

Weekly publication an answer for newspapers? - frossie
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/apr/08/not-safe-for-work-newspapers

======
frossie
(I submitted this story). Much as I don't like the tone of the piece, I think
the point about the traditional media focusing on competing on accuracy and
not speed is valid. The question in my mind is, is there a large audience for
slow, albeit thoughtful and accurate, journalism?

~~~
brandnewlow
I hear a lot of people pointing to the Economist as the example of what
newspapers should do. That's fine, I agree that would be a good thing.

But please don't point to Newsweek. The traditional U.S. news-weekly is dying
almost as quickly as metro newspapers.

What's the difference between Newsweek and the Economist?

Point of view and voice. That's really what this is about. The Economist has a
point of view and takes sides on the issues it covers. It will always side
with open markets and capitalism. That's its POV.

What does Newsweek stand for? U.S. News and World Report? Time?

So yes, weekly could be a good approach, but really, the problem is a lack of
voice and POV.

Also, I used to buy the line that while the big dailies were struggling, the
weekly neighborhood papers in U.S. cities were doing ok. That's been said by a
lot of people with access to good data.

And yet here in Chicago the family-owned business that published 5 weekly
neighborhood papers recently folded one and sold off two for a song to a
husband-wife business that's turning them into newsletters. So there's some
struggling going on there, too.

~~~
frossie
The local paper is a serious, though different problem. I read a very touching
article last week about the collapse of the local press in the UK, with old
people quoted as saying there was no newspaper left to publish their obituary
in.

Back to monetising serious journalism in the national (or even international
this day) press - I have a different view of the problem, which is I _want_ to
pay money but the sites are not asking for it. Rather than subscribe to a
single paper, what I want is to make a micro-payment for an article that I
read that interested me. For example that long piece on Dubai that was posted
here a few days ago, or the piece on newspaper ownnership posted today - both
were from newspapers that I do not regularly read or visit. I read the
articles, I enjoyed them, they were long serious pieces of work and I would
have pressed in an instant a button that said "If you liked this story click
here to donate $0.10" in order to reward the person who paid the journalist to
write the story. In fact I am many, _many_ times more likely to give 10 cents
that to click (or even notice) an advertisement on the same page.

The search engine and other type of aggregators (such as HN type sites) then
become a clear boon to the primary content provider because they are not
diluting page views or anything like that - they are just delivering a
potential paying customer straight to something they are likely to pay for.

Why is nobody asking me for my money?

------
knightinblue
1) For newspapers, the paid model doesn’t work -
[http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/04/paying-for-online-news-
sorr...](http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/04/paying-for-online-news-sorry-but-
the-math-just-doesnt-work/)
[http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/06/micropayment...](http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/06/micropayments-
not/) The basic idea is that people will find the news for free. Newspapers
can wall the content behind subscriptions all they want, but that will only
result in bloggers/aggregators getting subscriptions, rewording and
summarising the articles and posting them on their own sites without any
attribution whatsoever. The WSJ is the perfect example - their subscriptions
are going down primarily because readers are getting the same news from other
sources, who are most probably rehashing the WSJ after getting a subscription.
Entire teams will spring up EXPRESSLY to make sure they dodge copyright
infringements. It can’t be stopped.

2) The quality vs speed argument doesn’t work either. "The blogs have speed,
you have quality and, given what they’ve had to put up with all week, that’s
something your readers will be more than willing to pay for" - that’s a
monstrously large assumption. If anything, it’s becoming more and more evident
that people care a lot more about getting bite sized ‘gists’ of breaking
stories rather than in-depth page long columns. True, there are a small chunk
of people who would be willing to pay for this but it’s most certainly nowhere
near the number it would take for the papers to earn as much as they make
today. The perfect example is the Economist - it’s profitable BECAUSE of it’s
small size. The NYTimes is simply too big to follow their model, since they
would need multiple magnitudes of order higher in the number of subscribers to
turn the same rate of profit. If the NYTimes is willing to cut down to the
size of the Economist, then they MAY make a profit.

3) Weekly news updates - if the questions is whether newspapers should adopt a
subscription policy, I don't see why they can't stay as dailies. The speed at
which they publish currently doesn't really sacrifice their accuracy all that
much.

When it comes to monetization, webapps like xobni and basecamp can charge
monthly subscriptions. But news outlets can't. If they have news that's
exclusive, then yes, they can charge monthly fees. But with the evolution of
the internet as it is, nothing stays exclusive for more than 14 seconds. It'd
be far better for them to stay open and enable other sites to send them free
traffic. This way, they can focus their energies towards making ad revenue
from the increase in traffic.

The equation is simple: more traffic = more revenue. The problem right now is
they don't have enough traffic. They could be doing MUCH better. The question
is - how?

I propose a 'Site Network' solution. Brands like Techcrunch and Gawker have
proven that a NETWORK of sites, alongwith a dedicated effort to push the
headlines in front of readers (via search engines, social media etc) is the
way to raise ad revenue. I have always wondered why the NYTimes would be
boneheaded enough to publish everything on ONE site. Any succcessful site
(success here measured in terms of ad profit) will show you that content
belongs in its own niche.

Here’s an experiment, step by step -

1) the NYTimes breaks into 100 sites (or blogs), each with a specific name and
topic, from tech startups to cooking to sports etc. Journalists will now see
their articles on their respective sites. For example, the freakonomics
section on NYTimes will now be a website called freakonomics.com. (All the
individual sites will carry a NYTimes 'brand')

2) Instead of all articles being published on subsections within ONE site
(like they are now), the same exact news is published across 100 different
sites, in their respective niches. For example, freakonomics articles will be
published on freakonomics.com instead of
<http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/> . The news is the same - it’s just
the format that changes.

3) Dedicated SEO/SMO teams whose sole job is to constantly drive eyeballs to
these 100 sites. The key is assigning teams PER site whose sole job is the
growth of that individual site - ranking in google SERPs, maintaining popular
twitter/facebook profiles, getting readers to blog, reblog, tweet, retweet and
ultimately direct traffic to the site.

4) The individual sites will serve as cross-promoters to each other and serve
a symbiotic network.

5) The NYTimes homepage can host the stories urgent enough to be on the
homepage, but more importantly, it’ll serve as the portal which directs
viewers to these 100 sites.

6) At the same time, strict guidelines on what is acceptable for 'quoted
content' should be established, followed and enforced.

7) Monetize the increase in traffic.

The fundamental problem with subscriptions is this - people won’t pay.
Correction, not ENOUGH people will pay. The idea of walling off content so
that people will be forced to pay is a fallacy. This will only fuel the free
sites’ drive to replace the newspapers by ripping off those very same
newspapers. I dread that day.

P.S. I mentioned this idea to Paul on his blog and he raised a concern - "I
guess my main worry would be that by creating sites so explicitly to allow
SEO, the balance between editorial and advertising (which is to say
journalists being encouraged to write about certain topics, or use keywords)
could be slowly eroded." My contention is that as long as a newspaper's
current policy of separating journalists from the website is continued,
there's no problem. As of now, besides submitting their articles, journalists
have no input on the site’s look, feel, ads, links, fonts etc. The new sites
will simply continue this this policy. Journalists would write and submit
their articles and from there onwards, it's the job of the 'online teams' to
publish and push the headlines in front of as many people as possible.
Finally, it's the job of the editor to make sure that the qualities of
investigative journalism aren't compromised for ad dollars.

Whew! That was a mouthful.

