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| Thursday, May 24, 2007 |
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Because paper is scarce. And so is time. 
| | Last I checked, the Star Trek Holodeck, despite a Wikipedia entry, is still fiction. No one is teleporting a newspaper to your home anytime soon. Unlike music which can be copied once and stolen a million times, newspapers live in the material world. Thankfully, as an author, it's the same for books. Even a 30-inch screen can't match the readability of what cheaply spits out of a printing press. I really believe that the copy protection mechanism for newspapers is their consumer interface, in the form of ink spurted on newsprint. |
| | Exact-a-mundo. Call me old-fashioned (or just old; you'd be right), but I hardly ever read a newspaper online. Or read online "content" like it was a newspaper. Getting news through a screen is like listening to Mozart on the phone. It ain't the same thing. Design matters. Form factor matters. Physicality matters. Paper is paper. Pixels aren't ink. |
| | Print is a huge advantage for newspapers. Always has been, always will be. (Unless, of course, the cost of dead trees becomes prohibitive, in which case lumber and other tree-dependent businesses are toast as well.) Friends in the newspaper business tell me the folks on Wall Street no longer like print. It's all gotta be online these days. To them it's all about "content" pumped through "pipes" like the one that's pouring text on your eyes right now. |
| | Advertisers don't entirely agree. They like the directness and inventory size of online advertising, but they still pay a premium for print. Just ask anybody wanting to start an online-only daily newspaper. Never mind if your readership is larger than the local print daily. You're not getting the same rates. |
| | Newspapers are scrambling to embrace the Web. Paid subscriptions, blogs, it's all a grand experiment on how to monetize their expensive news-gathering organization. But thanks to a form that's hard to duplicate, newspapers still have time. |
| | In the meantime, rather than just charge for content, I'd be licensing every type of newfangled software and Web service until I could come up with a tight community of interest around my newspaper, local or national. Don't just start the discussion, keep it. This means comments, reviews, personalized newsfeeds, social networks of like-minded readers, whatever. Give advertisers a little "link love" so they don't stray to generic search engines. Google, Microsoft and others dropped over $10 billion to buy online ad-delivery companies in the last few weeks alone. The value is there: Newspapers aren't in the printing business, they're in the ad business. |
| | They're also in the subscription and paid newsstand sales business (the old-fashioned ones, anyway). While the revenues from subscriptions might be small compared to advertising, the do drive up the rates advertisers pay. And they do increase the degree of loyalty and involvement by subscribers, which is also non-trivial. |
| | In addition to Andy's excellent suggestions, I'd add the ten I listed here in March (along with what Dave Winer added). The first of those was Stop giving away the news and charging for the olds. Sure, daily papers make advertising money by selling inventory on the free Web versions of the papers that subscribers pay for. But by doing that they're also dissing both those subscibers and their legacy franchise. Put more simply, they're competiting with themselves while cheapening their main product. |
| | So here's a challenge to the daily papers: stop giving away the franchise. Make daily editorial available online only for subscribers. Charge for the fresh stuff, online as well as off. |
| | But give away what's stale. Free the fishwrap. |
| | There is lots of advertising money to be gathered just by opening the archives, linking to them, showcasing them, letting Google's spiders index them, and watching as the AdSense ads start appearing on them and bringing in money from click-throughs. Most papers have enormous archives which, once exposed, will greatly raise their profiles on Google and other search engines. There's lots of good will to be had as well, from everybody who ever wants to know anything about a town or a city that only newspapers have kept up with, for decades. I can't think of a better way for a paper to expose vast legacy advantages than by opening its archives. |
| | I'll give the last word to Andy: Lots of painful restructuring is still ahead. But it's worth noting that Rupert Murdoch would bid to expand his newspaper empire. Perhaps he sees the same pipe-busting in the future of TV. |
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