INMA World Congress: how newspapers are innovating to survive the economic downturn

Posted by Helena Deards on May 15, 2009 at 10:34 AM

The day before the INMA conference began in earnest, representatives of the Miami Herald, Palm Beach Post and South Florida Sun-Sentinel spoke about what their newspapers are doing to stay afloat in this current economic climate - and their solutions seemed to be largely focussed innovation. Christina Gomez-Pina, marketing and community affairs manager at the Miami Herald was, however, keen to point out that print daily readership is up and that Miami.com has grown 65% in unique visitors over the past year. "We're not suffering an audience crisis," she said. "It's a revenue problem."

The Palm Beach Post will soon be launching a website branching out from news reporting; Florida Home is described by marketing director Laura Cunningham as the "best local real estate site out there". Meanwhile, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel chose to focus on reprogramming its own website, explained strategic communications manager Jenifer Sacks, using data from Omniture to realise that "local and useful information" was what its readers were searching for online, and that "taking centrepieces from the newspaper and just putting them online" just wasn't working.

Sacks also described how the Sun-Sentinel is taking social networking seriously, and has actively been using Twitter as both a marketing and news-gathering tool. She said that this kind of innovation, social networking and use of technology will be a crucial part of the newsroom of the future, "in that everybody is trained in all facets of multi-media, and are feeding all of our platforms across all our media".

All three of these newspapers are, to one degree or another, affected by the difficult economic climate. The Herald, in particular, was named as one of the most likely newspapers to soon go out of print by Time magazine - a label that it responded to with a high profile marketing campaign to the contrary. Gomez-Pina explained that in the current climate it is essential to focus on the "core" activities which attract readers and add value, whilst Cunningham emphasised flexibility, communication, creativity and faith in the power of print.

Source: INMA