The Solution and the Problem

[Moderator1]

We've discussed this stuff in various ways on various threads over the past few months and I thought this story I read on AJC.com kind of capsulized things for me.
My plea has always been for newspapers to give me something to read. Forget video, forget your Web tricks, forget your alternative story forms. GIVE ME SOMETHING TO READ.

Atlanta did today with a super story on the Francouer situation. I've always been a Stinson fan and this is what newspapers can do better than other mediums.

http://www.ajc.com/sports/content/sports/braves/stories/2008/07/05/francoeur_0706.html?cxntlid=homepage_tab_newstab

Of course, I read it for free! I'm 500 miles from Atlanta.

Maybe you tease to that on the Web? Put a blurb out there and send people to the paper? Or make me click and pay (which I would have done)? Something. You just can't give your product away.

 

[JackReacher]

Damn good story.

And you're right. We tease to the web like crazy. Maybe we should tease to the paper as well. Does anyone do this?

 

[Joe Williams]

That's how it should have been set up from the start: Use the Web site to promote your print product, and offer more in the paper than you post online. Instead, newspapers not only gave away for free everything in the paper but they quickly began giving you more online than in print (extra charts, sidebars, links).

As for Moddy's suggested solution, I'm all for it. But really meaty stories -- well-sourced, well-reported and well-written -- require time and with the manpower being shed all over the industry, that's one thing papers no longer have. Smaller staffs now are being told to do the bare minimum for print, while devoting hours to breaking "news" 24/7, blogging, podcasts, video, chats. Then you've got the stars of the business chasing extra $ outside the paper, devoting hours to radio and TV and (in many instances) gouging into the 40 they owe the paper.

As soon as papers decided that takeout jobs and "national" beats were luxuries, the opportunity to have these in-depth, available-only-in-print(-or-by-paying-to-the-Web-site) stories became third- or fourth-priority. Sure, you can have your beat people do them but then you need someone spelling those folks for a day or three. And you'll have to get past the "shorter is better and teensy-weensy is best!" legions making decisions now.

It would help, too, from a quality standpoint if you had your very best writers doing those stories, instead of buying out or laying off your very best writers.

 

[Moderator1]

I admire Atlanta, which is in the same straits as most everyone else, for saying "get yer ass to Mississippi." I don't know what was sacrificed (probably Tom's holiday weekend) but it is the story in Atlanta right now and they did what newspapers should do and went the extra step. Then gave it to me free!

 

[Johnny Dangerously]

You just can't give your product away.

I tired of discussing this with a member of management at our paper. He said, "Subscriptions and rack sales don't pay our salaries. Ads do. You don't have to pay for the news on Channel 2, do you?"

Every time I pointed out ad rates are based on circulation, and that drops in circulation (because of giving away the product online) would be costly to us, he'd say, "Yeah, but they have a way to count Web hits and factor that into the rates for advertising."

The conversation was always a lot longer than that, but I'd usually end it by saying what Moddy did: You can't give away your product for free.

Good thread, Moddy. Thanks. Oh, and I loved this part too:

GIVE ME SOMETHING TO READ.

 

[DemoChristian]

What prevents us from charging more for online ads and financing our operations that way? If we can show that's where the readers are, won't the advertisers pay to get to them?

 

[lantaur]

I hate to beat a dead horse, but the 50 cents you pay for a paper is not paying for the product, it is paying for the device it is delivered on.

And online - as well as newspapers - are devised on an advertising model. And page views (or time spent on page) drives these ad rates.

Has online lowered circ? In some cases probably a little. But there are other places on the web for business' ads than newspaper sites, and you see that with classifieds, which has been the biggest dropoff for papers.

Charging for content just doesn't work. The AJC did try it and it didn't work. Hell, the NY Times gave up on it.

Face it, the times they have a changed. I know it is hard for the old guard to accept that.

 

[Moderator1]

It's hard to show - there are so many ways to juggle numbers and advertisers are leery of hit counts and page views and whatever. You can document sales of 150,000 papers or so they say.
Who knows? At my old shop, they offered print/Web packages and discounts. They sold 15-second teaser ads to use in front of all the video and then someone figured out how to run the video without the ads.

I remember one meeting where some video we'd done in sports was getting raves. It had 2,000 views! 2,000! I said, "We circulate 170,000 papers and we're jacked because 2,000 looked at a video?"

Way more people still read the paper instead of going to the Web site. Way more. Yet at most places, it's Web-de-web-web-web and the paper is an afterthought.
GIVE ME SOMETHING TO READ.

 

[pressmurphy]

Damn good story.

And you're right. We tease to the web like crazy. Maybe we should tease to the paper as well. Does anyone do this?

One paper I'm aware of still runs in-depth Sunday pieces that we're all used to seeing in the papers. They begin teasing it on Wednesday or Thursday by making supporting elements such as searchable databases or flash-powered maps available online with an explanation of what's coming in Sunday's paper.

They've noticed improvement in single-copy sales with this strategy. Not huge numbers, mind you, but enough of a bump to totice and to be able to attribute to the promo strategy.

 

[Mystery_Meat]

I know a lot of people I respect are touting this "charging for the content" as though it's the golden goose and they're the only ones who see it. But here's the thing: if you wanted to implement something like that, the time to do it would have been the mid-1990s, when per-hour and per-minute Internet charges were still the industry standard. People then didn't surf for hours on end, so they'd be more open to going to one site and getting everything, since they knew they were only going to be on for a short time. But even then, once flat-rate pricing kicked in, you'd lose a lot of those customers who got more and more accustomed to paying one price for generally-unfettered access.

