The Hearst Corporation in the US has finally put Seattle’s oldest newspaper the Seattle Post Intelligencer up for sale, saying that if it can’t find a buyer in the next 60 days, they will close it down or continue to publish it as an internet based information source. The owners have also stated that in no way will they continue to publish it in it’s current form.
The media release from the Hearst Corporation states:
After 146 years of delivering news, the Seattle P-I faces becoming what it has chronicled: history.
The Seattle P-I’s parent company, The Hearst Corp., said Friday that it has put the paper up for sale and will stop publishing unless someone buys it in 60 days. If no buyer emerges, the paper would either become a Web-only publication or cease all operations.
“We’ve been on the knife edge all this time,” P-I managing editor David McCumber said Friday. “We finally slipped.”
Economic reasons have forced the state’s oldest morning newspaper into a sale, Steven Swartz, president of The Hearst Corp.’s newspaper division, told employees Friday.
“One thing is clear: At the end of the sale process, we do not see ourselves publishing in print,” Swartz told employees gathered in the newsroom overlooking Elliott Bay. “Since 2000, the P-I has lost money each year, and the losses have escalated and continue to escalate in 2009. We have had to make a very tough decision.”
Hearst said the P-I lost about $14 million in 2008.
One observer noted “The speed with which the 200-year old newspaper industry is disintegrating is remarkable. The model no longer works, at least not for most papers. And most of the industry seems incapable of–or unwilling to–adapt to the new reality”
There are signs that the same situation is starting to impact in Australia as well and that is why I can’t for the life of me understand why some real estate franchise groups and individual offices are continuing to invest in a medium which is very quickly starting to die. These groups that have so much invested in press will pay the price in the future if they don’t start to create and invest in digital communication channels and open up new mediums to communicate and advertise to the changing consumer.
Yesterday, the Gold Coast Bulletin real estate section had over 208 pages of advertising from real estate agents, and not one agent advertising listings in the paper integrated into their press adds their on line presence, this is so important today. I wrote about this back in November Integrating your On Line and Press Advertising- How Important Is this To Your Brand? The other interesting situation with all of this, is that some of those agents spending on full page adds in the lift out have just recently cancelled or halved their on line spend.
It’s been my experience in working with real estate businesses, that they mostly work for today and not to the future. You really need to now look at opening or creating new communication channels for your business, because most of the real estate industry uses a very small fraction of the power of the web and most leave it to the major portals in Australia to drive leads and branding.
Look forward to 2015, how will you communicate to the consumer then if you have no strategy in place today to gear your business to the future and to open up new marketing opportunities on the web.
The writing is on the wall for newspapers, don’t let your agency be so press oriented that you fail to see the bullet coming. Create that strategy today and start to implement a digital communication strategy for the future.
If you don’t know where to start with this, let me know because that’s what I do.
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Last week I spent time in Adelaide South Australia and presented to a number of real estate groups, and it was for me an interesting exercise. Social media is not going to be for every agent or business owner, of that there is no doubt, because each person within the office needs to commit to the discipline of social networking.
