Newsday to charge for Web access

Hearst may start charging for some content, too:

http://blogs.wSportsJournalists.com/digits/2009/02/27/hearst-to-begin-charging-for-digital-news/

 

Yup, I've been saying that for months. Giving the product away for free is part of the reason we're in the mess we're in.

 

Your anecdotal evidence aside, every study every done that I'm aware of indicates that sports doesn't move papers. Tabloids that are the second paper in their market may be an exception.

http://www.aasfe.org/its-the-readers-stupid-increasing-newspaper-readership.html

http://www.readership.org/content/highpotential.asp

Please understand what I'm not saying. I'm not saying that we should try any less on the job. I'm not saying that what we do is unimportant. If I didn't feel like sports had its place, I wouldn't have career working in sports, turning down many opportunities to switch to news. Do I think that most sports sections can be better? Yes. Harder? More newsie and less fluffy? Absolutely.

But what I am saying is that MEs and publishers see these studies, and they realize what a money drain sports can be. A lot of money and resources for travel and so forth, and very little return on investment, comparitively.

What if the Chicago Tribune took the money it spends covering the White Sox and Cubs for one season and instead poured it into local news investigations?

 

Exactly. You narrow your reach and you lose an opportunity to market and build the credibility of your paper. People won't pay for it.

 

waylon, here's the thing. in some markets, sports sells the paper. simple as that. and even in the ones where it doesn't, it sells lots of papers. because the thing about our readers is that many of them only buy for the sports section and the rest is a bonus. they are a small but vocal, fiercely loyal bunch. if your bosses hurt their sports section, they will hurt the bottom line.

 

If they hurt it in a vacuum, yes. If they hurt it to help other sections of the paper that draw in more readership? Not necessarily ...

 

If every newspaper in the world did this, sports nuts would simply do what they have been doing for awhile now:

Go to ESPN.com.
Go to Yahoo.com.

And the majority of that content (Insider excluded) is free.

Yes, we're giving the stuff away for free, but we're also losing readers to the major sports sites.

 

Not that I neccesarily agree with Newsday's stance here ... I think they're the wrong market for it ... But nobody is logging on to ESPN.com to read about their local teams on a daily basis ... because it's not there. If you're a huge Hawks fan, you're not getting covered by ESPN.com.

And if you're a Georgia Tech fan, you're probably getting even less.
And if you're in a smaller town where the biggest game in town is high school, forget about it.

We aren't competing against ESPN.com and Yahoo. There's room for both of us in the cyberscape.

 

Again, stop thinking so much through the sports prism ...

This is bigger than sports. Way bigger.

 

OK .... CNN.com ain't covering our city council, either.

The local newspaper will always be the No. 1 source of local news ... except when it ceases to exist.

But to think the people who are reading our newspaper will get the same things from national websites is, frankly, laughable.

 

On that we agree 100 percent. That's the fantasy of all the wannabe Mo Dowds and David Brookses blogging out there. They are under the delusion that the "MSM" is all about national columnists opining about national issues. Really, the foundation, or at least part of it, is local reporters covering property tax hikes and city council meetings and road construction projects in Podunk County and bacteria count on Lake Local.

People paid for that news for decades upon decades. They can pay for it again.

 

you can't put that genie back in the bottle