The biggest problem for newspapers is not falling readerships, it is falling advertising revenue. It is the move from local monopolies to a global platform where competition is everywhere, and advertising less lucrative.

For all the talk of how journalists can get a grip on new media, there’s been far too little on how ad sales people can do the same. So here I present ten ways ad sales people (and their managers) can save their jobs.

1. Stop treating web ads as second class

The first and most important change is a structural one. While management enthuse about a digital future, the bottom line for most ad sales people is this: incentives are based around print ads; web ads are typically sold as add-ons, and much cheaper ones at that. When it comes to earning your wage and your bonus, web ads are simply not the priority.

If newspapers are serious about a multiplatform future, they need to look at ways to change incentive structures to better reward web ad sales.

And part of this means making web ads more lucrative – because why would you put all your effort into selling a £50 banner ad when you could be selling a £500 half page ad?

2. Stop selling adverts on static pages

Most advertising on news websites still tends to take the shape of banners, sold against particular sections. This is the ad equivalent of shovelware or brochureware.

But the web is not a brochure: it is dynamic, constantly updated, and flexible. So why not drop the print mindset, and start selling against some of the following:

• how about a slot against the ‘most popular’ story of that minute (if it helps, think of it as the equivalent as the front page ad), second most popular, and so on (you could even auction these slots in the same way as Google does with AdWords).
• How about a slot next to breaking news? (Obviously you would put provisions into place to prevent embarrassing juxtapositions).
• Or exclusives? (If they still exist)
• Or personalised services such as SMS alerts on election results, school closings or local events (as the Cincinnati Enquirer’s James Jackson mentions)?

3. Sell advertising against search terms

While we’re stealing ideas from Google, here’s another one: instead of selling an ad on a particular page, sell advertising that will be targeted at people who search for particular things.

As soon as someone searches for a particular term, that advert is served up to them. Simple.

Then, why not turn the usual process on its head and sell the print ad as an add-on? Even when people spend money on search marketing, they often back it up with print ads, and the stats on user behaviour suggest they should do more:

“Two-thirds (67%) of search engine users are driven to search by an offline channel, and 39% of those offline-influenced search users ultimately make a purchase from the company that prompted their initial search. Moreover, it also shows television advertising to be the leading offline channel that drives users to search (37%).”

4. Give ad sales people access to the internet

Incredibly, many ad sales people are not allowed access to the internet at work. This amazes me. What happens when a client calls to ask about their online ad? Do they have to put them on hold while they find a computer? What happens when a client mentions a website they’d like to imitate? What happens when a client uses a web 2.0 buzzword that the ad sales person needs to quickly look up?

Most of all, what happens if an ad sales person is expected to sell online advertising, but has never used the internet and doesn’t understand its possibilities?

If this is your future direction, it helps if the place where most of your money comes from knows something about it…

Especially when they have access to online reports which say local newspaper websites are one of the most trusted places for advertising.

5. Enable the long tail of small businesses to advertise without you doing it for them

Online advertising means that small businesses who previously were not typical print or broadcast advertisers can now afford to advertise.

In other words, there is a potential long tail of small advertisers that could prove a significant source of new revenue.

Google’s own AdSense is one (particularly successful) example of this; Rick Waghorn‘s Addiply is another (built in response to his frustrations with AdSense).

Many newspaper websites carry AdSense adverts, but if a small operation like Waghorn’s can build a service to allow local businesses to buy and place their own advertising, why aren’t major publishers? Why give more money to Google? Why ask ad sales people to spend hours cold-calling for small web ads when you can cut out the middleman and focus your ad sales team on more creative work, like…

6. Think beyond the banner: get creative about online advertising

The web is not a one-way medium. We expect interactivity from a modern news website – comments, polls, bookmarking, chat – so why do we not extend this capability to the advertising? Here are some simple ideas:

• How about letting users work out their body mass index as part of an ad for a health club?
• How about selling that cute little widget to the health club website as well? Or showing them how to allow users to embed it on their own sites?
• How about allowing users to email an ad to a friend at a click?
• How about creating a branded game for the client – again, that can go on their own website too.
• How about a mobile-based weekly dining-and-entertainment advertorial touted as a roundup of things to do offered as part of a joint print/online promotional package for bars and restaurants.

