Monday, March 31, 2008

GateHouse loves those niche products


GateHouse Media, like many newspaper companies, is investing as much of its time and effort in niche products and that's the way President and CEO Michael Reed likes it.
At a marketing meeting of the Newspaper Association of America last week, Reed, one of the keynote speakers, explained his thinking:

Reed, meantime, said the industry has to continue to invest in and train its sales force.

“We have gotten increasingly complex compared to 20, 30, 40 years ago when we just put our daily newspaper on the street,” Reed said. “That’s not the case anymore. We have a plethora of niche products, weeklies, monthlies, special sections, and our daily and online products.”

Newspaper sales reps must know the product mixes, the community and the competition and be willing to change. Singleton stressed feet on the streets, while Reed said his company’s strengths lie in knowing the community and integrating the newspaper within that market.

As a result, GateHouse, which largely owns newspapers in small and mid-sized markets, has been able to avoid some of the classified revenues meltdown and cyclical downturn that’s affected its larger counterparts, Reed said
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GateHouse Media owns The Carthage Press, Neosho Daily News, Big Nickel, Pittsburg Morning Sun, and all kinds of niche publications and special sections in this area.

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