A really stupid idea

[sptwri]

First off, I know the idea is stupid because I've been told it is by some people who have spent some 20 years in a business I have toiled in for 37-plus years.
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I know the idea is stupid because I mentioned it to some people who might have a chance of discussing it on a national scale and haven't heard a word about it since.

But here's my stupid idea. Newspapers want to make money off the internet? Then continue to give away the news, the features, the alternative offshoots. But start charging $10 a month for sports.

Yeah, sports. The non-journalism part of newspapers. The toy department. All that. Why? Because you can't get this stuff easily anywhere else. Nobody covers Kansas and Missouri like my sports section. Nobody else covers the Royals or the Chiefs like we do. Heck, nobody covers our local high schools like we do.

So you want to read about that? Pay for it. Just like you do for Rivals sites on your favorite college teams. And trust me, people do pay for that stuff in a big way in many regions.

Now, why this won't work? Why this is stupid? Because you can't get the folk in St. Louis to do the same thing. Or you can't get both papers in Dallas (and Fort Worth) to do it at the same time.

You can't get the Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Post to do it at the same time.

And why can't you? I don't know why. I must be stupid.

Mike DeArmond

 

[Michael_ Gee]

Hi, Mike! It's not a stupid idea. Charging for ALL online information would be a good idea. But newspapers are run by people who do not really think information is a valuable product. They believe in selling their audience as a product to advertisers-even online. They won't abandon their broken business model out of fear of the unknown.
It's like watching a football coach kick a field goal down 28-0 in the third. We've all seen that, too.

 

[WaylonJennings]

I think the Chicago Tribune tried to do this with the Bears and it didn't work. I know that the Bloomington, Ind., paper does it with Indiana University basketball.

 

[sptwri]

I think the Chicago Tribune tried to do this with the Bears and it didn't work. I know that the Bloomington, Ind., paper does it with Indiana University basketball.

Waylon. Seriously? The Trib tried this and it didn't work as well as not doing it and filing bankruptcy?

Hey, I told you it was a stupid idea

 

[sptwri]

Hi, Mike! It's not a stupid idea. Charging for ALL online information would be a good idea. But newspapers are run by people who do not really think information is a valuable product. They believe in selling their audience as a product to advertisers-even online. They won't abandon their broken business model out of fear of the unknown.
It's like watching a football coach kick a field goal down 28-0 in the third. We've all seen that, too.

Michael,
Ah, but we were so much older then, trouble is we're not much younger now.

 

[RayKinsella]

I think my idea may be even stupider. I say take all content off the internet. Everything. But see, this won't work if only one paper does it. Or two, or 100. Everyone needs to do it.

Then it would force the reader to pick up the paper if they want their local sports/news/crap.

 

[britwrit]

Yeah, what kind of business model is it where you have a local monopoly on something people want and then give it away free?

 

[Shaggy]

I think you gradually start charging. 5 bucks a month for the columns and takeout features. Then the editorials go under that blanket. Then sidebars. Then game stories, on and on and on.

Leave part of your site free, such as breaking news.

And no Mike, I don't think it's a stupid idea at all if executed properly. But not one suit in this industry knows how to execute anything properly.

 

[Jake_Taylor]

I think you do it like Shaggy said. ESPN started out putting just a few juicy items in the Insider and gradually started putting more and more as people got used to the idea of paying for the good stuff. Newspapers could still post 3 or 4 graphs of a game story and important breaking news for free, but the good stuff would come with an Insider-like subscription.

You could even let people subscribe to just the stuff they want. I'd pay $5 or 10 a month for the Star's KU coverage and another $5 or 10 for the Royals. I probably wouldn't pay just for the Chiefs right now, but I might pay $15 or 20 for everything in the sports section.

 

[deskslave]

Could newspapers all band together and do something like that without getting busted for collusion?

 

[bake1234]

I don't think it's stupid. You have the brand name people look for. I wouldn't pay to read a random blog on my favorite teams, but I'd consider paying for what the best reporters in the business think about my teams. I think it's worth trying if you can get the suits to agree. But, as has been mentioned, they're still clinging to an old business model and are too scared to try something else for fear of failure. Like hanging out on the Titanic as it sinks because you're afraid the life boat is too rickety.

