We’ve published a ton of posts here about the need for marketers to realize they’re in the media business today. Here’s one about a media company realizing that they’re in marketing.
John Yemma, Editor of The Christian Science Monitor, in a guest editorial on PaidContent says:
What we’re learning is that the key to building and keeping traffic is far more prosaic than multimedia and sharing buttons. It rests on overcoming a huge cultural barrier: evolving a serious, experienced, thoughtful newsroom into an audience-first organization. I use the term “evolving” because this is all about the present tense. Trying to understand our current and future audience is a work in progress that will continue for as long as we publish on the web.
It’s working. CSM’s web traffic climbed from 6 million page views last April to 13 million in February. And their print circulation rose from 43,000 to 77,000 in the same period.
