A theory on the trouble at metros

At some point in the very near future, a nationally recognized newspaper will take the plunge and go online "completely." I hedge on the term "completely," because it will probably be in the form of a Sunday print edition (or Sunday and Wednesday) and 7 days of online subscription. Want the Sunday paper? Fine, you have to subscribe online, too.

And that newspaper will fail miserably. Go down in flames. But several other newspapers will learn from the sacrificial lamb's mistakes and eventually succeed in that business model. For now, nobody's brave enough/smart enough/desperate enough to take that plunge. But the time's coming.

 

If the price of oil continues to climb, that day is coming faster than anyone realizes.

 

Ding ding ding goes the trolley.
Paper: We value local news. We are the local news leader
Reader: Why isn't it on the front page then?
Paper: Umm, did we mention you get a free umbrella if you subscribe?
Reader: Why should I subscribe when I can read the paper for free, online.
Paper: Umm, did we mention it costs only like a dollar a week to subscribe?
Reader: If the news is so valuable, then why is it free online and the cost of a bottle of coke to get the paper delivered to my house?
Paper: Umm,
Reader: You know, I'm not stupid ... click

I think the solution is more print products. If you subscribe, you get the special weekly business journal. Or the weekly sports magazine. Specialized newsletters in political coverage, that sort of thing.
If you subscribe, you get access to more of the website. Premium content, message boards, expanded coverage. Blogs and all that.
The free site becomes the bare bones. You have to pay for the bells and whistles.

And on an online only operation. If Wired, the magazine for the internet age, can't make it work without a print version, nobody can. They actually did an article on it. People were complaining about the subscription blow-in cards and Wired told the truth: We can't do what we do just on the web. Too many internet freeloaders.

 

Yes. My friends outside the industry said they'd gladly pay something like $5, $10 a month to get full access online cause they know they wouldn't get some of that stuff anywhere else. There's no incentive for someone who can competently use the Internet to pay for the paper now. And if papers need me to pay for my product to save the industry, it's too late anyway.

 

I don't know if you'd call it nationally recoginzed outside our industry, but the Capital Times in Madison, Wisc., either just has gone or is just about to go totally online.

 

I don't appreciate the print product because in both the case of the paper for which I work and the local paper in whose town I reside, the online product is not only free, it's better. The people running things at my shop don't care about the print product at all, really. They'll put any warm body in the slot, continue to let good, young designers leave without any effort to keep them and invest absolutely nothing into the printed edition. Meanwhile, our section lacks any imagination and routinely publishes stories that haven't been read by anybody. It's like the higher ups are actually hoping the print edition will die.

As for my local paper, I would like to subscribe to it. I do enjoy having the printed paper in my hands. I find it much easier and quicker to read that way and I end up reading at least four times the number of stories than if I just go online. But it costs $12 a month. I decided it was either that, or HBO. I went with HBO, because you can't conveniently and legally get HBO for free.

 

The thing that paper does that online doesn't -- particularly if you get your news via RSS feed, as I do -- is rank the stories. News play gives you a good feel for the relative importance of each story. Some web sites do this well, others do it very poorly in the interest of trying to get as many headlines as possible out there. And an RSS feed, of course, is basically like scrolling the wire.

This is something that poorly designed newspapers do, too; trying to get as many things as possible "above the fold," you get no sense of what item is the MOST important.

Well-designed newspapers -- with design driven by NEWS JUDGMENT, not by which story has the most or best gimmicks -- tell you not only what the news is, but the relative importance of each story.

 

That's always been my feeling, that the newspaper saves me time and effort. To those who've argued that readers can get game stories on every team on ESPN.com, my response has always been, Fuck if I want to read a full game story on every team, a roundup suits my needs a lot better and the person putting it together is doing the heavy lifting for me. Same with the skilled page designer's creation of order and hierarchy.

Unfortunately, a lot of people seem to disagree. I think they're crazy -- I know I read more than most humans and I know the newsprint product saves me time. But for whatever reason, they believe the opposite.