Question Everything

Bringing Readers Back Into the Fold: Or how newspapers can stop apologizing and start regaining their audience. In case you missed it, click here for part 1 *** In my last post, I began a long, slow dive into the issue of content: its importance, its necessity and its apparently new addition to the world of marketing. And I posited the question, in light of content being such a heavy focus for advertisers and consumers in 2013, what are newspapers to do? How can they hope to compete? Well, before any journalists reading this go looking for the tallest building, let’s think for a second about what sets newspaper apart from these other media; what is the one thing it does better than any other? Wait, wait, don’t tell me. Oh, I know. It’s content. (See what I did there?) Yes, content, the two-syllable word from where my diatribe sprung. Newspaper and print are writer’s mediums (I’m a writer, I would know). They are a haven for those who still love long-form stories, in-dep...

Note: So, I started writing this little blog post and it quickly turned into a "Jerry Maguire"-esque mission statement. As a result, I've split the post into two parts and I will post the 2nd one in a couple of days. **** 2013 and What that Means for Content It tickles me just a bit that this year’s newest marketing buzz-phrase appears to be “content marketing.” And it makes me giggle for a couple of reasons. If you’ve got a website, what else exactly would you be marketing except content? As a business, what precisely do you think consumers want besides content? In 2013, is it really a revelation that we should be marketing substance versus platitudes?  If your answer to any of these questions was something besides ‘nothing’ or ‘no,’ then I think we’ve got a problem. Of course, companies market their goods and services to their consumers in the hopes that they will win the battle at the point of sale, but as our world becomes ever more global and our techno...