If an ad sales person can pitch ideas like that to a client, they may be more successful. And they can charge more too.

Remembering that many businesses have websites too is key here – an advert can be sold twice: once on the news site, again as a piece of content on the client’s site.

As web readers become increasingly banner-blind, and CPMs/CPAs/etc. less reliable, standing out from the crowd becomes increasingly important.

7. Think about vouchers/coupons

This will not be new to readers in the US, where coupons are a big part of newspaper advertising. In the UK, however, what are better known as vouchers don’t seem to have the same importance in newspaper advertising, and I’m not sure why (if anyone can enlighten me, please do).

Vouchers online, however, are a power in themselves, with dozens of sites dedicated to simply passing on voucher codes. As a result, they can not only be a great way of driving business to advertisers, but also traffic through your site.

One publisher took this idea further at DeliveringQC.com (background in this report (PDF), p39), while the Tampa Bay Tribune took the idea mobile with XtraCoupons.mobi (background here):

“One of the biggest drivers of revenue for the [parent] mobile site has been the sales staff themselves. Media General made extra efforts to train ad sales reps to sell the mobile, including arming reps with demonstrations, PowerPoint presentations and other sales collateral.”

8. Sell advertising aimed at the non-local market

Your online audience is different to your print audience: typically only a third of local newspaper website users will be readers of the newspaper; another third will be local non-readers; and a further third will not be local.

That means you have a new market for ads, and therefore new clients you can pitch to.

The most obvious is to sell ads to local hotels, resorts and attractions for those people who read their old local paper and occasionally pop back for a break (most obvious places: sports pages; nostalgia features).

This also works the other way: with non-print readers you can create non-print products: take the old sponsored print supplement idea and do it online. Create a service. Build a platform. Do something with multimedia…

9. Sell video ads, as well as the production of video content

Video has enormous potential as a source of ad revenue – not just in terms of traditional ‘spots’ at the start of some video editorial, but as content in itself.

The drop in the cost of producing such video means that there is a new potential market for not only selling video ads, but selling the production of that video itself (and of course production of video generally). Small businesses who would otherwise not have considered video can now afford it.

Newspapers are starting to build experience in video. Production standards for web video are not expected to be as high as broadcast – a simple ‘video diary’ format can be filmed cheaply – and there’s the rub: on the web, production is incidental, but a good idea and good content is key, and newspapers could offer both.

The idea doesn’t stop at video: the NAA reports of TBO.com’s mobile operations:

“sales and online staffs are also selling services to help local businesses build their own mobile advertising and marketing campaigns. Using their experience and services in mobile, Media General is helping businesses build mobile microsites as well as offering text messaging services, which setting up and managing SMS campaigns. “That is proving to be where the major revenue is coming from,” [director of mobile Tim] Repsher says.”

10. Work in networks

We are in a networked era. A modern journalist should know how to team up with people outside their organisation, to connect with communities and readers…

Ad sales people should build the same skills.

On a basic organisational level this should obviously start with selling ads across titles, top-down – the most obvious being beer ads in football sections. That should be happening anyway. But it can equally work the other way – selling ads from one title across parts of the network, bottom-up.

Targeted advertising technologies make it possible to have ‘local’ advertising in newspapers 200 miles away from the client, if it’s relevant to the reader.

Then there’s looking outside your own organisation. A national newspaper executive recently told me they have an advertising and revenue share agreement with a number of blogs. Sounds like a sensible idea to me.

Bonus: don’t take digital growth for granted

Whisper it quietly: online ad sales by newspaper businesses are beginning to decline: “Upselling print advertisers is a losing business when those advertisers are fleeing print.”

Your ad sales staff may already be doing some of these things, or planning to – sing their praises here.

The concluding part of this draft book chapter sums up some of the key points and looks at the future paths of investigative journalism in a new media age. I would welcome any corrections, extra information or comments.

Conclusion

Blogs and new media have undoubtedly changed the landscape of investigative journalism. In terms of its form, journalism as a whole has become more conversational, and iterative, as readers seek to contribute to the story, and journalists open more of their processes to public view. The time and space offered by the internet has provided opportunities for these conversations to take place, and for journalists to make raw material available to fuel them. And the networked nature of the Web has facilitated coordination of contributors across borders and industries, along with a now global distribution of material.

