Kentucky basketball game tonight; flame away on me

I asked if we could send out alerts to remind people about my blog, the first in the paper's history. I was told "bulk e-mail costs money." No can do. We just had to hope people would remember it was there, this thing that hadn't been there in the previous, oh ... all of history.

Which was interesting, because I was getting text alerts and e-mails from local radio stations when they broke something on their Web sites or radio shows. Hell, I was getting notifications from friends when their blogs updated. Because of that and the slow-poke blog software the paper used, I concluded the paper must have gotten a free toaster with the company it had a contract with for Internet and e-mail services.

 

Good post. I still say blow up the websites now. Look ... people 35 and up like newspapers still. Who cares about immediacy? Let the immediacy websites exist. People still want to read about their kids' high school teams and their kids. They want to read the local newspaper guys (and girls) takes on their teams. Advertisers still like the print ads (with the exception of classifieds I guess).
Great points about ad people being too lazy to sell the Internet. My opinion is the internet is not ad friendly and never will be. Papers will never sell their websites.
Go back to print you fricking fools!!!

 

Internet equals no profit.
Newspapers: Proven way of making money. Go back to it publishers, do what you do best. Sell the newspaper. Frick the internet.

 

I'm pretty much in Fredrick's camp on this. I have to be shown that newspapers can actually turn a profit as an Internet-heavy industry before I believe it can be done.

And nobody's showing me it can be done. Lot of lip service, but you would think that with all these great ideas, somebody in charge somewhere would be implementing it and making shitloads of money.

"Oh, you've GOT to go Web or you're gonna DIE!"

Maybe THAT'S what's killing us. Makes as much sense as the other side.

 

Like I said, who cares if ESPN or Rivals.com or yahoo prints the game story of your team 10 hours before you do.
What cretans are reading the stories at midnight when they have to go to work at 7?
They want the newspaper!!!! I should say people 35 and up want the newsaper.
But not these shitty pieces of shit with these sliced staffs are putting out.
How is the Kansas City Star going to sell copies getting rid of the great columnist Christopher?? What sense does that make?

Like the previous poster said. Nobody has been able to make this model of the internet profitable. I am a huge sports fan and would NEVER click on a fucking webcast or web interview. I want to READ. I want to read the Herald Leader's coverage of the game in the paper; I don't need it at midnight on the web. I want to read stories of my kid's football game in high school in the paper so I can clip it and save it.
Fuck the internet.
See ya in the foodstamp lines soon.

 

With that attitude, I'll let you cut in line so I don't have to risk being seen with you.

Look: I understand wanting to lift up the newspaper. I understand that the newspaper is still the bedrock of the company. I believe the best business plan is one that incorporates and embraces the print edition -- in whatever form -- indefinitely, instead of treating it like a necessary evil, noblesse oblige or the 95-year-old stroke-striken grandmother you won't pull the plug on but don't expect to live much longer.

But what if, years before, Western Union executives stamped their feet and said dammit, people need to stop using pagers and cell phones, and e-mailing people, and go back to sending telegrams! They'd be a part of business lore and nothing more. Rather than holding their breath and waiting for everything to magically come back to the way things were, they branched out and created a new product (money transfers) that insured that when they sent out their final telegram a couple years ago, it was a symbolic and not a literal end.

You keep throwing this bizarre anti-internet tantrum, assuming that if we shut down our sites immediately, readership would go up and everything would be better. But you're swimming upstream. Internet's not going away. If we cede the internet completely, we lose relevance to a public that increasingly uses it for a source -- and more and more, THE source -- for their daily news. Either they'll miss us entirely since we won't be online, or they'll use our lack of online presence as a leading indicator that we don't understand 21st century business. Hell, look at the stark difference between how Obama has and is using the internet, and how McCain didn't really know how to use it. Did that alone mean Obama was more able to be president? Did it win him the election? No, in both cases. But it was telling, and it was something brought up often on this very site.

Unless you're hitching your wagon to a) a time paradox that sends us back to a simpler time or b) a wholesale and long-term crippling of the internet, your thinking won't save the newspaper. It'll just speed up its irrelevance.

 

In their (sorta) defense, 10 years ago, most people were getting their internet through a 56K dump truck --if they were fortunate. There were probably still people paying per-minute. It was a hassle to get on, a hassle to stay on and a hassle to get anything done. The only reason most people stayed on was fear that they'd have trouble getting back on later if they disconnected. Or they'd cut short their surfing time so as to not tie up the line.

