Most-read, or most-reviled?

William Lobdell, who previously wrote a trenchant and sadly accurate critique of the state of papers in general and the LA Times in particular, has looked at the "Most popular" feature at local web sites and decided the list of stories indicates that there's no future for news online.

I think he needs to take a deep breath and consider what's really bugging him. Is it that people don't care about news? Or is it that they don't care about what he thinks is the right news?

For 12 years I studied the logs of what people were reading locally (at baltimoresun.com), and for the most part, the results are heartening.

People want exactly what local news organizations are set up to best provide for them: local news and sports. There will be the occasional outlier about Britney or Clay or some heinous and gruesome murder in another state, but most of what rises to the top of daily, monthly and yearly readership patterns is the bread-and-butter journalism that most newspeople say they care most about.

So why's William upset

The top-viewed stories don't reflect the work of 600-plus journalists busting their asses around the world.

He's right. A dispatch from South Africa or Tibet in the local paper's web site isn't exactly going to drive big numbers. But report on a local crime spree or a controversial piece of local legislation and you can almost hear the page-view counters clicking loudly.

This is a good thing. Local readers want local news primarily. They certainly expect their local news web site to have all the national and world news, in case they need it, but that's not why readers go to latimes.com or baltimoresun.com. They're there for the news that matters most to them locally. CNN.com and wsj.com are just a click away and do it better anyway. But the one thing they can't do well - the one thing local newspapers still have, for now - is local news.

It's not that the readers don't appreciate the efforts of the newsroom. It's just that they appreciate the efforts a whole lot more when what makes it into print is locally relevant, unique and useful.

Did news media fail us at a critical moment?

Two clear thinkers about journalism reach a similar conclusion: at best, the mainstream media contributed little to the understanding of the current economic situation. At worst, they repeated the uncritical reporting of the so-called "March to War" in 2002-2003 and added to the panic state.

Here's Howard Owens:

What you rarely found or heard was any serious questioning of whether the crisis was anywhere near the proportion George W. Bush said it was, or if the bailout was really necessary, or if the bailout would work, or if, maybe, the bailout might make things actually worse.

...

It could be argued that the American people, who pressured representatives to reject the bailout, saw through the clamor and clouds, but if you spend time reading comments on newspaper web sites, angry constituents reacted more viscerally than logically.  If you support the reform, you should be concerned that the lack of depth in news coverage also failed to clearly communicate why the bailout was necessary and wise.

And here's Jeff Jarvis:

I’m reminded of Bob Garfield’s chaos scenario for advertising, in which he argued that the old media world would crumble before the new media world was ready for marketers and advertising dollars would fall into the crevice between. That is what is happening with our political and financial and industrial and journalistic leadership. The old is crumbling fast — and angry voters yesterday helped push it over the cliff. But what now?

A daily folds

A very wan "Yay"

I just collected thirty-four fake dollars by correctly forecasting that this would be the year that a daily paper would shut down.

Jeff Jarvis posted the question a while back on Hubdub. It's just been settled with the shuttering of the New York Sun.

This is not a contest I'd hoped to win.

Added for clarity: Jeff's question talks about a daily with circulation of 50,000. I believe he meant paid circulation, but the question is not explicit on this point. Wikipedia: "...according to April 2007 article in The Nation, its [the Sun's] own audit indicates that "the Sun is selling 13,211 hard copies a day and giving away more than 85,000."

A right-sized newspaper

At my local Starbucks this morning, I noticed this:



It's one sheet of newsprint, folded to about six-inches square, focused on one topic, published once a week, distributed free.

To a non-print reading public, this may be the perfect newspaper.

To be fair, this is probably not where our local papers are headed, but it is a step in the right direction. After all, what's the number-one reason people give for canceling a newspaper subscription? Not enough time to read. A typical metro daily has hundreds of entry points and dozens of topics.

The Good Sheet has one topic and dozens of entry points, presented as a quick primer on key issues for the upcoming U.S. election. It's hardly a purely objective vehicle, but the issue I picked up - on immigration - attempted to focus more on facts than cant.

