Digital Media Strategies took place in London earlier this month, bringing together over 400 CEOs and senior leaders from news, magazine, broadcast, B2B, STM and digital pureplay media businesses from around the world.

On day 2 of the event, Ashleigh Highfield, CEO of Johnston Press discussed the issues facing regional publishers with Neil Thackray, CEO of Briefing Media to discuss the challenges facing the industry, and how Johnston Press are tackling these.

Below is a summary of their discussion.

History & Context

Johnston Press was formed over 300 years ago and today claims a 70-80% reach in local communities, reaching 1 in 3 people in the UK.

Just a decade ago, Johnston Press were able to boast a companywide turnover of £600m. Today, that number has halved and new strategies and approaches are now more vital than ever to turn around their declining revenues.

2008 was a crunch year for the publishing industry, and the rather abrupt and rapid decline of print from 2007 to 2009 caused revenues from classified advertising to diminish as consumers turned to digital for purchasing cars, advertising goods, searching for jobs and browsing property. Other organisations profited hugely from publishers missing this opportunity, platforms such as eBay, Gumtree, RightMove and Monster, to name a few.

So, given that regional newspaper groups in particular still have the same level of reach (perhaps now more than ever) the challenge for executives such as Ashley is, quite simply, how do you monetise that audience?

Structure

Johnston Press employ over a thousand journalists nationally and “hyper-local”, quality content remains paramount to their overall strategy.

“Our focus remains to deliver highly local quality content at the heart of communities” – Ashley Highfield, Johnston Press

The fact of the matter is that this model simply isn’t sustainable if they are to maintain a consistent level of growth to become the business they once were.

From a financial perspective, their focus is getting their top-line growing again and they plan to do this by investing heavily in digital.

In order to introduce a level of sustainability to support significant growth without having to double the number of journalists they employ, Highfield spoke of connecting their national reach using internal systems.

One example was the introduction of a large screen in each regional news room which reeled off articles from all of their publications that had received particularly high engagement (whether that be social sharing or otherwise) and making that editorial content available in a centralised database which everyone had access to. This meant, for example, that if the Yorkshire Post had run a story about a topic that had proved particularly popular with consumers, other news rooms could either rerun this themselves or simply look to it for inspiration.

Organisations such as the Press Association have been, in the past, utilised to create a central content hub of regional news which is available to all localised groups. Highfield wishes to bring these services in-house so that this central content hub is powered by the already rampant content machine that is the Johnston Press portfolio.

This methodology has not come without criticism, and Johnston Press have come under scrutiny by those who believe that they are no longer a local content hub with the recycling of editorial content and growing focus on national concerns.

In short, this approach means that local articles run the risk of no longer being isolated to local communities.

Strategy

Digital advertising remains central to Johnston Press’ growth strategy and Highfield plans to see this through without opting to introduce paywalls, something which is central to the growth strategy of other national newspaper groups.

Digital currently makes up 17% of Johnston Press’ total revenue, and their forecasts dictate that this will be roughly 23% by the end of 2015 which culminates a very aggressive digital growth strategy indeed.

“My aim is to see at least a quarter of our revenues coming from digital” – Ashley Highfield, Johnston Press

Revenues from their legacy business (i.e. local print newspapers) are declining at a rate of 5% p.a. whilst digital is enjoying a growth of 10% year on year.

In order to get the business performing as well as it once was, in terms of revenue at least, Highfield reports that digital revenue needs to be growing at four times the rate as its print business is declining.

Commercial Offering

The main focus for Johnston Press going forward is to simplify their commercial offering.

All publishers now seem to focusing much more on the quality of engagement rather than just the volume. This is a message that is conveyed to their clients who, as local businesses, want to reach local people. One example given was Tesco, who may typically run ads in national newspapers to promote discounts and core value messages, but a new superstore opening in Leeds would benefit far greater from an advert in the Yorkshire Post (whether that be in print or indeed digital).

This core goal saw the introduction of “1XL”, which involved a collaboration between Johnston Press, Local World, Newsquest and the majority of the UK’s independent local media businesses and brings together more than 800 sites which will allow brands, for the first time, to access a broad portfolio of local media advertising opportunities via a single sales point.

Another product being introduced is Johnston Press’ self-titled “Digital Kit Bag”, a marketing services product that was recently seen them scoop up an award for Google’s fastest growing partner in EMEA.

This product, quite simply, offers small and medium sized businesses the opportunity to utilise both Johnston Press’ digital expertise and the huge portfolio of local reach in their arsenal to grow their market reach. This makes use of local advertising both in press and in local digital publications and must no doubt be appetising for those who wish to target their marketing towards a “hyper-local” audience.

They plan to simplify this service further by offering fixed rate pricing and clear plans for expected results.

This arm of the business is headed up by Chris Brake, MD at Johnston Press and formally of Yell and rather than market this to a new audience, JP plan to target existing customers and draw upon the relationships they have already built up within local communities.

Recruitment advertising

The value of Johnston Press’ jobs business is growing and is currently worth £20m. Today, 40% of this revenue comes from their digital job boards but they plan to grow this to 50% by the end of the year.

Their approach to recruitment advertising has by no means shut out print and they are benefiting from a model that combines both print and digital as a bundled offering to their customers.

Their “Smart List” service, which them screen CVs on behalf of the recruiter (again, targeting small and medium sized businesses) takes away the administration pains of internal recruiters and is proving to be a highly lucrative service, adding significant value to their overall recruitment advertising model.

One example given of how print and digital are working in tandem for their jobs business was that of the Sheffield Star, which historically had seen a huge peak in print edition purchases each Thursday when the latest community jobs were advertised. This particular brand has benefited from “reverse publication” where jobs sourced from their digital community of recruiters were once again published in print each Thursday and has reignited the sales of their local print edition.

Highfield claims that this is an exciting time to work in local publishing, with many local papers declining at a rate of just 3-4% per year and digital business booming – there is still a significant amount of opportunity to monetise a thriving local audience.