State of the business is dismal, as we know, and yet ...

Do you honestly think a Green Bay Packer fan goes to ESPN or FOX or NFL.com before he/she goes to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel? Especially in the hours and days after a game? So they'd rather read one story than six?

 

I'm not disagreeing with this, Tony ... but "giving away the product for free" was a newspaper philosophy before they created their own websites. Remember the "total market coverage" shopper craze of the 1980s and 1990s? Quantity over quality has been the mindset of newspaper management for decades, and now that there's plenty of online competition out there, it's come back to bite them in the ass.

 

Fans aren't loyal to one brand. They'll go from website-to-website. The one thing they won't do is pay for a J-S subscription for their Packers' news when good-enough free content is available.

People can lament all they want about how current readers don't want to pay, but what's going to change that? A paywall isn't the answer when free does the job.

 

Jesus Christ. NBC pays huge sums of money to own those broadcast rights. Sports writers string words and sentences together. That's their product. Sports photographers take pictures. That's their product (although with some significant exceptions in the commercial space).

Newspapers don't own their staff members, either. They are free to work for companies that pay better, for example cable companies whose primary income comes from exploiting the content (the games) for which they own rights. Newspapers can't compete in that world financially.

The demand for newspaper content varies greatly depending on the newspaper. For the most part, newspapers have a relatively small local audience. I rarely visit my local paper's site more than once a week

 

I do all of this. I don't live there anymore, so ESPN/Fox/NFL.com are easier for me and more on my radar, and typically one story is enough for me.

I might have to turn in my cheesehead for saying that, but what I describe is a far more typical reading habit than what you describe.

 

Maybe if you're talking local news and all. But in my area, Packers fans, Brewers fans, Bucks fans, Marquette fans, University of Wisconsin fans -- at least the ones more than casual fans -- go to the Journal Sentinel all the time. It's not even close that more people read the JS website Packers coverage today than ever read the paper in the 1960s, 70s, 80s or 90s. And they draw those eyes from around the world rather than just in the areas the paper can be delivered.

 

How do you know this? Do you have access to the analytics?

And we've all heard the line "more people than ever are reading our content." Most of that is because it's free. People aren't ponying up for a digital subscription to read a few columns and sidebars.

 

I seem to recall the J/S creating a subscription Packer Extra subscription site. The experiment ended rather quickly if I'm remembering it correctly.

 

Packers Insider, which is now part of a digital subscription, so you get all the Packers content you can't get anywhere else (except you can, and for free).

 

Exactly this. A good chunk of fans are going to read whatever they see on their Twitter feeds first. Oh, the local paper's column on today's game is behind a paywall? I'll just read SBNation or Fansided's take on the game.

 

Say what you want, but that is an example that the product most definitely is in demand.

 

Not enough for people to pay for it when there's a free alternative elsewhere.