But what interests me more than the content is the form. Designed to be a quick-read for when you're waiting for your latte or as a conversation-starter for the table-hogs, The Good Sheet makes it incredibly easy to dive into a single topic. Imagine if a local news organization - paper, tv station, talk radio program - took a similar approach to offer hooks into issues of local interest.

There's decent web presence for the Good Sheet as well (mercifully free of the assault of headlines you'll find on most news sites), though I don't like how the only response to clicking the "discuss" link is a message that says "You need to be logged in in order to do that." Also, the paper could benefit from suggested links/sources for further reading, but all-in-all, I think this is a worthy print experiment.

And, it's sponsored, by Starbucks, of course, which underwrites the distribution, but also by Lenovo, which has a full-page ad that, smartly, picks up the theme of education and empowerment. So, as Navin Johnson would say, it's a profit deal.

Any other examples of micro-editing in the print world?

Imagine if a mainstream site acknowledged the existence of blogs

Tip of the hat to the folks at bthesite.com for including prominent links out to Baltimore based and Baltimorecentric blogs in the main well of the recently redesigned site.

(Disclosure: I helped create bthesite.com and argued loudly for the inclusion of local blogs)



The local blogs have been there since day one, but were somewhat hidden in the left rail. Now, they're pushed out front and center.

It's great to see a major-market news organization showing signs that it realizes it lives in a wider web.

A peek behind the curtain at Curley's lasvegassun.com

In a post that seems to have largely gone unnoticed, Rob Curley wrote a detailed summary last week of what goes into a typical day's work at the innovative lasvegassun.com. The paper itself is just a few pages - with no ads - inserted into the competing Las Vegas Review-Journal. So the web site has a lot of ground to cover on its own.

A local newspaper filled with lots of local journalism that matters and no ads. Craziest thing I’ve ever seen. Hell, it’s probably the craziest thing any of us have seen in regards to local media.

One of the things that we’ve found since being at the Las Vegas Sun is that a lot of that amazing journalism that works so well in the print edition (it’s essentially a kick-ass “A” section of all-enterprise local and state stories) doesn’t always translate to big online traffic numbers.

Because of that, our new-media journalists and editors have a ton of focus on writing lots of breaking news stories and essentially the other sections of a typical newspaper (metro, sports, entertainment/lifestyle). Those are all stories that because of the JOA, the Sun just doesn’t cover in print like a typical newspaper.

What that means, with the exception of all of the crazy alternate delivery and multimedia we do, is our new-media news team is about as old school as it gets.

It's a long piece, rich with detail and examples. If you're at all interested in the intersection of traditional and digital journalism, there's much of value here.

Hyperlocal won't wait

Newspapers and TV stations have been throwing around the hyperlocal buzzword for years. Some have actually done something with it and launched web sites focused on tight geographic areas. But many of these are thinly-resourced and dependent on user-generated content that's been slow to come.

So what happens when a media-adept resident of a neighborhood looks around and realizes that there's an opportunity unmet by the local publisher or broadcaster?

In Cory Bergman's case, he and his wife launch a neighborhood news site that winds up netting more readers than the local print community paper.

Bergman, who runs the excellent Lost Remote media blog, describes how he used off-the-rack tools to create what he calls his own hyperlocal experiment:

Soon after we moved to the Seattle neighborhood of Ballard last year, my wife Kate reserved MyBallard.com after we noticed there was no daily news source dedicated to the community of 35,000. We rolled out a standard Wordpress blog and started writing about news in the neighborhood. We added an events calendar, restaurant guide and a forum, too.

The lesson: There's an entire subset of people who are absolutely comfortable with the tools of content creation who, when they see a need for news or communication, don't wait for someone else or some vast media company to create it for them.

How is your neighborhood being served by your local newspaper? Is there an opportunity to do more? Have you already reserved the URL?

A big job: fixing classifieds

For years, newspapers thought Monster was the enemy. And for a while, it was. After enough people in the business had their "Holy crap, Monster's stealing our business!" moment, Careerbuilder was created.

It was a classic defensive move: stop the outflow, then recover the share. And it worked. Careerbuilder and Yahoo's newspaper-centric HotJobs both are in the game with Monster, often beating it. Mission Accomplished.

So, why then is this chart still going in the wrong direction? Why is the money-pump of recruitment advertising sucking air?

