Seriously, what if newspapers did this?

[slappy4428]

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.

That jury's still out...

 

[Fredrick]

What is your problem, Petty? Please answer or please settle this with a moderator. Thank you.

 

[Bullwinkle]

What is your problem, Petty? Please answer or please settle this with a moderator. Thank you.

He thinks that you think you know everything, when really, I do.

Am I right, TP?

 

[ScribePharisee]

Just curious what you guys thought about this.

It seems that since other Internet websites are taking all our stories and using them for their own gain, would it not stand to make sense that newspapers might benefit more by not having an Internet product at all?

By not having a website, it forces readers to actually buy the printed version of the paper. It also forces people to see the advertising and it keeps freeloaders away. Also, if talk radio or television want to steal a story, they literally have to report from what is in the paper until they do their own work.

I feel like we are getting ripped off by a lot of other medias for doing the time-consuming part of the work, yet we get no credit for it. If we make our product more exclusive and quit giving it away online for free, then maybe it can hold its own.

Of course, ignoring the Internet might also contribute to the death of the newspaper.

Any ideas on this suggestion? Too stupid?

No, because chickenspine publishers and newspaper companies are too damn busy wringing their hands over the cost of paper products. They'd rather have a smaller product. The leadership in this business wouldn't make it two days in any other business and they know it. Well, except for being Smithers to Mr. Burns.

 

[buzzerbeater]

We must begin charging for Web site access.
Start low like 5 bucks a month so it won't scare people off. People will bench in the beginning but it will become a small expense deemed worthwhile to most very quickly.

 

[tonysoprano]

Bravo, Scribe.

Could not have put it better myself. Absolutely right on target.

 

[editorhoo]

Great topic and lots of great points on this thread. The worst thing our industry ever did was dump our product on our Web sites for free, rather than finding some way to incorporate the two by putting different information on both outlets.

This may be a little off topic, but in my neck of the woods, I've noticed that big communications companies have purchased a lot of small-town radio stations, and they're all sharing information under the guise of ESPN. "ESPN Radio" has been at every prep football game I've covered. Of course, this isn't actually ESPN radio, but ESPN likely owns the company that owns all of the small-town radio stations in the area.

Is this a concept that could work for newspapers?

I think in 10-15 years there will be only two employers left in the United States -- ESPN and Wal-Mart. Well, health care and legislation may survive, as well.

 

[Fredrick]

The last four or five posts have been awesome. Giving away a product ... really smart business model.
Let's say you were an automobile dealership owner. OK, let's give away our cars. And even better yet, let's put up a big sign where our customers can blast our employees (as they do on forking newspaper comments sections after stories and message boards).
To summize ... let's give away our product. Stupid publishers. You deserve to go broke. Dumb dumb people who were sold a bill of goods.

 

[Tom Petty]

What is your problem, Petty? Please answer or please settle this with a moderator. Thank you.

He thinks that you think you know everything, when really, I do.

Am I right, TP?

i've never been able to argue with you, bull. you had me at "he thinks". quite the compliment, that's for sure.

 

[lono]

I would love to see you come up with one shred of evidence, one readership survey to prove this.

It might be true when it comes to the local Milford-Tilden h.s. game where the only coverage is from the local rag, but when it comes to pro games or big college ones, I'd much rather read ESPN.com, Yahoo! or CBS Sportsline.

That's where the "respected professionals" are moving to these days — people who know their sports insides and outsides, sites that offer multiple writers and columnists writing about the big game.

Sorry, but I'm going to get more insight about the Eagles-Cowboys game from ESPN.com or Yahoo! than I am a 20,000-circ paper in Tarrant County or Bucks County who has a 22-year-old kid making $25,000 a year at the game.

Don't get me started on readership surveys. Yeah ... I really trust those. Focus groups, surveys. They are unreliable.

Yahoo and ESPN.com cannot effectively (or at least not to this date) cover all pro, high school and college teams' games on a daily basis like the local papers can.

Take Chicago for example: ESPN.com and Yahoo don't cover all the White Sox and Cubs games and high school games. People in Chicago, for instance, will buy the Tribune and/or Sun Times or the many fine suburban papers to get such coverage.