The current period offers both significant threats and opportunities to investigative journalism. The sheer quantity and accessibility of information means that quality is becoming a precious commodity. Technological tools have made the investigative journalist’s job of gathering and analysing data, and identifying and contacting sources, easier, but when the source of information is a blog, journalists face the challenge of evaluating both the information and the source, sometimes without knowing what partisan, ideological or commercial affiliations the blogger may have (Friend & Singer, 2007). The protection and access afforded to journalists – in particular, access to certain areas or people, and the ability to protect a source – are not routinely offered to those working outside mainstream media (Gant, 2007), while at the same time the past two decades have seen courts being increasingly reluctant to offer protection even to journalists working for large publishers (Henry, 2007).

The use of blogs for investigative journalism raises a number of challenges and ethical issues. Investigative journalists may find it hard to protect their sources in an age where so much is recorded. There are useful tools that help – such as Invisiblog.com for free anonymous blog hosting and The Online Policy Group (OPG) for privacy-protective domain name registration, while the likes of Tor and Anonymizer.com allow bloggers to hide their IP address (location) and Pingomatic allows bloggers to quickly broadcast an entry while making the poster untraceable (Electronic Frontier Foundation, 2005) – but there are always concerns about weaknesses in such technologies emerging in the future.

Equally, for journalists going undercover there are new issues around invasion of privacy – particularly when the distinction between private and public spaces becomes blurred online. Lee Wilkins notes that

“the Web provides journalists (and others) with ways to invade privacy on a worldwide scale … Most journalists don’t hide in bathrooms to get stories – because hiding in the bathroom means we can’t ask follow-up questions or seek multiple and other points of view … So lurking and then quoting without first identifying yourself seems, to me, to be a pretty easy call.” (in Friend and Singer, 2007: 85)

Furthermore, new media technologies allow the subjects of investigations to tell their stories, too – as demonstrated by the video released by Scientologists of BBC journalist John Sweeney “losing it” while conducting his investigation into their activities (Sweeney, 2007).

Economically, the traditional support structures for investigative journalism – large news organisations – are, at least in their own terms, struggling, and investigative journalism is having to look elsewhere for funding. While BlogAds and AdSense have allowed some bloggers to operate through traditional advertising-based models, others have relied on reader donations facilitated by technologies such as PayPal and ChipIn, while foundations are playing an increasing role in supporting investigative journalism – but few have found a reliable revenue stream.

The future of investigative journalism is likely to lie along at least three paths. On the one hand, in a new media world of information overload where ‘anyone can be a journalist’, investigative journalism offers a way for the mainstream media to provide a distinctive product and prevent the readership migrating elsewhere online (Bradshaw, 2007). News organisations with declining budgets but a commitment to public service may be inclined to outsource part of their investigative work, taking advantage of their brand and experience and using crowdsourcing approaches to pursue investigative journalism. Finally, and perhaps more realistically, it is likely that foundations and reader donations will increasingly support investigative journalism as an important contribution to society. For investigative journalists themselves, the biggest concern is lack of job security - or at least an increasing requirement for new skills in managing volunteers or enterprises. For readers, however, the latter two routes, dependent as they are on active public support, offer some assurance that investigations will be undertaken in the public interest rather than the media’s own self-interests. For this to happen, however, requires a change in the cultures of news organisations. As journalism becomes less a product – ‘what sells’ – and more a service – what people want to use – the need for that change will become increasingly pressing.

From today I’ll be blogging parts of a book chapter on ‘Blogs and Investigative Journalism’ which will form part of the next edition of ‘Investigative Journalism‘. The following is the first part, which introduces blogging in general and its relationship with journalism. I would welcome any corrections, extra information or comments.

Blogging and journalism

To ask “Is blogging journalism” is to mistake form for content. Blogs – like websites, paper, television or radio – can contain journalism, but may not. They are a platform, albeit – like other media platforms – one with certain generic conventions. Like all conventions, these have advantages and disadvantages for journalism, which this chapter aims to address.