It's Craig. Starting around 2000, Craigslist went national with a largely free ad model. Over time, businesses discovered they could fill their open positions with an ad on Craigslist. Money that once was spent on a newspaper ad or a Monster or Careerbuilder ad simply was not spent. Hundreds of dollars per ad did not change hands. And yet the position was filled.

How do you compete against that?

Like the Grinch standing atop Mount Crumpit believing Christmas would never come without packages, boxes or bags, newspapers scoffed at the Craigslist model: "It can't possibly work"

Well, it does. Mix in vertical job sites that do charge, but at a much lower rate than newspapers and online megasites, and you've got the makings of the swoon the newspaper classified business is currently in.

And can you really blame the hiring manager, who fills a job without spending a dollar in a newspaper or on Careerbuilder, for never spending there again? Especially in an jobs economy that's becoming less of an applicant's market with each passing day?

This should not be news to anyone in or out of the newspaper classified business. Yet the slippage continues, accelerating even in the past year. We shouldn't need to say this almost a decade into the 21st century, but we do: We need to change. Fast.

If I had P&L responsibility for print classifieds, these are some options I'd consider to shore up one critical category, recruitment, still the largest slice of the classified pie:

1. Get out of print. The "Want Ads" of previous generations worked well because the classified section was a reliable database of most available positions. A printed database, yes, but for most people well into the end of the 20th century, a printed database was the most accessible database. Today, however, when huge swaths of our population are online with devices both tethered and wireless, a printed database is a museum piece. Convert to 100% digital classifieds now and use the paper to promote the heck out of the online product. This will cost in the short run, but so will doing nothing.

2. Create a weekly tabloid which aggregates the best local classifieds and distribute it along with the paper on Sunday, then free on Monday. This may simply be forestalling the inevitable, but there's also the possibility that it could pump new life into the old beast, rebuilding the teeming marketplace of old through sheer volume:

• All 3-4 line ads are free if users create them online. If a user wants the traditional phone support, there's a $20 fee for the service.


• Offer aggressively-priced upsells for both print and online.


• Aggregate classified content from other sources, either through partnerships or straight-up content-scraping.


• Surround the ad content with original editorial content. Give the publication a voice and an attitude to encourage readership by more than just the hard-core jobseeker.


• Extend your reach outside of your paying newspaper customers, but still give them the early look by holding off the free edition for one day.


• If your newspaper owns community papers or other niche publications, use them to distribute the new classified tab.

(Note: a variation on this option recently launched at The Baltimore Sun. I had a small hand in the development of the idea. The Sun's product as launched does not contain free or aggregated ads, a critical difference to my mind.)

3. Be your niche. Take a look at the Sunday jobs section - a great deal of the jobs there are blue collar and entry-level. Under the current model of the newspaper employment section as an omnibus job source, this is a bad thing. But what if we embraced the reality? Move all of the professional listings to online and focus the printed product on helping employers fill the manufacturing and service jobs in your market. Publish it in English and Spanish to better meet the needs of the workforce. Distribute it outside of the traditional newspaper rack system, employing hawkers at major work sites and home improvement centers, for example.

4. Charge for leads. This is Lucas Grindley's idea, and I think it has a lot of merit. It starts with free online and in-print ads. Then it gets interesting:

After those ads are printed for free in the newspaper and posted online for free, numerous people will obviously respond wanting to apply for the job or buy the merchandise.

When that happens, notify the job poster or car seller that someone has responded. If they’d like to view the response, they’ll have to pay a fee.

That’s right. Charge them to view responses.

To encourage usage, maybe give away the first response for free. Then charge per response after that.

These are just a few ideas. I imagine Steve Outing at Reinventing Classifieds will be assembling quite a few good ideas about fixing classifieds now that he's created a $500 bounty for the best idea.

But we've got to do something soon - that trend line's moving far too quickly toward zero.

Aggregation works

Newspapers need to be dragged kicking and screaming, but Drudge knows it and Google knows it. Aggregation works. An outstanding way to build audience is by sending people away.

One of my favorite recent arrivals on the web has been Guy Kawasaki's Alltop.com. The model is simple: aggregate the best of the web in vertical categories and organize it in a clean and logical presentation.

