Time: How to Save Your Newspaper

How many of you live in town where the car dealer isn't advertising anymore? Or they are going out of business. My town is losing a couple and that will hurt.

 

Here's a startling number that should matter to everyone in the business.

I know for a fact our newspaper, our little 20K circulation newspaper with lots of local stories, generated $9 million in the 2008 fiscal year. That's $9 million from the printed product only.

Want to know what the newspaper's website generated? $60,000. That's it.

Still think charging for website access is a dumb idea? Still think throwing hundreds and hundreds of man hours and thousands of dollars at the internet makes sense?

Think again. Losing out on $60,000 is a fucking drop in the bucket.

 

I'm guessing there are some antitrust law issues.

Lawyers on the board?

 

Well, and newspapers are not all created equally. There are so many market-specific differences between this weekly and that daily and this mid-major and that major metro that hoping for a unified approach is probably unrealistic. It might be the only solution, but with different markets and their different needs, how do you pull it off?

 

One problem is that competing papers want to run each other out of business, not help keep each other alive for the good of the industry.

 

Given all the content-sharing going on right now with former competitors, I'm not sure that's true.

 

Damn, and here I'd always been told that time is money.

 

I think price-fixing is a whole other ballgame, though.

 

Does this mean that the organizations realize that cost-cutting is not the way to go and thus cease and desist, to pursue other anti-hangman tactics?

Or does it simply mean that, no matter how many and how fast they cut, the hangman is on his way and bound to do his duty no matter what?

 

How about a national JOA that encourages paid sites?

 

If newspapers charged $.10 per blog/message board response, and got some articulate, yet combative hosts, they would make a mint.

Just like iTunes.

 

These "micro" charges or fees or subscriptions -- whatever you want to call them -- don't add up. We've done the math.