Now the only way you can make charging for content a winner is if everyone charges for everything. The major web sites, the TV and radio stations, everyone. Otherwise, people will find the free way to get the information they want. Can they get it better from the newspaper? In most cases, yes. But I rather suspect the reason newspapers were strongest when they were wasn't that they provided the highest-quality information, but that they provided the most in a concise package. That's no longer the case.

 

[Babs]

Charging for content just doesn't work. The AJC did try it and it didn't work. Hell, the NY Times gave up on it.

Face it, the times they have a changed. I know it is hard for the old guard to accept that.

Agree, the subscription model has proven not to work. All the leaders are using an ad-based model. Hopefully ad rates will rise to the level necessary to sustain good work. That is the key question.

As others have said, the pay for paper legacy is due to the printing and delivery expenses. If you eliminate those aspects, you eliminate the need to cover those expenses. You get down to ads, which is where you make or lose your money.

 

[Lugnuts]

What's wrong with asking a reader to watch an ad before viewing an article?

 

[Moderator1]

Nothing.
But they won't. They'll find a way to end around it.

 

[Ira_Schoffel]

Charging for content just doesn't work. The AJC did try it and it didn't work. Hell, the NY Times gave up on it.

Face it, the times they have a changed. I know it is hard for the old guard to accept that.

Agree, the subscription model has proven not to work. All the leaders are using an ad-based model. Hopefully ad rates will rise to the level necessary to sustain good work. That is the key question.

As others have said, the pay for paper legacy is due to the printing and delivery expenses. If you eliminate those aspects, you eliminate the need to cover those expenses. You get down to ads, which is where you make or lose your money.

There's the rub. The online ad rates will never catch up.

Web advertising is a completely different animal than print, and it will never be as valuable. The problem is we use the Web differently than we do newspapers or even television.

With newspapers, people took time to digest the entire paper -- news and ads. A well-crafted ad could sometimes generate as much chatter as a strong news story. Merchants frequently had customers pop in the store and say, "Hey, saw your ad in the paper ..."

Same with television. While some people flitter about, jumping from channel to channel during commercials, many more people will sit and absorb the advertisters' messages.

We don't use the Web that way. Other than the commercials that load before a video you want to watch, we have trained our eyes to look around the ads online. The click-through rates are abysmal and getting SMALLER. The majority of Web ads are worth squat, and merchants are paying accordingly.

The bottom line is we're giving away the content. And we're basically giving away the advertising space. And the only way we're able to keep these sites afloat is by bleeding the print product dry.

I don't have the solution. I don't know all the answers. But I do know that we are on the exact wrong course today.

 

[SixToe]

What's wrong with asking a reader to watch an ad before viewing an article?

Nothing is wrong with it at all and more papers should employ the tactic.

I don't believe people like it, though. I hate clicking on ESPN.com because of the damn TV clip that automatically starts.

If something I want to read online has an ad I cannot skip, I don't read it and move on. Maybe the site gets its "hit" or "click" or whatever to count. If so, bully for them. But I don't want to watch a 45-second ad for the University of Phoenix before I read today's baseball story.

 

[bake1234]

Moddy, you mention that you read the AJC article online from 500 miles away. That's the beauty of the Web - I can read it wherever I am. If I live in California, I can catch up on my hometown team, even if I no longer get the newspaper because I live 2,000 miles away. I don't know how many hits most stories get from people outside of the circulation area, but anything that gets hits seems like a plus to me. Someone will find a way to make money on Web advertising...and when that happens, all those extra hits will add up. Or so I hope. That's what gets me to sleep at night.

 

[big green wahoo]

Here's a paper that teases to its print version: www.vnews.com

It runs 3-5 print stories on its web site and the ledes of some others that appear in full only in print. See what you think. It annoys the heck out of me as a long-distance/internet reader, but maybe they've got the right idea?

 

[Overrated]

I get bitched at a lot because I never put all our local stories on the Web. I put our main story or three, but I leave off a lot of the minor local stuff so people have to buy the paper.

They ***** at me, but they never threaten me or anything. So, I keep doing it my way.

 

[UPChip]

Here's a paper that teases to its print version: www.vnews.com

It runs 3-5 print stories on its web site and the ledes of some others that appear in full only in print. See what you think. It annoys the heck out of me as a long-distance/internet reader, but maybe they've got the right idea?

We tried a variety of web strategies around this time last year, including just the highest stories, just the lowest stories, just the leads and posting well after the print version has hit the street. I don't know if any of them work. The problem with the first two (as it relates to us) is the deluge of angry phone calls alleging favoritism, the just the leads approach basically insults the reader (You want to know how this ends? Buy the damned paper, you cheapskate!), and posting late doesn't lead people to buy the paper, they just read it later or not at all.

I think Moddy's "Give me something to read" edict makes sense. I think it was Molly Ivins who said modern papers are facing financial crisis by making themselves smaller and less useful. If we're all going into the ****-can anyhow, why not do it producing five years of quality work instead of eight years of crap?

 

[Del_B_Vista]

One thing we do with some of the meatier special sections is not to publish them on the Web site until the next day, making them exclusive to print for 24 hours. Don't have any numbers to prove that it actually does anything, but it's one of our attempts to get around giving stuff away for free.