In six months, he's grown his site from nothing to more than five million page views by pointing at other people's content:

You can think of an Alltop site as a “digital magazine rack” of the Internet. To be clear, Alltop sites are starting points—they are not destinations per se. The bottom line is that we are trying to enhance your online reading by both displaying stories from the sites that you’re already visiting and helping you discover sites that you didn’t know existed. In other words, our goal is the “cessation of Internet stagnation” by providing “aggregation without aggravation.”

Some legitimately question whether Alltop is merely riding on the back of content created by other sites, but I think that the careful aggregation itself - the curation - does add value and makes it easier for me to find the content I'm looking for.

What can be done to stop the free-fall in classifieds?

Steve Outing, of E&P and, more recently, Reinventing Classifieds, is asking for your help, and he's offering $500 as an incentive:

WHAT CAN THE NEWSPAPER INDUSTRY DO TO 1) BRING BACK CLASSIFIEDS CUSTOMERS (BUYERS AND SELLERS) THAT HAVE BEEN LOST TO ONLINE COMPETITORS, 2) ATTRACT NEW CUSTOMERS WHO HAVE NOT USED NEWSPAPER CLASSIFIEDS BEFORE, AND 3) RETAIN ITS REMAINING CLASSIFIEDS CUSTOMERS?

Good questions.

But to back up a little, Step One in solving any crisis it to define the crisis. We've all seen the numbers, watched them slip year-over-year. But sometimes the numbers aren't enough. You need a picture. Here's what the biggest slice of the classified picture, help-wanted, looks like in 2008:



(2008 estimated based on first-half performance. All data from NAA.)

You don't have to be a draftsman or Photoshop guru to visualize that trend line's forward direction if nothing changes. It hits zero in mid-2010.

Zero.

You can look at the chart two ways. The first, is that we've got $2.6 billion at risk that we have to do everything in our power to save. That's been the approach of the newspaper business so far. We said the same thing when we had $5.1 billion at risk. And $4.7 billion. And $3.8 billion. And still the slide continues.

Or, we could take another approach. We could say that in 2011 dollars, we have nothing at risk. Because if we don't do something dramatic, that's exactly what we'll have. Nothing.

Next: a modest proposal to help stem the tide and relieve Steve of his $500.

Hint for where this is going: Look at the chart above and remember that Craig Newmark started his expansion in 2000.

The online news solution, simple and easy version

What's the one thing that news organizations could do to increase their readership and, by extension, their bottom line?

Link out.

UPDATE: The Washington Post creates a new feature that's all about linking out, called Political Browser. All they need now is an RSS feed.

Manhunt: The Wire meets Our American Cousin?

Episode One: The ground-level investigators have good ideas on how to catch the assassin, but they're hamstrung by idiot superiors who keep insisting that they follow stupid leads for political reasons, all the while cutting the investigatory budget. And everyone curses like sailors.

David Simon is back on HBO:

HBO announced today a mini series based on the assassination of Abraham Lincoln called Manhunt. That news would be interesting enough because the series will deal with the 12 days after Lincoln was shot when the assassin, John Wilkes Booth, was on the run. However, the guys that HBO have tapped to work on Manhunt are two of the best in television -- David Simon and Tom Fontana.

Jay Rosen on why bloggers have already written the rulebook on ethical blogging

I really like NYU professor Jay Rosen's mantra-like tweets and posts, which more often than not, contain obvious truth that he somehow is the first to articulate.

Like this one on the pressure to create ethical rules for bloggers:

If “ethics” are the codification in rules of the practices that lead to trust on the platform where the users actually are… then journalists have their ethics and bloggers have theirs.

• Good bloggers observe the ethic of the link.

• They correct themselves early, easily and often.

• They don’t claim neutrality but they do practice transparency.

• They aren’t remote, they converse.

• They give you their site, but also other sites as a frame of reference.

• When they grab on to something they don’t let go but “track” it.

In all these ways they build up trust with a base of users online. And over time, the practices that lead to trust on the platform where the users actually are… become their ethic, their rules.

People in journalism who want to bring ethics to blogging ought to start with why people trust bloggers, not with an ethics template made for a prior platform that was a closed system in a one-to-many world.

