Interesting article from MediaPost. I think they are right in their prediction of US News' future. Full story with interesting comments here

Killing Your Print Business Starves Your Brand

by Ari Rosenberg, Thursday, November 11, 2010, 12:00 PM

"News you can use" is no more.  In case you haven't heard, U.S. News & World Report, the former weekly magazine that rode this tagline into media departments with flair and confidence after Mort Zuckerman purchased it in 1984, has suspended its magazine business except for a few planned one-offs throughout the year.  The company will rely solely on its Web site to drive revenue moving forward. 

Its press release read like a suicide note. 

Even when pages were not included in a buy, the U.S. News print platform gave the brand a unique and credible point of differentiation when up against Web-only properties.  Now they are going head to head with sites that do online better than they do.  It would be like a diner, located next door to a Five Guys, changing its menu to burgers only.   

The number of U.S. News readers who follow this brand online once they stop getting the magazine, will be vastly smaller than the number the brand will abandon -- so overall audience will take a huge hit.  But the hardest hit will be the brand's perceived value.  It will become less relevant to consumers and less significant in an online ad market great at drowning brand value in exchange for cheaper prices.

Someone once shared with me an interesting and provocative perspective on the print advertising business.  He is the former president of The Onion.  At The Onion, he knew his advertising profits came from his brand's Web site.   He also knew he was losing money publishing a free paper distributed in multiple markets.   So why did he stay in the print business?  Easy. Publishing his brand in print became a marketing expense to help increase the brand's awareness, credibility, and value.  

The print platform of a content brand not only drives incremental traffic and subsequent page views to the brand's Web site (and related digital assets), it helps support higher CPMs online.  Removing this platform, and decreasing the overall number of advertising sales calls made on behalf of the brand, is an irrevocable mistake by U.S. News -- signaling an end, not a new beginning.

There is a restaurant in my neighborhood that I used to order business lunches from three to four times a week.    Once or twice a week, I would also order myself dinner.  Needless to say, I was a very good customer.  Two months ago, the restaurant stopped opening for lunch.

I have not ordered dinner from them since.

Consumer appetites are fickle. Once you stop serving your brand the way they are used to consuming it, they pick something else off the menu. 

U.S. News strategists will find this out as they starve this once-proud brand into obscurity.

From today's New York Times comes this story of how newspaper web sites are having trouble attracting larger brand advertisers consistently.The reason boils down to two problems we have spoken about on this blog many times - newspaper sites are too expensive and the ability to target is poor.

Full story here.

Part of the story:

It was a good day for newspaper Web sites when Mercedes-Benz USA introduced its updated E-Class cars this summer. Mercedes bought out the ad space on the home pages of The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, and had those sites create special 3-D ads for them, at an estimated cost of $100,000 a site.

The days after were not as good. While Mercedes was happy with the newspaper sites’ performance, it shifted money to cheaper, more tightly aimed ads bought through networks, which bundle ad space from many Web sites.

When Mercedes advertises its more basic models next year, it will largely avoid newspaper Web sites and rely on networks. That lets Mercedes “be very targeted and efficient with our dollars,” said Beth Lange, digital media specialist for Mercedes-Benz USA.

But that also explains why newspaper sites are not holding on to ad dollars, even while overall Internet advertising is creeping back. Newspaper sites are the patent-leather stilettos of the online world: they get used for special occasions, but other shoes get much more daily wear. The beneficiaries of this behavior are networks and exchanges like Advertising.com from AOL and DoubleClick Ad Exchange from Google, which dominate the buying and selling of extra space.

As a follow up to our diatribe yesterday on BusinessWeek consider this typically snarky comment from AdAge:

"Why the persistent drop for the business bibles? Business-to-business advertisers have found many more efficient, targeted ways to reach their customers. Brand campaigns remain an important component of their marketing, but they've also gotten much better at maintaining databases of the crucial decision makers who buy their products or services, focusing on preserving their loyalty and contacting them more or less directly than through a major magazine ad buy."

If you are in print - newspapers or magazines - this comment should really bug you. The author, Nat Ives, is wrong about the potential for print publications to generate response for non-branding campaigns but he is expressing a sentiment which is common in the advertising world. In other words, the advertisers you covet think he is right about magazines being a branding advertising medium. Further proof, that if print publications don't start proving response to their customers using any number of rudimentary tracking mechanisms (800#s, text addresses, unique urls), no one will.