But charging for content still would have been a non-starter, because people don't pay directly for straight news and info. New York Times tried it, then dropped it. CNN.com charged for videos, then dropped it. Once the all-you-can-eat internet plan kicked in, it became next to impossible to get people onboard with paying more than the $25-75 they'll pay to get on the internet in the first place. It's like paying $75 to go to Disney World, then finding out that starting this year, all the fun rides are charging an additional $5 per ride.

And as an end user, would you WANT everyone to go the pay-as-you-go route? Do you want to pay $10/month for ESPN.com access? A dollar to watch football highlights? I'm guessing most of us go to multiple sports sites every day. That won't be happening if you're paying at each one.

There's a way to grab the golden egg from the goose's butt, or wherever the hell eggs come from. Give people something so good, that they're willing to pay a little extra. Recruiting stories, maybe. I'm sure there's news equivalents, but I can't think of any offhand. But there are no news/information websites that charge for the preponderance of their content. Anyone who thinks that's going to change is deluding themselves.

 

Very good points, Meat.

And with all that said, Shotty's right, too: We need to be shown that newspapers (i.e., news-gathering operations, and what have you) CAN make money on the Internet. Because right now, that's not happening.

Biggest problem is, there's been no investing in the product -- print or Internet -- and we're putting out a shittier product all the way around. That's the first step. And while we're investing in a better product to keep our credibility viable, we also need to figure out a business model that will keep us financially viable.

Ignoring the Internet is a sure way to fail at both, that's for sure.

 

Look, Meat. I read your post and like your passion.

But I am allowed to take this to an extreme to counterattack years of newspapers being sold a bill of goods that the internet is the way to go. Why is it necessary to have a website at all?

People will think we are irrelevant if we don't? Why? Because we have to put up a breaking news story to prove we beat the radio?? To prove we beat rivals.com??? Fine, keep the internet site to put the bare minimum on a breaking news story. I mean one paragraph and say, for PROFESSIONAL coverage of (said event) read tomorrow's Herald-Leader!

I do not have high regard for those people who I affectionately refer to management fucks who made all these decisions to go internet. I believe many of them had selfish interests in agreeing to go internet, such as wanting to show the publishers how THEY can save money on newsprint and ink. You tell me these management types aren't capable of making selfish decisions designed to make them look good?

The best way to cut back on newsprint and ink is cut the size of the newspaper and stress the internet. Publishers like the idea of all the money they save in this regard.

The problem is the newspaper can and will be able to sell ads in all markets big and small. The internet cannot.

Management fucks convince publishers to go for the smaller newspapers, thus cutting newsprint costs and ink costs and they look very good in doing so. And eventually they cut jobs because newspapers are stressing the free unprofitable internet so much they are putting out a far inferior newspaper product.

So now the quality of the newspaper is weak and you have a self fulfilling prophecy. My contention is sell the ads and keep your quality people and the readers 35 and UP will always buy the newspaper. Advertisers will buy ads.

Look ... I can sell my argument just as these people who sold the internet sold theirs.
Only I am right. They were wrong.

Again, you want relevancy??? Ok, put up one graph on these breaking news stories to macho-ly prove we can "beat" rivals.com and the radio.

And say, "for a complete story and analysis read tomorrow's paper."
Why am I such a loser for these opinions? I'm trying to put food in my kids' mouths just like the rest of you.

 

Therein lies the problem. When newspaper companies finally tackled the internet, they assumed that since both involved disseminating information, one staff should be able to do both (with specialized people like press operators and webmasters). If they really wanted to succeed editorially and financially, they would have tackled it with aplomb, even if it was at the expense of the newspaper. Instead, they weakened the later while putting a half-hearted effort in the former (and their love of gadgetry as a sorry attempt to understandthe internet didn't help -- just because you can put audio and video online doesn't mean you need to equip your freelancer with recorders and video cameras so (s)he can do three jobs crappily instead of one job well).

It ain't pretty. Fact is, we're planets away from pretty. Best we can hope for -- at least for the next little while -- is treading water in a riptide.

 

You're not a loser for your opinions, Fredrick. You're a loser because you don't really give a fuck about having a discussion here, you're just interested in screaming the loudest and blaming whomever's making a point here for the faults of ... "management fucks."

Whatever, dude. Keep "taking this to the extreme." Peace out.

 

You know, the funny thing is ... your post is in the past tense. Yet too many newspapers -- some of which I'm intimately familiar with -- are just now making these same mistakes all over again, since they weren't even thinking about their Web sites 2, 5, 10 years ago.

It's frustrating as hell.