That’s why I say: if bloggers had no ethics blogging would have failed. Of course it didn’t. Now you have a clue.

Blue-screening the Microsoft campaign

I will eat a plate of crow if I'm wrong on this, but I'm not buying a word of Microsoft's story that they planned all along to stop the trippy, confusing, amusing and mildly offensive  story of Bill and Jerry on the road just two episodes in. With no payoff. Not even an emerging narrative arc.

Yes sir, I believe that.

No, these ads were all set-up. Like the two protagonists, they were going somewhere, eventually. And given Crispin Porter & Bogusky's track-record, I'd bet they were building to something epic. Now we'll never know (until some creative blogs it).

And next? The campaign reportedly will shift gears to bring on a John-Hodgman-as-PC lookalike. Can you say "The campaign's bombing, let's go with that other concept"?

And I was just beginning to enjoy the picaresque story of, as the pizza guy says, "two leaders in their respective fields" walking around, talking about nothing.

Best in Baltimore

I don't work there anymore, but I put a quarter of my life into it, so this makes me smile:

baltimoresun.com was just named Best Baltimore-Related Web Site by The Baltimore City Paper.

Poke around Baltimoresun.com for an hour and you'll find the mark of the city, its moods twisting like so many threads of anonymous rants. You'll find good web-only content, such as the documentary videos that sometimes accompany stories, and a blog lineup that doesn't cast too wide a net.

To me, this is better than a nod from NAA or ONA or E&P or any other navel-gazing journo-award, because cp.com is a whole lot more representative of Baltimore and its readers.

Congratulations to the team at baltimoresun.com.

Turning reporters into curators to improve journalism

A conversation started this week by Scott Karp and carried forward by Terry Heaton has me thinking about why news organizations are so skittish about linking out from their web sites.

It's as if they think that creating a cul de sac will make readers forget they've got a Back button on the browser.

And when you layer that conversation onto Chris Anderson's pith about amateurs noted below, you come to one of my favorite topics: journalists as curators.

It's simple: Journalists need to stop thinking exclusively like content creators and start acting also as content curators.

Even today, years after the arrival of the social web, the internet might as well not exist to most news organizations, except as a broadcast medium for a one-way conversation.

But what if we took a step back and acknowledged that, in 2008, not only is pretty much everyone capable of being a journalist , many of them are already doing it. They maintain blogs. They post photos and videos online. They build and host popular and active discussion boards. They ask questions and they get answers.

Honestly, this isn't a revelation, but you'd think it was based on most metro news web sites.

It’s no longer sufficient for a reporter to remain plugged into the happenings in his beat but report only the most significant. The reporter as curator takes on the role of the the most plugged-in guy in the room about a particular area of interest and uses that knowledge in multiple ways:

• Report, of course


• Blog on their beat. All beat reporters should maintain a blog that becomes the most reliable source for information and discussion around their topic area.


• Be an active participant in communities of interest, online and off. This means real-name participation in blogs, user groups and discussion threads online and participation in real-world organizations and events.


• Build, maintain and grow a real-name social network on at least one of the major platforms, involving peers, readers, experts, etc., around the  beat topic(s).  Learning from and model the successes  of Jay Rosen’s BeatBlogging project.


• Point readers to the best of the rest. As good as our reporters are, they’re not able to cover everything. Linking frequently to other coverage of their beat is essential, as is asking readers to share their recommended links.


• Ask questions of readers. Chances are, many readers know a whole lot about the topic area, too.


• Embrace crowdsourcing as a reporting tool.


• Participate in the conversation. Every story that’s published has a comments thread. This is an opportunity to connect better with the audience and to cement our roles as the go-to source on the topic.


• Maintain an “about me” page that lists all recent articles and blog posts and relevant background and links out to related areas of interest.

This requires an investment in time, but the payoff in reader engagement will be worth it.

(Thanks to Scott Anderson who contributed much to this list back when we both worked for Tribune.)

"Amateur" isn't a slur

Chris Anderson has a short post today that gets to the heart of something I've seen in action for years: amateurs will always bring more passion to the table, on average, than pros:

To me that's the difference between amateur and professional content: the first may not be polished, but it's driven by the sort of intense interest that cannot be faked. The second may be better written, spelled more correctly and otherwise competently produced, but all too often it has the arms-length perspective of a drive-by.

