Forced to innovate or die, newspapers are leading the adoption of RSS and other such technologies. New Media Strategies' CEO explains what other marketers can learn from these efforts.

It is hard to swing a Sunday Times without hitting another story about the precipitous decline of the newspaper industry. And the erosion is not just limited to the hard copy editions; outside of the major national papers, the online audience of local papers is shrinking as well.

According to a recent study by Harvard, "Creative Destruction: An Exploratory Look at News on the Internet", traffic drops of 10 percent or more have not been unusual in the last year for a mid-city daily. The culprits for this shift are well known, and all are digital: Craigslist has devoured the lion's share of classified dollars; portals such as Yahoo! News and Google News have provided much easier ways to get customized national coverage via wire stories; local blogs are creating more compelling community coverage of sports teams and restaurants and "hyperlocal" coverage; and finally social networks are drawing attention away from other sites at an amazing rate. 

With such a bleak outlook for the dailies, what can marketers learn from their decline?

Plenty.

With their backs against the wall, many newspapers are now innovating at an astonishing rate. Broadsheets have to replace every paying subscriber with two to three dozen online readers to regain lost revenue, which makes their efforts as aggressive as any in the content industry, with a much higher tolerance for experimentation.

As trailblazers such as the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal work diligently to figure out the best delivery and advertising models, marketers can sit back and watch, literally following the news to evaluate and engage new creative platforms. In many ways, the news industry is a bellwether for other content producers, and the lessons and strategies learned by marketers trying to adapt are going to be useful well into the future.

It is not a stretch to view articles as the product pages of a news provider, and many of the threats to the news industry also are shaking the foundations of total corporate control of communication. Blogs move much faster than PR departments, e-commerce aggregators bring everything down to price, and social networks are still tough for many companies to engage effectively. 

The vast majority of news is text based, which means it can be sliced, diced and wrapped in any form for the user much more easily than video or audio content. With the universal appeal of timely information, the consumption platforms have blossomed as quickly as they are invented, becoming a "Ghost of Christmas Future" for other media.

People are now reading news via traditional sites, RSS readers, mobile properties, IM bots, email, iPod/PSP homebrew applications, and even gaming consoles: if it has a screen, ingenious owners will find a way to get their "must read" headlines onto it.

While I do not envy the publishers who are in a continuous struggle to keep up with their audience, I do see a great opportunity for advertisers to gain from their pain. A few of the lessons that can be learned seem obvious, while others might be counter-intuitive, but none of them have been implemented on a wide scale by mainstream marketers. Here are the top three headlines:

• Feed the beast: Very few commercial sites use feeds at all, let alone to their full potential, while even the smallest community papers let their audience subscribe to a headline feed. Papers learned the hard way that pushing content out is one of the best ways to get people back in, so making product pages and corporate blogs available via RSS should be a priority. RSS is the Type O content blood of Web 2.0, as every new platform accepts it (almost) before anything else.
  
  
• Send to a million friends: While almost everyone has a "Send to a Friend" button embedded in their site, a quick glance at any major daily news site will show a key difference. In addition to the base ability to email a story, "Share This" with corresponding buttons to tag and submit the article to Digg, reddit, Newsvine, deli.co.us, Sphere, and Facebook are available. It’s a much easier option for your customer to pass along information than traditional email, and also puts your product in front of a much larger audience.
  
  
  While social news sites tend toward tech and sensationalist news, many are hinting at dedicated product sections, meaning that you won't have to launch the iPhone, Halo 3 or the "Leave Britney Alone" video to get noticed on Digg in the near future. The Project for Excellence in Journalism has a very comprehensive overview of what currently works in the space, titled "The Latest News Headlines -- Your Vote Counts."
  
  
• Flood the zone: Ubiquity wins, and not just from a reach perspective. It is becoming a necessary element of maintaining brand relevance. If users can obtain their news via a New York Times widget on Facebook, a USA Today mobile application or a Wall Street Journal IM bot, they are much more likely to view the site as a trusted brand, due as much to their lack of competitor's availability vs. quality of their content. Similarly, marketers can use a platform advantage as a key differentiator if they can optimize their offering to not just the platform, but also the audience. Simply making a site available via WAP doesn't help much if the content isn't relevant, and pushing the wrong product on a social network can be disastrous, but so can ignoring these audiences all together.

The primacy of paper-based news, at one point consumed by 80 percent of the population, has been under the gun since the advent of television, and premature obituaries have been penned ever since. While the salad days of "Extra! Extra!" will never return to the news industry, the constant cycle and universal relevance of news (no matter how trashy/geek/esoteric) has long made it the content guinea pig of choice. Many of these innovations that are meant to revolutionize the industry will fail (PointCast, anyone?), but sometimes the knowledge of what won't work is as important as the insight as to what does. The strategies above have all been adopted by users and exploited by publishers to varying degrees of success, usually with investment levels that are far less than equivalent traditional campaigns. Just as you don't bury the lead in journalism, don't bury your content in marketing.

Pete Snyder is CEO, New Media Strategies. Read full bio.