As a platform, blogs are a type of website built (normally) using content management software to a template where entries are dated and arranged with the most recent entry uppermost. Despite their extraordinary range and number, the technology and history of blogs has lent the medium some generic qualities. These include: a most-recent-post-top structure, a ‘blogroll’ of related sites, an often personal or subjective writing style, brevity, and – related to brevity – a tendency to link to any source mentioned (which the user can click to find out more).

When they first began to spread in the late 1990s, blogs tended to be lists of links to similar sites (this ‘blogroll’ element still remains in many blog systems and templates today). Blog posts, meanwhile, often hinged around a single link, where:

“An editor with some expertise in a field might demonstrate the accuracy or inaccuracy of a highlighted article or certain facts therein; provide additional facts he feels are pertinent to the issue at hand; or simply add an opinion or differing viewpoint from the one in the piece he has linked. Typically this commentary is characterized by an irreverent, sometimes sarcastic tone. More skillful editors manage to convey all of these things in the sentence or two with which they introduce the link … Their sarcasm and fearless commentary reminds us to question the vested interests of our sources of information and the expertise of individual reporters as they file news stories about subjects they may not fully understand” (Blood, 2000)

Although the first blogs were programmed by their authors, it was the launch of free content management systems such as Pitas, Blogger and Groksoup (all in 1999) which facilitated an explosion in blogger numbers as the barriers to entry were lowered to those without HTML coding skills. Rebecca Blood (2000) argues that this change, and Blogger’s interface and culture in particular, resulted in a change in the medium itself, in favour of more diary-like blogs, with accompanying cults of personality. It was during this time that blogs received much of their initial exposure in the mainstream media.

The years since, however, have seen a number of supplementary technologies develop that have brought the blog further into the orbit of journalistic enterprises. One is the rise of RSS as a distribution method. RSS (Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary) – now routinely included in blog services such as Blogger and WordPress – is a technology which allows readers to subscribe to a blog through an ‘RSS reader’. This removes the requirement for readers to check the blog itself for any new postings, and means they can instead include the blog feed as one among a number to form their personal news service. It also means feeds can be aggregated by publishers or journalists.

A second factor is the rise of linkbacks (also known as trackbacks, refbacks or pingbacks). These ‘ping’ a blogger to notify them when another blogger has linked to their post, while a brief extract of the referring website and a link is often included as part of the comments on a particular post, enabling the blogger to address any response or debate, as well as allowing readers to follow disussion that took place on other blogs after the original post was written. This combination of reverse referencing and notification adds to blogging’s conversational nature, making bloggers aware of their readers’ identities and opinions, and allowing them to correct errors or clarify and refine arguments. Notably, articles which are not written on a platform using trackback technology – i.e. most traditional news websites – do not get included in this discussion.

Thirdly, because of the tendency for blogs to link frequently, and because of the importance of incoming links to a webpage’s ranking on search engines such as Google, blogs have become a major factor in the profile of particular stories. A story that is heavily blogged benefits from a high visibility on search engines – particularly blog-specific search engines which monitor popular terms and sites. Economically, the advent of services such as AdSense and BlogAds meant some journalistic bloggers who began as amateurs were able to commercialise their operations and employ full time staff, as popular blogs such as Boing Boing and the Daily Kos enjoyed visitor numbers higher than most mainstream news organisations.

Perhaps partly as a result of the significance of blogs to search engine ranking – and therefore readers and online advertising revenue – and partly because of the threat that blogs pose in taking away their audiences, the blog format has been increasingly adopted by news organisations, who have either coopted the technology for their own journalists, employed bloggers on their staff, or teamed up with blogging and citizen journalism operations (Gant, 2007). With this shift into the mainstream media, the preexisting generic qualities of blogs have, in many cases, been diluted, with some journalists writing blog entries in the same way as a column, disabling comments or linkbacks, or failing to link to their sources. The blog, in these cases, simply becomes a new platform for traditional print content – or, put another way, ‘shovelware’. In other cases, however, “They are now achieving what Gans called for in an ‘indirect sharing of responsibilities’ with journalists [and] represent the multi-perspectival news that will end up setting more and different agendas as desired by Gans” (Robinson, 2006: 80).

Part two of this chapter – The Amateur-Professional Debate – is here.