'What if the newspaper industry made a colossal mistake?'

All are entertainment.

 

My father in law died in August 2015. The local paper, a major metro with a circulation of about 60,000, charged $1 a word for a paid obit. Ours was pretty basic, but still about $350. I thought that was bad. The paper I work for charges 50 cents a word.
Were you putting an obit in the New York Times worldwide edition that they charged you $3,100?

 

Rivals.com, Scout.com and the rest of its ilk are not entertainment, though I concede that the ridiculous arguments on the message boards are pretty entertaining.

The recruiting sites provide news and information, for a cost, to readers who are interested. Rivals sites have broken significant national sports news in the past. For all their issues - and there are many - those types of sites still run the model that is most similar to what newspapers should be following.

 

I am in the minority on this site thinking this type of thinking is wrong and a myth so I thought this was interesting:

The newspaper industry’s colossal mistake was a defensive digital strategy

 

They are absolutely entertainment. They are for consumption by sports fans.

 

My thoughts on paywalls ...

1. They're too easy to work around. I can use three different browsers on my laptop (Safari, Firefox, Chrome) as well as our family's iPad and my phone and, if there's a limit of 10 free stories per month for a paper, such as the NY Times, I can read 50 stories a month for free, if I want.

2. One of the reasons (probably of many) people don't want to pay for content is they're already spending the price of a monthly car payment on their device and their internet/wireless service. They think they're paying and believe whatever happens after that should be free.

3. I think newspapers get way too hung up on the paywall concept. Was there bemoaning of giving our content away cheaply for free before the internet? No. Newspapers have always been cheap. Penny press. Quarter newsstand prices as recently as 15-20 years ago. Newspapers never had a problem with the sharing/pass-around concept, either. Libraries, doctors offices, etc. In fact, they would try to count those in their circulation numbers.

 

"Yosemite Sam, 69, went to meet his maker."

Eight words, $10.65? That's what the person who handles the obit makes per hour ... maybe.

 

1. Good paywalls can't be worked around. The Times and Post have soft paywalls.

2. They pay for Netflix, Hulu, iTunes and more. They pay for apps. People will pay for stuff they believe has value. Our job is to give them a digital news service that they value. Most outlets are not. They are still being too timid or too sloppy when it comes to digital.

 

Those decreasing circulation numbers can at least partly be traced to companies emphasizing digital resources at the expense of print. That's why people say there isn't as much in the newspaper as there used to be. There isn't.

The bean-counters have convinced the decision-makers to let print slowly die.

 

One other point: Management of newspapers DESPERATELY want digital to work instead of print, because the dead tree edition takes so much time and money to produce and distribute.

If digital-only could produce even a tiny profit, media companies would dump print (and the production facility, newsprint costs, delivery drivers, etc.) in a heartbeat.

Unfortunately for them, the profit is still in the print product, because online advertising doesn't work nearly as well.

 

Online advertising isn't working because they're not doing it right.

Here's a quick look at the sites of some larger papers ---
NY Daily News - A big banner ad and a box ad on the front page, both run by Google's AdChoices program.
Minneapolis Star-Tribune - A stupid interstitial ad just to get to the front page, a big banner run by Google Ads and then a lower sidebar run by Google Ads
The Columbus Dispatch - Banner and sidebar ads that are run by Google's AdChoices program
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette - front page of post-gazette.com has three ad locations "above the fold": A banner strip, a banner, and a box. All three serviced by Google Ads.

These sites may appear to have local ads because Google has the easy capability to set its ad programs to use not just a user's history, but also their location and the client's location. But they're not local ads. Why are newspapers giving away prime real estate to a third party ad vendor? Design the page so that you can sell weekly ad space and insert an image and hyperlink. It's basic HTML. You already get the images for print...the only difference would be tailoring it to online.

This is the problem, at its core, of newspapers' attitudes towards digital. They'll do it, but they'll do it half-assed, farm out the work to a third party, and then complain when they don't get decent revenue.

 

Oh god why did nobody think to sell HTML banner ads