Seriously, what if newspapers did this?

I have long advocated partnership with cable companies.
The major newspaper chains should be banding together and striking deals with the major cable companies. Newspapers have to find a way to get a subscription price for Internet access hidden into a cable bill. The cable companies would get the news service provided by the newspapers. Both get better advertising platforms.

 

Didn't the Gwinnett (Ga.) Daily Post do this very thing?

 

No it wouldn't. People would still buy newspapers. That's the bill of goods that has been sold to newspaper publishers who frankly have no clue. Nobody has figured a way to make money off the internet product. Newspapers deserve to die and will die just because of the way clueless owners gave up on the print product. Just my opinion, which I believe is 100 percent correct.

 

google loses $20 million a year on the "other" button, and the folks there don't care.

 

you're as humble as a villarreal and as subtle as a train crash.

 

I agree with everything said, but remember we're dealing with publishers and industry executives who are inept when it comes to being creative and proactive with ideas like those mentioned above. It's like there's some form of mental retardation, and you've given them something basic like scissors, Elmers and some construction paper, and they have no idea what to do with it.

 

No, please God, nooooo! Not THAT name!

 

That certainly would draw in the coveted 18-35 demographic that newspapers just can't seem to reach. Maybe if you throw in a free 8-track player with each subscription.

 

Your opinion means nothing. People age 40 and under are moving away from newspapers. People age 25 and under ... forget it. They were never into the print product and never will be. You know who still buy newspapers? Old people. Retirees. The people that Buick and Cadillac tried to market to for decades before realizing that their target market was dying --- literally. Between TV and Internet, everybody else is used to current news immediately, instead of waiting until tomorrow morning to read about things they knew about 12 hours ago.

The ship's already left the dock. It will never come back.

Not really. Newspapers are already terminal. Ignoring the Internet would kill the idea of journalism using the written word.

Yeah. Basic news briefs on a free site; subscribers get to see the real online product. One of the Arkansas papers (Little Rock, maybe) already does this and allows both full (print+online) and online-only subscriptions.

Does anybody know how much money newspapers spend on printing costs (paper, ink, presses, inserting machines, maintenance, labor force) every year?

 

Had lunch with an MBA professor, with a marketing Ph.D., and he asked me why newspapers decided it was a good idea to put all their print content and more onto their Web sites, without charging for access to that stuff.

Good question, I said.

He said that, as a full WSJ subscriber, he values the stuff that he gets online that isn't available in the paper or to the average Internet surfer. He thinks it's hooey that the New York Times dismantled its pay-online system in order to allegedly attract so many more eyeballs from a totally free site. Doubts that the NYT has turned those eyeballs into money that surpasses the subscriptions it was pulling in for its pay site.

He said newspapers should treat their Web sites as a news digest, teasing to the print product or to the full versions available via online subscription. His experience is, this is much more common with magazines, many of which provide only a limited Web site to non-subscribers.

He also had these thoughts:

-- Newspapers never had to worry about the 18-to-35 year olds because, for so long, that demographic a) wasn't countable the way it is in modern marketing research, and b) wasn't as coveted by advertisers, who have gotten more sophisticated as the audience has, too. Sponsors used to try to sway all of us in our buying behavior but now target the younger consumers who aren't as "set in their ways" as older folks.

-- Newspapers almost always were something that you grew up into, in terms of buying/subscribing to one of your own. You might have grown up reading the paper that hit the doorstep at home, but it was Mom & Dad's paper. Only when you got a place of your own -- most likely buying rather than renting -- and put down some roots in your community (house, property taxes, kids, schools) did you become highly likely to purchase a newspaper. Or, of course, if you took public transportation to/from work.

-- So, a big chunk of the audience most coveted by many modern advertisers are not and frankly never have been major newspaper readers. Back in the day, the near-monopoly conditions that papers enjoyed in their markets overrode this problem, as did the limits on advertisers identifying and targeting the 18-to-35 year olds. But instead of evolving in their advertising marketing to be more persuasive and appealing to their core audience, the folks who run newspapers just chased after a group of readers that they never were going to own with a print version anyway.

-- Then they gave their content away to the readers their advertisers coveted the most, scratching their heads as to why those technology-adept youngsters didn't evolve into print subscribers.

It's almost as if some market researchers decreed that advertising is most effective in a pre-verbal form, catching kids before they turn 5 years old. What would newspapers do then? Publish in baby talk, "Goo goo ga ga?" Abandon the English language as musty and out-dated and "dead?" Find something else to give away for free to the babies, then wonder why they don't buy the same stuff once they hit first grade?

Anyway, the Professor left our lunch shaking his head over the colossal blunder of how newspaper publishers and editors turned the opportunities of the Internet into the Ultimate Challenge.

 

As a monopoly and with no real business plan, newspapers managed to thrive in spite of themselves. Forced to concoct a strategy, publishers decided to give the product away.

Hey, it worked for AOL.

 

Joe -

I don't think your professor has any clue on the difference between a local newspaper and a magazine/Wall Street Journal when it comes to online, and why the latter can get away with charging for content.

As far as the NYT goes, I have heard the opposite of what your prof "thinks."