Photos now rule the web

Facebook has shown us that the public wants photos. Over 100 million photos are added to Facebook everyday. Those photos create of 10 trillion page views a month.
If your paper is not sharing all the photos it takes (not just the ones from the print edition) you are not providing what your readers are telling us they want.  We should all see Facebook's enormous success as a business and as social phenomenon as a giant direction arrow for where to steer our ship.

Oh the picture? No particular reason. I just always liked the portrait of my friend Mark.

Newspapers and the day-old bread store.

Although not as common now, a generation ago the day-old bread store was a common merchant in many communities. As the name implies these stores sold the bread that bakeries had gathered from the shelves of supermarkets when the "day-old" bread was replaced with freshly baked loaves. The day-old bread stores sold these older loaves at a discount to salvage some value out this old inventory.
News photos are like bread. The value drops as they age. But not because they soon grow blue-green hairs but because the emotional connection to them wanes quickly.

Daily uploading insures the most possible sales and prevents the photojournalism version of blue-green hairs.

Photography has never been more popular. Is your paper getting its share of this surging market? If you are uploading your photos everyday and making them available for viewing and purchase then you are ahead of many papers. But if you're not then you are leaving money on the table everyday. We can help.

This photo was from the opening of the CP+ Show in Yokohama last week (that's me 3rd from the left). This is a photography hardware show for consumers. The attendance was 65k, up 30% over last year!

How late is the paper's office open?

Over 50% of sales now take place at some time other than 9-5 Monday through Friday. How can a newspaper use this knowledge and still send the person that answers the phone home at 5PM? Sell online. Sell ads. Sell subscriptions. Sell classifieds but sell. When it comes to selling photo reprints and full page reprints we can help. Your newspaper office will be open for photo products 24/7. And not just prints but mugs, mousepads and stretched canvases. 

This is what our newspaper needs

No not money, though we all need that. We need relevance. We need to be important to our readers. As the internet changes our readers' access to news and images no news content is more relevant than photos. To be relevant to our readers we need to provide photos in a new and different way. Not just one per story but enough to tell the story. The price of ink makes that impossible to do in print but the revenue derived from doing it on the web actually makes it profitable. Let us help make your paper more relevant and your paper more profitable in 2012.

Making the 2011 numbers

It's too late if the paper isn't going to make it's 2011 profit projections. But coming up is another year and a new revenue stream from assets you already have can help with 2012. If you're not selling your photo reprints or if you're not getting enough for them (unlike the picture here for $13 beers) let's correct that.

Going the wrong way.

Some newspapers pay to have photos stored and displayed on the web. They pay the same company that hosts the rest of the paper by paying storage fees or pay a third party for storage and a gallery. These galleries often don't include an option to sell photo reprints.This means money is flowing the wrong way. It's flowing away from the newspaper. That is a missed opportunity.This leak can be plugged at your paper in just a day.

Happy Holidays to all our partner newspapers out there!