Kentucky basketball game tonight; flame away on me

The problem isn't putting content on the internet. It needs to be on the internet because people want their news instantly. This isn't 1942. The problem is selling ads. The people in corporate need to realize if advertisements were making money on the internet, newspapers would be hiring, not laying people off. Readerships is larger than ever, so ad revenue should be too.

Readership is better than ever because people have more options, print or web. Audio, video, or stories. It's not the writers faults.

 

Frederick, you make an excellent point.

Unfortunately, you are making it 10 years too late. As stated, it's too late to go back now. Newspapers just have to figure out some way to make money on this new Internet world, keeping themselves relevant in the meantime. Having people read your product, even for free on the web, is the only way to stay relevant.

In the meantime, I'm not optimstic there is a solution, so I won't be going back to the segment of the industry (print) that fired me.

Good luck to the rest of you.

 

Frederick, you're dead wrong in your belief that hard-core fans will flock back to the newspapers for a gamer, sidebar and a couple of photos.

If newspapers didn't have Web sites, they would be losing more revenue than they would gain from minimal circulation gains. The Internet isn't the problem that's causing the newspaper industry to suffer. Circulation has been going down for quite some time.

If those Conn. papers shut down, some smart person will come along and start a Web only operation. Maybe 10 or 20 people will try something. And one of those will work.

 

Not to pile on, but ... fuck it, I'm piling on.

The "WE SHOULDN'T GIVE AWAY OUR PRODUCT ON THE INTERNET" argument is old meme here. News, for the most part, is considered a free service. You might pay for cable, but you don't write a check to CNN or ESPN. You might pay for the internet, but you're not doing a monthly direct deposit CNN.com or ESPN.com. You're not making a PayPal payment to KASS Channel 6 Eyewitness News On Your Side. Newspapers are the only medium that charge explicitly for their product, and even that's a giveaway -- you're paying for production with those two quarters or subscription, not content.

Unless you can institute an area-wide block on internet sites that offer news so people are forced to the paper, or get every news disseminator to charge for access, from ESPN.com to Bert's Basketballapalooza blog, you're swimming upstream. You can't NOT have a viable, full website in 2008, and short of a Unabombian revolution against technology, that's going to be the case more and more with each day.

Make money using the Internet or die. That's where we are.

 

Unfortunately, we should have been there 10 years ago. The powers-that-be decreed that the Internet was a secondary outlet because people would of course always turn to the morning paper first for in-depth news coverage, thus ensuring that they didn't have to figure out how to make the bulk of the profit from something other than the dead-tree cash cow. And since the Internet was a secondary outlet, why bother charging people for it?

Idiots.

 

There is plenty of money to be made on the internet. I have worked for companies that knew how to generate ad revenue through the internet, but the reason they can do it is because they have an advertising and marketing departments ACTIVELY seeking to sell the ads. Newspaper advertising departments thought they could get away with putting the same kind of effort into internet advertising as they put into getting the local card dealership ad - make one phone call on a Monday and assume you are set for the rest of the week. Internet advertising requires a tremendous amount of effort from the marketing and sales department to properly target the ads, rout the ads and then drive traffic to the content to properly drive up clicks and revenue.

Newspapers aren't making money on the internet for two reasons:
1. No extra effort in sales and marketing to target the right advertisers
2. Assuming they can function as a "portal" site when in fact, very few sites can succeed as portals. You have to produce great content and then actively create ways for people to find your stories. You can't assume that people will just stumble on the content you have produced -- this also takes effort from the marketing department.

 

OK. That's great. How the hell are we supposed to do anything about it?

 

Great post. I can't tell you how many times I wondered if the folks at my previous place of employment understood any of this. You have to tell people what you've done, and you have to show them -- simply and often -- how to find it.

Or it's a tree falling in the forest.

 

Exactly imagine if newspapers didn't have a circulation department. They just printed a bunch of papers and left them in the warehouse for people to come and pick up.

That's how most newspapers are treating the internet. They assume that people will just come by and grab the story on the internet without any effort from the company.

They have an entire circulation department that makes sure that the paper is available for people to read yet they assume that they don't need to do the same thing for the internet.

Go back to the kentucky example that started this thread. Did Kentucky fans have the option to receive an e-mail link to that kentucky information as soon as it was available? Did they get immediate text messages with the score as soon as it was final? What sort of effort was being put in place to increase views of the content? -- and therefore create advertising views and revenue.

 

Swap out North Carolina for Tiger Woods and it could have been written by Doug Ferguson..

 

Both funny and true. Bravo, slappy.

 

At my shop, the ad staff leaves early on Fridays after the ads are sold for Sunday's paper. If the journalists are expected do more, shouldn't the ad staff be expected to work as well?