The Day The Newspapers Shut Down Their Sites

Some small papers do it. The paper in Lewiston, Idaho, is one of the best 25Ks in the country and they charge $7 per month for an online subscription (free access for print-edition subscribers). They've been charging for a long time. BTW, they are looking for an editorial page editor (for those of you politically inclined). I think it's on jjobs.

 

This is worth a look as to what newspapers tried to do when they couldn't print (i.e) the Pittsburgh Newspaper strike of 1992 from the New York Times.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CEFDC1339F932A35755C0A964958260


Sad times indeed when you figure the Penguins were playing for the Stanley Cup and the Pirates were actually decent then. I'm sure the people who were in Pittsburgh then can remember what they did for news but from what I remember living in Eastern Pa. the result was horrific as the Press closed and the Pittsburgh newspaper scene was never the same again.

These folks tried "high-tech" models, which are totally out of date now, but but at least they tried.

A few excerpts:

"As part of its efforts to retain readers, the Press Company on Wednesday began mailing 325,000 copies of a 28-page news and advertising supplement called "The Allegheny Bulletin." The supplement, which contains articles written by the news staff of The Press, is printed by independent contractors and mailed to residents in selected areas of the city and suburbs.


Separately, The Post-Gazette has been offering several high-technology alternatives. The morning paper has been printing daily summaries of news events and entertainment, sports and feature stories and faxing them at no charge to businesses, convenience stores, hospitals and other news organizations.

The paper has also set up a toll-free telephone number that reports news, sports and entertainment information, and it is planning to produce radio news shows and a television news program. In each case, The Post-Gazette is looking into the possibility of acquiring air time on local stations and selling its own advertising."

 

And a follow up psot on how vital (at least in 1992) newspapers were. It changed the whole dynamic of reporting news for radio and TV as well.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CE3D91E39F931A25754C0A964958260&scp=2&sq=Pittsburgh%20newspaper%20strike&st=cse

 

C'mon, dude. Cell phones and the Internet have made all of that irrelevent. And let's not forget the result of that strike -- one of the newspapers folded.

What's REALLY going to be hit are historians and archivists. If there's no newspapers, there's going to be no newspapers to archive. There's going to be no old copies to look back to for research purposes. The historical record could very well be erased.

 

The SportsPredictor:

Obviously that wouldn't be done today with Internet and cellphones, I just used it for some fairly recent historical perspective. At the rate papers are going now, I think only the very small (10,000 circulation and under) will survive. The bigs one will fracture into shoppers and community blogs, maybe even neighborhood blogs or whatever new technology comes along.


The newspaper industry messed up many years ago by giving away everything online for free. Instead of giving a slice of pie they gave away the whole pie.

We have one guy on our staff that posted 27 blogs on letter of intent signing day, plus had two college football stories in the paper and one on college basketball and we're talking a 200,000-plus circulation paper. He gets nothing extra for posting blogs but his posts are the most widely read thing in the "paper," er online. I wonder if individual journalists might start to farm out their reporting talents to the highest bidder. If I were him, I would definitely stop giving away so much for free and tel my bosses I need extra cash for all the work.

 

The point isn't withholding the product. The point is the withholding of the giving away of the product for free. Right now an ad online may be getting more eyeballs than an ad in the print edition, but the advertisers aren't willing to pay nearly as much. And readers will never be convinced to pay for something we're giving away for free. It's time that the free ride ended. We die if it doesn't. Apparently that's your hope.

 

Simple answer is this: It's time to re-train them. Or die.

 

That's an answer, but not to that question. And it's anything but simple.

 

The Santa Barbara News Press charges for web access unless you have a dead-tree subscription. Of course, its owner is the poster child for batshit crazy and they lost a ton of readers over the gutting of their newsroom, so it's hard to assess if this is a good strategy or not.

 

Someone posted a comment on Joe Posnanski's blog about the Rocky Mountain News that 50% of newspaper subscribers are 65 or older (I'm sure Frank Ridgeway has this info at his fingertips ). Not sure if I believe this, but do wonder what the breakdown is (if known). But that thought does speak to what I said earlier: readers' habits have changed. And the youth of today gets its information not from a newspaper. And not from a computer. But from a mobile or hand-held device. I remember less than 10 years ago the "joke" was that newspaper wouldn't die because you can't bring a computer into a bathroom. No one imagined all these new devices (and makes you wonder what will be out there 10 and 20 years from now).

I still roll my eyes about this giving away the product for free thing. Are you telling me that all that content in the daily paper is worth 50 cents? Or maybe it is helping pay printing costs ... hmmm ... I don't know, seems to me people are paying for the platform, not the content (and people do pay for Internet access, so that can make them hesitiant to pay for more. Not to mention this economy is not the best time ask people to pony up more $$$).

I wish I had the answer how to make papers solvent again. But it doesn't come down to charging people on the 'net; it has - and always will - come down to advertising. Classified advertising has shriveled in newspapers - coincidentally with this downturn. Maybe this newspaper Kindle-type thing is the answer. I was told the Canadian manufacturers of newsprint combined and raised prices by 40 percent. That certainly isn't going to help things.

I certainly don't think you can "re-train" people. It's too late, especially for the young. I can really only speak for sports, but when it comes to national news, there are way too many options. I'm an Orioles fan, if I can't get to the Baltimore Sun, I still have MLB.com (Orioles.com), Roch Kubato's blog on MASN, ESPN.com, CBSSports.com, Yahoo.com, Foxsports.com, Rotoworld.com, SportingNews.com, Pro Sports Exchange, etc. The local news issue certainly is the big one, but, at least in sports, there have been several national prep sites popping up lately which seemingly want some of the local piece of the pie.

Anyway, here are some links over the past few months I found interesting:

From Steve Yelvington:
"Another round of paid-content nonsense" - http://www.yelvington.com/node/520
"The Internet isn't killing newspapers" - http://www.yelvington.com/node/525

From Michael Kinsley, op-ed piece in the NY Times (has more to do with another ridiculous theory - micropayments):
"You Can’t Sell News by the Slice" - http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/10/opinion/10kinsley.html?_r=2&_r

Sorry for the extremely long post.

 

I doubt it. Right now, our paper sells more than 200K copies a day. On the best day of the year, we'll get maybe 50K unique visitors to our website.

When we started this Twitter service, we got like 500 subscribers, and our web people we're jumping up and down like idiots. And yet we've got 200,000 people reading our paper, and we're going under.

Doesn't make sense.

 

I know. This is what bothers me. You get 500 people using twitter and it's halleluia. And like you said 200,000 people reading the paper. This is fucking amazing. It's like comments at the end of sports stories. You get 10 people printing comments every day in their little comment club. These people print negative shit about the writer. And the higher ups are like, 'Listen to your readers!!"
Fuck you. The readers are the 200,000 people buying the fucking paper.