Where this is important to pro news organizations is the place where the amateur and the pro meet. At The Baltimore Sun, there are bloggers like Elizabeth Large, the food critic, Peter Schmuck, a sports writer, and Frank Roylance, a science reporter, all of whom discovered the intersection of a seasoned, professional journalism career and absolute fanboyism. The result? Highly readable blogs, and readership to die for.

The message? Great blogs don't get assigned. They're driven by passionate owners. If news organizations want continued reader engagement, they'd be wise to remember this and encourage reporters to identify topics they care about and run with them.

Using new media to talk to old media about new media

Scoble at ONA:

Change Agent: CJR profile of Tribune's Lee Abrams

In the September/October Columbia Journalism Review, there's a long piece on Tribune's Chief Innovation Officer, Lee Abrams. Although it makes the mistake of equating Abrams and Apple's Steve Jobs (They both hunt "the same Holy Grail: usability."), the article's chief premise is sound: Don't judge Lee Abrams only by his trippy, disjointed memos, emails and blog posts:

In person, Abrams is more thoughtful and low-key than he appears on his blog or in a big presentation... He has a kid’s heart—a fan’s heart. He’s not the guy measuring how much someone’s written. He’s not the guy who has a secret formula for taking the newsroom down to six people. He wants newspapers to be something people love.

Abrams blew into Tribune in 2008 and did something nobody even tried to do before: he mandated that every paper reinvent itself. But then he did something equally amazing: he kept his hands off. He gave clues, he shepherded in certain directions and, by his reactions to early prototypes, he used praise to reinforce the directions he liked and silence (and the rare barb) to indicate a non-starter. But he insisted that the solution arise organically from the local market. There were no templates to follow other than this one: Build a newspaper that more people will want to read.

So far, redesigns have launched in Allentown, Orlando, Fort Lauderdale and Baltimore, each different from the other. The big two - Chicago and Los Angeles - are coming soon. None of these - as far as I know - was tested on a focus group. Each is something of a Hail Mary, lobbed at the readers in hopes of a new connection. But each is also attempting to turn the hard reality of shrinking news hole into an advantage by reducing the number of longer traditional articles in favor of graphics, photos and hybrid "charticles."

At the end of the process, Tribune will have eight new approaches to daily newspaper design and something much more effective - and potentially dangerous - than a focus group: a live marketplace, where readers and advertisers will vote with their subscriptions and their dollars.

However this turns out, good or bad, Lee Abrams is the guy who made it happen.

Updates, as the saying goes, as they're available.

A new verb: To Batavian

GateHouse Media is up to something potentially amazing.

The newspaper company has launched a news operation in a town where the local (non-GateHouse) paper had largely ignored the web: Batavia, New York.

TheBatavian.com is an online news site that's all local and 100% paper-free. By eliminating one of the greatest sources of expense - the printed paper - the startup in Batavia increases the chances of breaking even and - imagine that - making a profit in a business far too many people are writing off as too expensive.

More importantly, TheBatavian.com could very well be schooling the competition on what happens when you allow the hottest medium of all to lie fallow. And in the process, they may be coining a new verb - to Batavian: to snatch a market away from the snoozing competition with an online-only play.

As GateHouse's Howard Owen says on his own blog:

We picked Batavia because it’s a neat, vibrant town; it’s close to our home office; and the daily newspaper there was doing nothing on the web.

Amazingly, the local paper still just has a brochure site and hasn't engaged the battle. This certainly bears watching.

The Glengarry Glen Ross revenue solution

On the subject of finding new revenue streams, Lucas Grindley has an interesting take that argues the old model of charging advertisers up-front for space has it backwards:

Generating an audience first requires attracting advertisers. It’s NOT a chicken and egg situation. Luring advertisers is more important than users.

To get on the advertiser’s list, posting an ad absolutely must be free. Otherwise, you’re asking the employer to take a risk and abandon one of their old standbys.

If it’s free to post an ad, then all you have to do next is convince the potential advertiser it’s worth their time to fill out an online form. Here’s a sure-fire way to persuade them.

