they just order online from the lounge room and the product arrives the next day.

So your customers need to move with their customers. As your customers’ customers become more discerning, so too your customers demand more from you. We are all encountering more and more advertisers who demand ?advertorial’ with their ad, who want rates cheaper than two years earlier, upgraded ad-sizes, better position and so on.

The problem is that all this reduces your margins and the overall quality of your newspaper or magazine, pushing it to the brochure/catalogue end of the market. Readers find themselves filtering through a bunch of crap as they hunt snippets of worthy journalism. The more effort a reader expends in this process, the less likely he/she is to return to your publication.

Of course the even more obvious cost, besides reputation, is bottom line – you are doing more for less!

Perhaps the fastest growing strategy to address this ‘commoditisation’ has been Content Marketing, generating positive opinion about brands or products via informative and trustworthy articles, images, forums, blogs, comments and more, throwing it out there and letting the community discuss and decide.

Instead of machine-gun spraying the doped masses with big-budget ad campaigns, content marketing sews seeds in niche markets or locales, attending to targeted patches that flower into conversations and positive references that lead to increased business for your advertisers. The value of a brand inserted into conversation around the dinner table has never been higher. Nor has the opportunity to make that happen for your advertisers.

Thankfully, your best new tool in the shed that brings all this together will also be one of your cheapest! The internet allows you to deliver so much more for less. Combining print now with online publishing actually makes it easier for you to accommodate this trend and better serve your advertisers in their own battles. Via your professional newspaper or magazine website, your advertisers have so many more ways to engage their customers at a fraction of previous costs.

Invite your advertisers to create blogs on your website, moderate forums, submit articles for your weekly e-newsletters, self-manage their own business directory listings, edit text, specials, images etc whenever they wish and much more.

Smart businesses are looking to media that can facilitate these strategies. The implication of this sophisticated and growing trend in advertising for print publishers is the urgent need to get online and engage. If a print publisher does not appease the local advertisers, the only certain thing is that the competition will.

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So why do we still have newspapers? Everyone knows that circulation is plummeting, but a few of us die-hards believe there will always be print. Why? Because it is comfortable. The Y-Gens are still buying their magazines and books because they also enjoy that relaxing slump on the couch with a drink, snacks and an engaging read. The operative word here of course is engaging!

Newspaper magnates are scrambling madly like a flock of geese in hunting season, desperately seeking new ideas from pricy consultants to engage their disparate audiences as subscription and print-ad revenues nose dive. The really big end of town is buckling under its own ancient weight, stunned in the headlights of a much faster moving information superhighway. The choice is change or die.

But change for these guys is tough. They are often fourth or fifth generation family moguls who know little else beyond the print world. “Ok, we’ve built our website%u2026now what?” The smart players are restructuring their offices in information-centric floor plans where a byte of news travels simultaneously to each media team where it is chopped, shaved, spiced and uploaded to the net, print production, radio, TV, mobile etc. The not-so-smart are sacking staff and closing shop, or even worse shaking their heads, holding their nose, closing their eyes and hoping the naughty internet thingy will just go away.

So the stage is set for a media revolution, where only the smart and nimble will triumph. Such a scenario has opened the door for the smaller players, who were previously excluded from the game owing to costly entrance fees and ruthless incumbents. Now however, powerful publishing software is extremely affordable, putting everything up for grabs. The little guys are redefining an archaic industry.

Over the past five years thousands of localised ‘news’ websites have sprouted around the world. Some with significant venture capital funding, some dabbling off-shoots of the big companies, others simply built by community minded individuals. The spin on these sites tends to be user-generated content, or ‘citizen journalism’, whereby locals tell their own stories, report on events that might otherwise be overlooked by mainstream media, or simply weigh in with an opinion or rebuff.

In 2004 ‘The Word’ newspaper was launched in Canberra, Australia. At the time this was the first tabloid in the world to be written entirely by its readers, circulating 35000 gloss covered copies monthly to 900 sites across Australia’s capital city. The beauty about this model was not only that content was free, but that it evoked immediate loyalty. Anyone who got an article published in print, or knew someone else who got published, inevitably showed friends.

But could we really call this a newspaper? Was it more like a magazine? A newszine? A yarnpaper? A plog (printed blog)? Whatever it was, it carried $30,000 of advertising in every issue and another $1000 p/m of online ads! It engaged its readers. As the adage proclaims, get your content and distribution right and the advertisers will follow.