But not now since they are giving away the product for free on the Internet.
Papers have been sold a bill of goods by people with selfish interests saying the Internet is the way to go.
You tell me this: What papers are satisfied with their internet ad sales and potential for internet ad sales?? Do any such papers exist? If so please educate me.

Again, I ask you: Show me any empirical evidence that readers prefer a local newspaper to ESPN.com. Back your opinion with facts.

I will grant you that a local paper will staff high school games that no online service will, but as far as covering major pro and college games, most major daily newspapers have radically cut back their news holes and their staffs in the last couple of years.

And many of the best daily newspaper beat writers have migrated to online sites, because the online sites will pay for talent that daily newspapers no longer will.

 

[captzulu]

The last four or five posts have been awesome. Giving away a product ... really smart business model.
Let's say you were an automobile dealership owner. OK, let's give away our cars. And even better yet, let's put up a big sign where our customers can blast our employees (as they do on forking newspaper comments sections after stories and message boards).
To summize ... let's give away our product. Stupid publishers. You deserve to go broke. Dumb dumb people who were sold a bill of goods.

If you're a car dealership, your core core product is the car. If you're a newspaper, your core product, the one that brings in the overwhelming majority of your revenue, is not your paper, but your audience, which you sell to your advertisers. The paper -- or more generally, the information you are reporting, regardless of medium -- is merely the device with which you create that product. In such a business model, the key isn't how you are distributing that device (selling it or giving it away), but rather how big an audience you are creating and how much you can sell that audience for. Newspapers are failing on both of those two points. Their print products are losing audience because of the increased supply of information outlets; their Web audience is growing but they haven't figured out how to sell that audience to advertisers for enough money to offset the print losses. Yet there is absolutely no way to reverse this, now or 10 years ago. The audience has been moving away from print news products and over to online for quite a while now, and advertisers are following, regardless of what newspapers do. If newspapers didn't offer their information for free online, somebody else would have (and are doing just that), because there is a significant audience to be had there and money to be made from it. Newspapers killing their Web presence and ignoring the online audience won't stop the audience or advertisers from going online. It'll just leave newspapers in an even bigger hole when advertisers are looking for online audiences much more than print audiences, and you have no online audience to offer. So really, newspapers have only three choices:

• Accept the decreased profitability of their industry in this new media landscape, which the execs and shareholders obviously aren't doing.
• Revamp their business model so that their core product is not their audience but rather the information they report. This is perhaps even more difficult than transitioning to the Web because it requires a significant change in consumer mentality. You're not just talking about charging for content, but charging many times more than you ever charged because that's what it would take to support newspapers primarily through paper sales rather than advertising. And since you're dealing in information, much of which is publicly accessible, you'll always have a good amount of competition that will limit what you can charge.
• Continue to build their online audience and figure out a way to sell that audience for more advertising dollars than they are getting now. There is no guarantee that this will lead to enough online ad dollars that newspapers can just plug it into the hole where their print revenue used to be and go on business as usual, but the potential outcome is more palatable to owners than the first option and seemingly more realistic than the second.

Some have mentioned the possibility of charging for an online subscription that also includes subscriptions to a group of other newspapers. Something like that might be appealing to some online readers, but my feeling is that many (and more and more) people who get their news online don't identify so much with the name of the publication on the story they are reading. If it happens to be from NYT or WaPo, so be it. If it's from Slate or some other online news source, that's fine too. I'm not saying that the reputation of the source doesn't matter, but thanks to RSS readers, google searches, and links on other sites to specific stories, online news consumers are thinking less "Let me go see what's in the New York Times today" and more "Let me go see what is being written about subject X." Much of the traffic that news sites get don't come through the front door. They go straight to a specific story within the site, and then perhaps explore other parts of the site if it seems interesting. In the face of that kind of consumer habit, I'm not sure how much a subscription to a handful of publications would appeal to the online reader. I can see charging for content if your content occupy a very specific niche, but as the general-interest pubs that newspapers are, I just don't see it working very well.

 

[goalmouth]

Let's say you were an automobile dealership owner. OK, let's give away our cars.

Three words: Ford Motor Credit.

Hope you're not a business reporter.