Print the ad.

That’s right. After completing the online form, the reader’s ad will appear in the newspaper for free.

It’s really not as odd as it sounds. To protect their market share, newspapers around the country already give readers free ads for merchandise under a certain dollar amount. But I’m saying let all ads appear in print for free.

You can read the whole piece here. Stay until the end. It's worth it.

Most news, print included, is free

That old tired meme - If everyone wants to read their news online, why don't we charge for it? - is the Old Faithful of seemingly good ideas that aren't. You can practically set your watch by the frequency that someone (often a print-centric newspaper employee) will throw down the idea as a fresh perspective on The Revenue Problem.

Which is a long way of saying that this post is at least partly a response to this post by Gus Sentementes of The Baltimore Sun:

Right now, we hear lots of anecdotes of people giving up the print edition and just consuming the news online, where it is free.

But we all know nothing is ever free. Harvesting the news costs a lot of money, though the promise of an Internet-only news site means a publisher doesn't have to worry about operating a costly printing press and buying pricey paper and ink by the ton.
...
So would you pay for an online subscription to get a little better coverage and more distinctive, original reporting? Or would you be happy with the free information that leaves you still hungry for more at the end of the day?

Before asking whether people will pay for online news, consider this question:

What do people pay currently for printed news from their local paper? 75 cents an issue? A couple bucks a week?

The real answer: nothing.

The newsstand or subscription price doesn't pay for the reporters or the editors. It pays for the printing and distribution of the paper (or at least, partially pays for it).

But the articles? They're free. Whether you're reading an article in the paper or online, it's being "paid for" by advertising, not by the reader.

That's why the decline in advertising in the US newspaper industry is a much more urgent problem than the modest declines in circulation. As ad dollars shrink, the ability of newspaper companies to create their product on a daily basis becomes much more difficult.

If a newspaper company were to truly charge what the paper is worth - that is, cost of reporting, editing and production plus a fair markup - most newspapers would have to charge many dollars per issue. That would cut into readership and, ultimately, drive down advertising revenues as fewer readers led to lower ad rates. The advertiser-subsidy allows for the paper to cover its costs and make a profit.

The same realities carry to online, but are magnified by the astounding volume of competing content available from uncountable sources. Any local or regional paper that charges for all content will make a fraction of what it can make as an ad-supported model. Why? Because once you put up a pay wall, fewer readers will visit and fewer readers mean diminished ad sales. You'd have to charge $1,000 or more a year per reader to even begin to make up for the lost advertising income.

So how does the Wall Street Journal succeed with their paid model? Here's what I believe: They're a highly-specialized, national product and many of the subscriptions are reimbursed or direct-billed business expenses. If a local or regional paper could replicate the WSJ experience, surely some would be doing so by now. The few experiments in this area have been less than successful, usually by small-market papers that are trying to protect print circulation.

Is the online model perfect? Hardly. Right now, online revenue needs to grow faster if it's going to support the kinds of newsrooms that can properly cover a metro area. One of the questions news professionals should be asking isn't "Can we charge for what we're already doing?" but rather, "What can we create that people will gladly pay for?" What kind of valuable information can 200- or 300-person newsrooms dig up and synthesize that's both compelling and exclusive? A hybrid model, where most basic news is free but certain types of information - or tools for managing that information - have cost associated with them, seems an inevitability.

Until then, I believe putting up a pay-wall between the public and local news would effectively kill the online revenue stream that newspapers across the country need to be able to count on.

Inflation-adjusted newspaper revenues approaching 1982 levels

According to The Newsosaur, Alan Mutter, the first-half 2008 newspaper revenue details, released by the Newspaper Association of America, represent the worst numbers in a dozen years.

But that's comparing 1996 dollars to 2008 dollars. If you look at print revenue performance in constant 2008 dollars, the industry hasn't seen numbers this grim since 1982 (click to see the chart in full size):



What's really bracing about that chart is how the rate of decline clearly accelerates in the past few years.

This chart does not include online revenue, which NAA has tracked since 2003.

(Obligatory warning: I was an English major in college, not a stats geek. This constant-dollar hack was made with simple web tools and the original data from the NAA. If this is way off, please let me know.)