A few traits that growing newspapers share

People have been predicting the end of the newspaper industry for a long time. The industry has changed enormously — nobody sensible argues otherwise — but "changed" and "finished" are different words. Saying newspapers are done is close to saying news is done.

We build software for newspaper and media publishers, which means we get a look inside a lot of operations. Some are shrinking. Some are growing. The ones that are growing tend to share three things.

1. Communication between departments is deliberate

The single clearest pattern: in growing publications, an ad order moves from sales to production to billing without being re-handled at each stop.

That sounds obvious. In practice, it is where most of the waste lives. An order gets taken on paper, re-typed into a layout tool, emailed to a designer, described again in a message to the bookkeeper, and finally invoiced from a fourth system. Each handoff is a chance to introduce an error, and each error costs more to fix than the original entry cost to make.

The publishers who grow have squeezed the handling count down. They can answer "what is the status of this ad?" without three phone calls. When we ask them why they set something up a particular way, they have an answer — they have asked themselves "why do we do it like this?" recently enough to remember.

That question is the whole exercise. Pick the repeatable task your staff complains about most and ask why it works the way it does. The answer is frequently "because that is how the old system made us do it," which is not a reason.

2. There is a specialty product alongside the main title

The second pattern is a supplement, a niche title, or some other specialty product sitting next to the flagship.

Multiple products diversify the portfolio, and the specialty product usually carries a better margin than the main title. For a lot of publishers, it is where the profit actually comes from.

The economics are favourable because the hard part is already paid for. Distribution exists. The sales relationships exist. Adding a product on top of infrastructure you already run is a very different proposition from starting one from scratch.

If you are weighing one up, start from the reader rather than the ad rate. What is your reader already interested in? What would genuinely add something for them? A supplement that answers a real reader question tends to find advertisers; one designed backwards from a rate card tends not to.

Worth noting: specialty products often pull in advertisers who would never buy the main title. A niche annual can be the first order from a business that has ignored your flagship for a decade.

3. The software is genuinely mission-critical

Top-performing publications almost always run on software their day depends on. Not software they tolerate — software that lets them do things they could not do otherwise.

That is the test, and it cuts both ways. If you could do more without your software than with it, the software is the problem. Staff keeping private spreadsheets alongside the system is the tell. So is re-keying the same order twice. So is waiting on someone else to run a report.

Two areas are worth looking at specifically.

Sales. Sales are the lifeline, and reps are an asset you can invest in directly. A newspaper CRM that works away from the desk means a rep can see account history, current balance, run history, and what an advertiser last bought while standing in that advertiser's shop. Reps who can answer questions on the spot close more, and reps who close more tend to stay.

Reporting. Reports are how you find out what is actually happening. When you evaluate them, look at customisation, the date ranges you can ask for, how long a report takes to generate, and how many exist before someone has to write one for you. You should be able to pinpoint when an advertiser dropped off, or list everyone expiring next month, in under two minutes. If that takes a support ticket, it is not a reporting system.

Reports are also a staff tool, not just a management one. Do not underestimate how much friction disappears when the person who needs a number can just get it.

Find software your business could not run without, and which makes the business bigger because it is there. Those two conditions are not the same, and both matter.

Newspapers will keep changing shape. The newspaper of tomorrow will not look like the newspaper of yesterday. But people are going to keep needing them.