The key is to get your competitors to agree. And, with more competitors going into content-sharing deals, I think some papers could be persuaded to try it.

Here's another (stupid) idea: Why not get some of your competitors together and make a new site devoted to Mizzou or KU or whatever? For $20 a month, you get Mizzou coverage from the KC Star, St. Louis P-D, Columbia Tribune and whoever else all in the same place. No clicking around. One stop, all the info I could want. You'd still break news on your paper's site...maybe you make some arrangement on that to protect yourself from scoops. I dunno. Just throwing that out there.

 

[I Digress]

Why not do it, start making money, hire away your competitors' best writers and reporters (we know every paper in america has room for staff), thereby forcing them to follow suit? It is capitalism, after all. And if the free stuff sucks, people will buy the good stuff... won't they?

 

[Johnny Dangerously]

The paper where I got my start has a Web site where a few stories and blogs are free, but you have to pay to read most of the paper (which is reproduced, pages and photos and all, in a format that's not PDF but accessible with log-in and password). You get access to the archives too, which are extensive.

Reporters and editors have complained for years (I think they'd like more people to be exposed to their work), but the one thing you can't say about the place is they put their stories online for free.

I wonder what 2008 would be like for print newspapers if the past 10 years had been like that at every place.

 

[Joe Williams]

Could newspapers all band together and do something like that without getting busted for collusion?

That fear hasn't stopped the burger joints from all deciding to charge.

 

[Joe Williams]

For staff morale purposes, I think you'd better put news, features and business behind the pay wall, too. Those people would be ticked off or they would have their little feelings hurt if the paper acknowledged that sports is the thing readers would pay for. They already grumble about sports' use of travel money. Babies.

 

[mustangj17]

Why not charge for the entire thing. And promo web only things in the paper. Give them snippets of things for free. Like ESPN insider does. Some people would buy it. I mentioned this before. If a newspaper has a circ of 100k, and 30k start paying online, they are all of a sudden getting paid for selling 130k newspapers, how can that be bad?

 

[Johnny Dangerously]

Promote Web-only content in the paper.
Promote print-only content on the Web.
Duplicate some, not all, of it.

Why would that have been such a bad idea in 1998 and thereafter?

 

[FileNotFound]

Put it behind the pay wall, and nobody buys ads (or worse, people resent having the ads there after already having themselves paid for it -- nothing irks me more than commercials on XM Radio). You'll need to have pretty much every human in your circulation area kicking in the 10 beans a year to maintain your staff.

And who's going to stop the pajama-blogger -- or, more likely, the laid-off ex-reporters -- from copying and pasting your stuff and putting it up on THEIR blogs? Or right here at SportsJournalists.com? With attribution, of course.

And search-engine algorithms are based heavily on being linked. You put your stuff behind a pay wall, you can't be linked. You drop in search results. What ad revenue you were bringing in (such as it was) starts to decline even more.

I love the idea of charging for truly premium content. I wish the New York Times and Dallas Morning News and some of the other big guns could have stuck with it.

Bake1234's idea is a fabulous one -- aggregating content into one kick-ass, multi-branded web site. What if all the great mid-sized sections in the SEC or Big 12 pooled their content under one URL? I'd read that. Hell, I'd pay for it (at least until I started seeing it all copied-and-pasted here :> )

Gotta be thinking of different ways, folks. The old way has just about expired.

 

[sptwri]

For staff morale purposes, I think you'd better put news, features and business behind the pay wall, too. Those people would be ticked off or they would have their little feelings hurt if the paper acknowledged that sports is the thing readers would pay for. They already grumble about sports' use of travel money. Babies.

Joe, if anyone was worried about staff morale just now we wouldn't be suffering throug half of what we are.

 

[Mystery_Meat]

You charge for sports coverage on the internet, people go to ESPN/Sportsline/Yahoo Sports/Fox Sports and don't come back to your site. There was a time you could at least have the high school coverage as a selling point, but now there's plenty of sites where I am that I can get scores and features. So even that's out.

Name a U.S. news provider that charges for a large portion of their content.