So we come back to content, the ‘news’ in newspapers. With the eruption of online commerce we are witnessing a turning point for content. Earning money online is all about ‘eyeballs’ – getting traffic to your site. Unfortunately the very same freedoms we cherish about the internet also drown us in spam and crap content. Waving a flag above the dumping grounds of useless and tedious content is becoming quite an art, a trade to which professional and novice authors are gravitating in droves.

Content will soon be entirely free! Already the industry is filling with content conduits, like Ezine Articles, Squidoo, WordPress, Twitter and plenty more. Authors upload their articles, as I will do with this article, to these newly forming content kings. These kings then push the content to relevant members who have flagged certain interests in membership profiles. These members then publish that content into their own websites or publications.

But where is the money in all this? Well the conduits charge for premium privileges for both authors and publishers and the authors charge for%u2026hmmm%u2026that’s right, nothing! And that is why this is so beautiful – there really is something in it for the author – reputation. Prolific and intelligent authors can now get their message out there faster than ever and gain hundreds of thousands of readers overnight, which translates to hundreds of thousands of eyeballs back at the author’s website wanting more. Another name for this phenomenon is ‘content marketing’, whereby the author creates positive, informed conversations around products or services.

Pulling together these clues, tomorrow’s newspaper is looking more like a hybrid of blogs, magazines, newspapers, forums and books. It is a disposable, stylish freebie, with likely a gloss cover and smaller than a tabloid so that it can be folded into the back pocket. It survives entirely on advertising and addresses in one sweep a bunch of interest sets that are beyond news. The stories are the neighbourly conversations over the back fence. Opinions are rife from front cover to the last page. Articles inform the evermore discerning readers of the pros and cons of a wide range of products and services, toward generating trust first, not the sale. If you want the latest news, open your iPhone. If you want a bunch of stories, pictures and meanderings, pick up your local musepaper!

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Publishers today bridge the online and print worlds better than their counterparts in radio or TV. When was the last time you visited a television or radio website? Even to find out what is programmed for the evening you don’t go to the actual station sites, you pull a page that gives you the timetable for ten different stations. Now on the other hand, newspaper, magazine or community news websites… you probably visited one of these yesterday.

“…while television is where people go to get breaking news, newspapers are far more likely to be their primary source of information when they are seeking analysis of the news rather than the reporting of it.” Australian Press Council, 2006

Publications, newspapers especially, are the most credible media. The above quote is somewhat out-dated however, as newspapers take their readers (and their credibility) online. With the advent of the iPhone and Android, news sites are fast becoming the first gateway to what is happening around us.

Juxtapose the online growth of newspapers and magazines with the glut of internet content and we quickly appreciate the unique position afforded to online publishing by its greatest asset, credibility. The possibilities are phenomenal.

In its most basic form media is a business and (mostly) it needs revenues to survive. So if we gauge a media’s alacrity by its ability to (a) diversify and (b) generate revenues, consider this brief list of newspaper / magazine media attributes:

• Will benefit most from the internet
• Can run video news and ads online
• Can run audio news and ads online
• Can engage their readership in content generation and dialogue
• Reciprocal print/online promotion
• iPhone, SMS, RSS and Podcasting tools
• Strong heritage in written content superior to most new online content producers
• Bundled advertising with print, online standard ads and online video ads
• Already have content-subscription models
• Credibility, loyalty and up-close relationship with the reader

With the stage so well set, how do publishers seize the day? Upsell.

If you are publishing a newspaper or magazine and your only revenues are print ads and copy purchases, you know how tough publishing is getting. If on the other hand you have stretched your horizons to include some of the revenues below, you are probably really enjoying the new dawn on publishing!

Upsell your advertisers to:

1. Websites and ‘Squeeze’ pages
2. Business stationery and other promotional
3. Listings in your business directory
4. Listings in your online shopping mall
5. Professionally written business copy for their own collateral
6. The SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) service you use
7. Online standard and video ads (take a camcorder to their shop!)

At the moment you and/or your staff sell an ad, you have done the hard work. You pulled together a big list of businesses in your area or niche; you rang and emailed dozens of them before you got a meeting; you established at that sales meeting that your publication means business and you can help them grow their business; you took the booking, you delivered the job and you took their money… that’s a pretty sweet spot to be in business. You are crazy if this is where you leave it! If your clients want to grow, they will very likely buy the above products and services from someone, and that someone might as well be you.

John Hancock is an ex-newspaper publisher and the founder of EzyMedia. EzyMedia is a revenue-oriented publishing company that supports independent newspaper and magazine publishers in all aspects of the business of publishing.

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