The best way to become acquainted with a subject is to write a book about it. - Benjamin Disraeli

Should you offer your print newspaper subscription for free?

Newspapers today generally offer two products: they offer an online product and they offer a print product. These products are different in some very basic but inconspicuous ways, which is why a lot of papers are still trying to shoehorn their print product into their digital offering; they haven’t figured out how important those little changes are.

The print product is becoming less and less viable. The online product is growing at ridiculous rates, even during the current economic downturn.

Newspapers need to start accepting the fact that their online product is their primary service. There’s a reason that 50% of your web traffic comes from Google: search is a web dashboard, your home page is a print dashboard.

So what do you do? You start treating your print product as a marketing tool for your online product.

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July 3, 2008 | Filed Under Advice | 4 Comments 

Things that were Not Invented Here are OK. Really.

I just saw Dan Gillmor’s post from a few days ago about McClatchy doing real journalism on Guantanamo and getting ignored:

It’s falling through the cracks, because of the NIH syndrome in journalism — institutional unwillingness to talk about other journalists’ great work and what they’ve reported.

I’m taking it as a convenient excuse to gripe about newspaper linking habits - specifically, the fact that many newspaper try to avoid linking to other papers because it sends the user away from their site.

This is a habit that papers will have to break, especially if they want to pursue aggregation as a strategy.

The fact is that finding good content elsewhere on the web is a great way to get people to come back to your site. In an environment where putting content up is easy, the value comes in finding the stuff that’s worth reading.

Add to that the new habits of tabbed browsing, and often people aren’t even leaving your site when they click links (they just open them in a new tab).

It was proven in the late nineties that trying to build a complete content destination online is going to be much harder and much less worthwhile than building a portal that helps people find what they need. Best example I can give you? Yahoo!.

July 1, 2008 | Filed Under Observations | Leave a Comment 

Small town classifieds: San Angelo

Today I looked through most of the San Angelo Standard-Times. It’s the big newspaper in town here.

One thing that caught my eye is that they have a 14-page classifieds section. That’s as big or bigger than most of their other sections.

It makes sense that a small town in Texas would be behind Seattle in terms of adopting the internet—and therefore craigslist—as an alternative to the classic newspaper. It is happening, however. I spoke to a couple people in town here who have recently cut their subscriptions because they wind up just reading news online (sound familiar?)

Out of curiosity, I looked at their online classifieds setup, because sooner or later they’re going to start seeing their paper-based classified ad revenue dry up, unless they take steps to move their classifieds customers (who are clearly active) online now.

The good news is that they’ve got classifieds listed prominently on their home page. They’ve got a step-by-step guide system to posting an ad. They allow interactive elements like slide shows.

The bad news is that they’re charging money. And if they don’t move to a freemium system soon, they run the risk of losing that audience.

The cost of printing a newspaper no longer provides the relative monopoly (and therefore relative captivity) of a community audience. If there are better and cheaper tools online, people will find them.

June 29, 2008 | Filed Under Observations | Leave a Comment 

Wall Street Journal reports: the AP is hurting newspapers

A few weeks ago I explained how the AP is now competing with newspapers.

Apparently, other people agree. The Wall Street Journal has a story today about the widening rift between the AP and various newspapers, especially those in Ohio. Here’s the story that Ben Marrison, editor of the Columbus Dispatch had for the WSJ:

In the past, Mr. Marrison says, he could usually count on the AP to cover such a trial if he wanted to commit more reporters to a bigger story. When he was told the AP wouldn’t have a reporter there, he sent one of his own to Akron. Shortly after the story was posted on the Dispatch’s Web site, an AP staffer rewrote it for a broader audience and put the new version on the state wire. “So it was important enough for them to move, but not important enough for them to cover,” Mr. Marrison said. “What has happened is we’ve become the wire service for the wire service.”

There’s a lot I don’t know about the AP. But from the outside looking in, their role in the news space is definitely changing.

The AP used to be a great way to efficiently cover important stories for multiple papers at the same time. This is because newspapers have limited staff, and some stories really only need to be written once, even if people in Lexington, Seattle, San Angelo, and Orlando all need to know about the subject.

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June 26, 2008 | Filed Under Observations | Leave a Comment 

Why Cost Per Click ads are unfair to publishers

In February of 1998 Bill Gross, the founder of Idealab, launched a new search site called GoTo.com.

The basic idea behind GoTo.com was fairly simple: Gross figured that if he could buy generic web traffic (around 5 cents per visitor) and then resell that traffic as targeted traffic (which is inherently worth more), he could play the traffic market and make a killing.

He further reasoned that the best way to turn random web traffic into structured, goal-seeking web traffic was search.

Removing the risk

Gross knew that launching a new search engine where the results pages where made up of paid listings would only work if he had paying customers. So Gross had a dilemma: he had to convince people that search keywords were worth paying for.

In his book The Search, John Battelle explains how Gross approached the issue:

Gross solved his problem by adopting the time-honored approach of dumping—or perhaps drug dealing is a better comparison: the first one’s free (or nearly so). Gross built not one but two entirely audacious ideas into GoTo’s initial business proposition for advertisers: first was the concept of a performance-based model—one in which advertisers paid for a visitor only when a visitor clicked through an ad and onto the advertisers’ sites. Instead of demanding upfront money from advertisers, the way AOL or Yahoo did, GoTo.com’s model guaranteed that advertisers had to pay only when their ads were clicked upon. Of course, this is now the standard model for the multibillion-dollar paid search market.

