You can bet that as a former newspaper reporter I took a lot of notes at SLC 2025. In fact, there were so many terrific presenters and panelists that I decided to stay onsite an extra day just to digest everything I’d seen and heard.
During my final morning walk around The Broadmoor’s tiny lake, I sat on a bench to relax and to try to reflect on the conference. I noticed a lovely swan grooming herself nearby. The swan paused and stared at me, just for a second. Maybe it was nothing, but I always try to count such moments as meaningful, especially in the morning when I need a little boost. Then the swan waddled to the water and swam away.
Three primary observations from the conference bubbled up:
Observation 1: In the air was an optimism that most newspapers can turn the corner to profitability. For example, The Denver Gazette seems to be proving that an online-only publication doesn’t have to have a national audience to be sustainable by an only-subscription-dollars revenue model. The challenge does remain how newspapers in more rural communities can accomplish the same, but we’re a little closer to discovering how..
Observation 2: The difficulty of talent recruitment constitutes the biggest headache among leaders. I spoke with several publishers one on one between sessions and asked each of them, “What is keeping you up at night the most?” To a person they pointed to the problem of recruiting high quality, affordable talent in advertising and general management. I wondered when exactly journalism had lost its mystique and cache. When I worked as a reporter in the mid-1990s, the pay wasn’t competitive with other professional lines of work then either, but there still seemed to be a high level of talent in each department. Maybe the industry can redouble efforts to tout that mission-driven aspect of journalism to young people and job candidates.
Observation 3: The industry has a plethora of powerful ideas and tools. As with most of the journalism conferences I attended this past year, SLC 2025 proved that there is no shortage of new information and digital tools that newspapers can utilize to help turn the corner. I wonder if the problem is not a lack of ideas and tools but, rather, a difficulty or unwillingness on the part of some key staff to put them into practice. Having worked the past two-plus years on one newspaper company turnaround, I have seen the difficulty of orienting every staff member toward new strategies, softwares and other tools when a given enterprise really does need all its employees to work in concert. What approaches might publishers take to gain alignment in their ranks?
If you stayed at The Broadmoor even one night you could not fail to notice the extensive marketing the famed resort deploys. I find that so interesting. After all, The Broadmoor already has you as a customer. Their very operation sells itself with impeccable food, art, architecture and customer service. And, yet, The Broadmoor spends yet more marketing dollars on its guests. The art postcards and catalog, luggage tag, bookmarks, aluminum water bottles, chocolates …. If a business that is already succeeding still sees an opportunity to market itself, why don’t newspapers as well?
Maybe newspapers could use some big ideas around marketing:
Big Idea 1: Create a marketing function in more newspapers. “We don’t toot our own horn enough” is something I have heard from dozens of publishers over the past few years. I agree with them. Until about the year 2000, newspapers never had to market themselves, but they do now. House ads are preaching to the already converted. How might the industry be more intentional and assertive in equipping newspapers with the marketing they need to increase readership and advertiser awareness?
Big Idea 2: Launch as an industry a national ad campaign to tout the scarcity and high value of reporter-driven journalism. In 1993, America’s dairy farmers asked the country, “Got Milk?” If consumers didn’t already have milk, they sure went out and found it! Quality journalism stands out on the information shelf more than ever these days, but people aren’t seeing it for all the smoke and mirrors. How might we land on powerful messaging that persuades the public that investment in real reporters and camerapeople is a differentiator in the market? A Super Bowl Commercial might be calling …
Late morning on my last day in Colorado Springs, I took a pleasant hike through the Garden of the Gods with another publisher. Those rock formations surely evoke a reverie in most hikers, but she and I talked shop the whole way. It was mainly me learning all the things this business owner had been doing to improve her company’s bottom line. I was impressed that she seemed to have left no stone unturned to capture every possible penny.
Still, this publisher needed to find yet more margin, as she had not been able to give herself a raise in a number of years. Retirement was calling her, but she wondered how in the world she would be able to afford it. I know she isn’t alone in that feeling. There are many admirable examples of survival, but there is not yet a reflourishing.
How do we change the game?
The nonprofit model is proving to be a viable revenue stream for a growing number of papers, but we simply must continue to seek out new for-profit business models. In order for that to happen, we have to meet additional needs in local markets. Businesses have many needs beyond buying an ad. Small business owners especially operate on a wing and a prayer, and more of them fail than succeed. If we believe in our hearts that newspapers have historically been a magnet for some of the most creative and analytical individuals in a given community (and can once again be that), how might we leverage such capacity to solve more business problems?
“Well, Eric, a large number of us tried the ad agency model decades ago, and it didn’t work anywhere near like we’d hoped.” True. Newspapers haven’t had the necessary capacity and skills in-house; plus, the model was very labor intensive. No wonder the model couldn’t scale. These days, only a very small percentage of newspapers have an in-house agency supplying a portion of their B2B revenue.
At The ORG Detectives, we think it’s time to dust off the agency model and give it another go. The timely news hook? AI. By using powerful new AI tools, it may be possible for newspapers to package, sell and deliver branding, marketing strategy and other revenue-growing services to businesses — even in rural markets, and even at scale. Not long before this year’s SLC, The ORG Detectives began experimenting with some of the new tools. We are finding them extremely promising, and, with the right partnerships and investment, we hope to prove them out and bring them to market in 2026.
Kudos and many thanks to everyone who made SLC 2025 such a positive event. Now we each just need to go back to our notes and execute on the ideas small and large that the conference sparked in us. My late father, an engineer, often liked to say, “Something will work.” We just might need to try everything. If we do, we might find a game-changing solution and what strikes much of the public as an ugly duckling of an industry might just turn itself into a swan again after all.
Eric Larson, MBA, is the CEO of The ORG Detectives, based in Raleigh, North Carolina.
