Dana Blankenhorn

Career Advice for Tough Times

No one wants to read the financial page right now.

I don’t. And I write for it.

For companies that cover finance, it’s a long march without water. Many companies will be lost, and so will many jobs.

It’s part of a natural cycle. If things were great all the time any idiot could succeed. We don’t want to see idiots succeed.

A market winter is a time of discipline. As was the case in the last two recessions, those who focused on the short term, who focused only on page views and not on branding, won’t make it through. What does get you through is a brand.

A brand knows its target market. A brand manager can picture their ideal customer, and the brand can go to that customer when things get tight, knowing there’s a base from which to build. A publication, or any company, without a brand can’t do that. They die.

Break From Google

Once news distribution became free, almost 30 years ago, publishers forgot what made the business go and they all went for scale.

What makes journalism go is knowing your audience. You don’t write for everyone, but for specific readers. You monetize the credibility you earn based on who you do business with.

The Internet opened the whole market to every publisher. It also opened the whole market to every advertiser. What Google and later Facebook did was let businesses reach just the people they wanted for a “run of network” rate, which kept declining as Web content expanded.

This broke the connection between writers and the audience. We stopped trying to write for specific sub-segments of the population and went for the mass market. Advertisers took the job of targeting in-house, using the Web only for branding and spot sales.

I said from the beginning that was a mistake. This is obvious now. Along the way we have raised a generation of publishers on the mass market model, and as they’ve come to power, they’ve lost the plot.