Reading E&P’s recent major piece, “Across the Web/Print Divide,”
I found myself wondering, for the Nth time, just what’s the purpose of a newspaper website, anyway?

Is it a way to expand a newspaper company’s audience by attracting new people who aren’t likely to read the print edition?

Or is it a way to give the newspaper, in different form, to the same the same kind of people who read the print edition?

I think we hoped it would do the former – win new readers. But most papers created sites far better suited to do the latter, because they mainly just replicated print content on the Web. Same information, just on different platform. The most likely customer would be the person who already likes the print content, right?

Our N2 consulting partners, Innosight LLC, have a name for that strategy. They call it “cramming.” And it’s not a compliment.

Studying scores of industries, they’ve found that cramming is a classic reaction when established, successful companies sense a threat from a new technology. They usually react defensively by trying to replicate their successful existing product in the new space.

In case after case, the focus on cramming keeps them from seeing huge new opportunities unique to the new space. Kodak, for example, saw digital imaging coming and resolved not to be bushwhacked – so they introduced the world’s first commercially viable digital camera in 1990. But they tried so hard to make it match the quality requirements of professional film cameras that it had a price tag of $30,000.

They didn’t foresee that digital imaging would actually enter the marketplace at the extreme low end, through children’s toys and then through low-resolution, point-and-shoot consumer models.

Newspapers, in a similar way, focused so hard on cramming the print news experience onto the web that they missed unique web opportunities like auctions, community and social networking (i.e, ebay, craigslist and myspace). Now they need to play catchup as best they can.

But the news for newspapers is by no means all bad. Cramming isn’t the best strategy, maybe, but it has succeeded in winning more new readers than might have been expected.

Based on new data from Pew and compiled readership data from NAA, it’s apparent that we have succeeded in growing our audiences pretty substantially.

At this point, the next big question is, what ELSE can we do? Especially, what can we do to engage the people who aren’t drawn to newspaper-type content, either in print or on the web? One thing is pretty clear -- that’s where some of the richest growth opportunities lie.