Backgrounder: John Kimball
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After more than 30 years in the media-business trenches, John Kimball is certain the newspaper industry isn't going anywhere, despite recent threats to the business, such as job cuts and decreasing profit margins at major media outlets.
"No other form of media has the newsgathering and editing expertise we have," he told Bullpen in a recent telephone interview. "Even with cutbacks, buyouts [and] layoffs, no one comes close to the number of 'feet on the street' that the local newspaper has in news and sales. That is the source of our real strength."
Kimball is well-positioned to make such predictions: He's the senior vice president and chief marketing officer of the Newspaper Association of America, the industry's trade association. Surprisingly, he's optimistic about the future of the newspaper, even as newspaper circulations decrease and online media prosper. In October 2006, the Audit Bureau of Circulations announced that daily newspapers faced an average 2.8 percent drop from the same six-month period the previous year. The figure is the largest drop in 15 years, according to The New York Times. A September 2006 Times article reported that the audit bureau created a new way to quantify a publication's reach: in some test cases, figures will combine print circulation with website traffic figures, indicating that the bureau recognizes the importance of online readership.
Kimball's confidence springs from nearly 40 years' experience in newspaper marketing. With a BA in advertising from Michigan State University in 1966 and an MBA from the Harvard Business School in 1986, Kimball got his start in the business selling ads at his hometown paper in Pontiac, Mich. in 1970. Since then, he has climbed steadily, working as vice president of advertising at the Detroit Free-Press and The Denver Post, and senior vice president of sales at Macromedia, the New Jersey-based parent company of the North Jersey Media Group, which owns more than 40 weekly newspapers across New Jersey, most notably The Record, in Bergen County.
Now Kimball is working to ensure that the industry has a viable future. At the Newspaper Association of America, Kimball conducts research designed to increase ad revenue for print and online media and works with newspapers to create new products, such as special-interest publications aimed at niche groups. The Washington Post's The Express, a quick-read newspaper marketed toward commuters and handed out for free at metro stations in Washington, is a recent example of such innovations.
Kimball also talks with legislators on Capitol Hill about media-related issues — he lobbies against postal-rate increases and telemarketing reform — anything that affects the business, he said. He also works with lawmakers to strengthen shield laws, state laws that protect journalists from government subpoenas that force them to reveal their sources.
As the newspaper industry moves online, Kimball said he is confident about the future. It's a business in transition, "an American institution that isn't going away," he told Bullpen. Adequate cash flows allow newspaper companies to invest in new products and technology, which is "fueling the future," Kimball said in an e-mail.
"All the little things that newspapers are doing with their websites, their niche publications, [and] their improvements to their core product will soon start to add to top-line revenue," he predicted.
In a December 2006 Time magazine forum about the future of newspapers, Kimball asserted his confidence in the persistence of a tangible newspaper form. "There will be advances in newspaper delivery: not just Web sites, but a printed product on a notebook of some kind that you could access electronically," Kimball said, referring to new formats of the original product, and emphasizing that technology could exist to deliver electronically a hard-copy paper to a reader to be printed at home. "I assure you that [newspapers] will still be around," Kimball emphasized in the forum.
Kimball stressed this view that newspapers will not go away. "Having whatever the advertiser is looking for and [what] the readers and users need is how and why the industry will succeed," Kimball told Bullpen. "As the business evolves, it really becomes less important how people come to the information, as long as they come to it through your brand," he said.
SOURCES
Caplan, Jeremy. "Forum: the Future of Newspapers." TIME. 5 Dec. 2006. http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1566014,00.html.
Kimball, John. Personal interview. 8 March 2007. Follow-up interview: 17 March 2007.
Mindlin, Alex. "New way to gauge a publication's appeal." The New York Times: 4 September 2006. Section C, Business/Financial Desk. Pg. 3.
"NAA Media Guide: John Kimball." Newspaper Association of America. http://www.naa.org/information-resource-center/naa-media-guide/experts/naa-media-guide-john-kimball.aspx
Seelye, Katharine Q. "Newspaper circulation falls sharply." The New York Times: 31 October 2006. Section C, Business/Financial Desk; Pg. 1.