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June 25, 2008 | Filed Under Long Form Blogging | 1 Comment 

2008 to be the worst year for newspaper advertising? Surprise!

The New York Times reported yesterday on the continuing downward trend in newspaper advertising:

Over all, ad revenue fell almost 8 percent last year. This year, it is running about 12 percent below that dismal performance, and company reports issued last week suggested a 14 percent to 15 percent decline in May.

To me, and I think to most people, this is anything but surprising.

The Times article blames the slow economy for the lower-than-usual growth in online ad sales:

Online ad revenue for newspapers grew 20 percent to 30 percent annually for most of this decade. Most analysts think the industry will return to that growth rate when the economy picks up again, but for now, it is closer to 15 percent. The Internet still accounts for less than 10 percent of newspaper ad revenue.

This is probably true, but I think newspapers also need to work on killing the CPC model of online advertising, since it is completely unfair to publishers.

June 24, 2008 | Filed Under Link Journalism | Leave a Comment 

Deck chairs

There are a lot of people talking about the Orlando Sentinel redesign.

Some people think it will work and others think that no matter what dress you put the duck in, it’s still a duck.

While I don’t think that print publications will ever go completely out of style, I think that trying to grow the print readership is not the best strategy for success. And redesigning the pages is relatively pointless if it doesn’t come with substantial changes to the content, or at least the places where content is presented.

I think that money would be much better spent doing usability testing and trying new things on their website. Let’s invest in the future not in the past.*

Someone recently told me that this redesign is like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. That may well be the case.

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* I think there might be a future for free print editions. If papers can swing it without subscription revenue, I think you’d see a persistent jump in the subscription base.

June 23, 2008 | Filed Under Observations | 1 Comment 

Knowledge is worth money, information is not

I recently started reading Clay Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody, which is one of the best books I’ve read this year. I’ve been really impressed with how well Shirky understands the shifts that are happening in publishing and media and organizations because of the internet.

So you can imagine how far my jaw dropped when I realized that he wrote, essentially, an early draft of his book in mailing list messages in 2002 and 2003.

I really liked this one in particular, which talks about the stupidity of micropayments and, essentially, the stupidity of anyone trying to charge for content on the internet.

Shirky argues that micropayments, or charges of any kind, create a barrier:

Though each piece of written material is unique, the universe of possible choices for any given reader is so vast that uniqueness is not a rare quality. Thus any barrier to a particular piece of content (even, as the usability people will tell you, making it one click further away) will deflect at least some potential readers.

Shirky is 100% right about news and entertainment. This type of content is easily substituted. If the Wall Street Journal is charging me to read about “the company formerly known as” Bear Stearns, I will get my coverage for free from the New York Times.

But information that creates knowledge is still worth money. If I need to learn how to do a particular magic trick, it’s worth $10 for me to buy the instructions instead of hunting around the dregs of the internet, hoping to piece it together.

In other words, the price of education is still high.

This doesn’t really apply to newspapers unless you think of it as a possibility for membership services. For example, a a paying member at the Seattle P-I might be able to sign in for a weekly webinar on pet care, or cooking, or computer assistance, or practically anything that imparts knowledge (since knowledge is different than information).

June 21, 2008 | Filed Under Advice | 1 Comment 

Aggregators vs Producers: Introducing findingDulcinea, Mahalo, and others to come

Brian Stetler pointed it out three months ago in the New York Times.

The younger generation is reading tons of news. But they’re not relying on the same filter—the editors in a news room—to tell them what’s interesting and worth reading. Instead, they’re relying mainly on their social networks.

This is part of what Clay Shirky calls the “publish then filter” model. In the past, publishing something was expensive, so the act of having it published came with the implicit promise that someone thought it was worth the paper it was printed on. With the internet, that’s not longer true (or one might argue it’s still true, but the “paper it’s printed on” is worth jack s#%!).

Crap gets published all the time. The filtering process now happens after things get published. In the future, you’re not going to walk into a job interview with a bunch of clippings (”how many times has your writing been worth publishing?”), you’re going to walk into a job interview with a list of permalinks and the times those links were dugg, bookmarked on del.icio.us, or stumbled upon (”how many people thought this was worth reading?”).

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June 20, 2008 | Filed Under Interviews | 3 Comments 

New York Times introduces their own social network: TimesPeople

Have you ever sat down and read a newspaper with someone else?

It’s fun to go through the paper section by section, finding cool articles and pointing them out to whoever is sitting next to you. This is probably why “sharing” links is such a common function of social networks and blogs.

This morning TechMeme pointed me to the news that the New York Times has launched a beta version of TimesPeople, which they are calling a social network:

TimesPeople is a social network for Times readers. But it’s not a social network like Facebook or MySpace — you won’t have Times friends, and it won’t get you Times dates. Instead, you’ll assemble a network of Times readers. Then you’ll be able to share interesting things on NYTimes.com with others in the network. For example, when you recommend an article, comment on a blog post, or rate a movie or restaurant, these activities will become visible to other TimesPeople members in a special toolbar at the top of every NYTimes.com page.

I signed up and played around with the service a bit, and what they seem to have done is condensed the “social network” concept into two concepts which are very relevant to newspapers: an activity feed and a network of friends.

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June 18, 2008 | Filed Under Observations | Leave a Comment 

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