Strategic Planning for a New Year

By Andre Jackson
Janurary 13, 2009

Hard to believe it’s 2009 already. Time to recycle the empty champagne bottles and trudge back to the newsroom as the business world reawakens from its annual holiday nap.

Before we all settle back into the routine of scrambling after bankruptcies and poring over foreclosure stats,, the start of a new year is a great time to take our eyes off the e-mail inboxes and financial wires to assess the journalism we produce and the audiences we seek to serve.

A regular process of review, revision and adjustment is normal for many of the businesses we cover. For our business, I believe it’s necessary to keep our offerings in line with what customers need and want.

Such undertakings are relatively new for many newsrooms. Journalism’s grayheads likely remember a time when we pretty much set the news agenda without a lot of reader input, deciding what needed to be covered and how to present it. That was our job – to edit and sort out the world for the public, right? That paternalistic high-mindedness was tolerable in the days when newspapers and big broadcast operations ruled their turf in near-monopolistic, highly profitable fashion. Audiences didn’t have many choices then because they didn’t have printing presses, broadcast antennas and reporting staffs at their disposal.

We all know by now that the world has changed rapidly since Microsoft, Netscape and a host of Internet service providers started to drag millions onto this thing called the Internet. Choices are everywhere and consumers know it.

So to remain relevant, valuable (and, yes, hopefully profitable), journalists need to embrace the world of strategic planning. They should develop processes to continually measure and assess how their offerings are meeting the desires of readers and viewers. I believe we can do this and still live up to the First Amendment’s noble obligation that drew most of us into journalism.

That said, let’s think like journalistic marketers for a bit (maybe that term will even be a J-school major one day – we need ‘em). If you’ve been a reader for awhile, you may remember I wrote about audience awareness in my Aug. 2008 column “Know Your Customer.” I won’t resurrect much of that work here. I’ll just say that knowing who we’re doing journalism for is critically important in these times of uproar for both our business and the economy as a whole. The next step after gaining at least a baseline of knowledge about your readers is to segment them into groups – a key step in the marketing process. Purists might raise an eyebrow here – isn’t segmenting a cousin of segregation? And isn’t herding readers into groups a bad thing for a media business that needs every eyeball it can corral? I’d argue no  and here’s why.

In these times of tick-tight resources all around, we simply can’t be everything to everybody.. Editors need to laser in on critical segments of our markets and devise strategies and products to serve them as well as resources permit. If we first find our best base(s) and build on them, I believe we’ll draw in other groups who’ll “read up” to what we’re doing.

And, no, segmenting doesn’t mean we abandon watchdog journalism or shy away from the tough, the controversial or other meaty pieces of reporting. It simply means we do our jobs more strategically to help ensure our survival in a rapidly-changing marketplace.

There are many questions to be asked internally to determine which audience niches to lock in on. One big question remains constant: What do readers want? Next question: How can we meet their needs?

Segmentation opportunities are many. Are you aiming for consumers seeking personal finance information to help them manage cash flow during these tumultuous times? That calls for a certain type of content, and hopefully will attract a nice crop of advertisers to pay journalists’ salaries.

Or, should you aim for the “Suits” – the executive class that makes things happen in your town’s business community? This is a broad group that you can dice into smaller sub-segments. The C-level folks likely pay people and services to keep them informed about what’s going on in their rarefied world. You might be better off focusing on the “Aspiring Suits” – the go-getters looking to make a name for themselves in business. You know them, the folks who’re always looking for an edge to make them smarter – or at least make them seem smarter. Your newspaper, station or Web site might successfully become that edge with the right product mix while still remaining accessible to a broader audience.

Copyright © 2009 Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism