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to promote civic engagement in the Philadelphia region.Lock Up Philly.com. Is Stu on to Something Big?
Thursday, February 5th, 2009 at 8:50 am - by Matt Campbell. Filed under: Uncategorized.
Should Philadelphia’s two largest newspapers stop giving their stories away for free? Stu Bykofsky, a columnist for the free Philadelphia Daily News argues this morning that The DN and The Philadelphia Inquirer are partly to blame for their revenue death spiral. His solution is “end the free on-line lunch.”
We all know by now that more people now get their news online than from reading the newspapers. (See Pew Study.) Ad revenues and circulation numbers nationwide are on the decline as the news industry moves more of their content online.
On the advertising side, all newspapers have been crippled by the migration of classified ads to the Internet. That’s gone and it’s never coming back. We can, however, recapture content, if we dare.
Publishers sowed the seeds of their own destruction - pre-Tierney - by stampeding to the Internet and giving away their content for free, overturning a business model that had sustained them for centuries.
We must stop the insanity - now! It’s time for some brave publisher - Hello, Brian - to stand up and howl: “No more free content!”
This company should charge online visitors a small fee, maybe $5 a month, for our content - which is copyrighted, then sue the pants off anyone stealing it.
What got Stu so riled up was this story in Philadelphia Magazine that went for the jugular of one of the paper’s owners Brian Tierney.
Tierney offered himself up as The Man Who Would Save Philadelphia’s Newspapers at a tumultuous time…Now, less than three years later, it’s all gone to hell. Circulation has fallen. In early 2008, Tierney warned union representatives of “a dire situation” if costs weren’t cut by 10 percent. The papers have slashed more than 400 staff members across all departments since he took over.
As WHYY continues its membership drive, I have to admit that Stu has a point. In his article, he reminds us that the DN and Inky set the news agenda everyday for local TV news, radio news and bloggers. The papers can do things that most news organizations don’t do often: good investigative journalism. Heck the only reason Vince Fumo is sitting in a courtroom today is because of an investigation by the newspapers into his non-profit.
So I think I would pay for the papers if Philly.com required a subscription. It’s only fair. Better yet, if the newspapers focused more of their editorial staff on just investigative pieces and let the news wires handle the run of the mill press conferences they would be indispensable.
But what do you think? Would you be willing to pay $5 a month for Philly.com? Do you think enough people would do the same? Or would Stu’s idea only accelerate the two paper’s shrinking revenues?
February 5th, 2009 at 9:46 am
Suing the pants off people stealing content? Look how well that works for the music industry… Hope they’re not considering going after joe blow who’s posted an article on their MySpace blog. If someone’s copying articles and is making money off of them, sue away, but run at individuals with your legal guns a-blazing.
For better or for worse - and at the moment it feels like it’s for the worse - the internet is completely changing how people get a lot of things. The predominant factor is ultimately to get things cheaper.
Unfortunately, the end result is the jettisoning of quality in many, many cases, and this is certainly notable in the newspaper industry, which has had the internet breathing down their necks longer than any other industry.
In my personal experience in the industry, the owners and publishers have been pig-headed and arrogant about how to deal with the internet, and you’re seeing the results. (I worked for the York Newspaper Company (part of Media News Group) between 99 and 01) I could write entirely too much on how completely incompetent and misdirected a lot of the higher-ups I encountered were, but the question here is - will charging $5 to access Philly.com save the newspaper?
Probably not.
I think that if the text news industry is to survive and continue to publish quality material, they’re going to have to take a close look at the business model behind public radio and public television.
Maybe look at the shareware and iPhone app store model… offer this week’s news for free (so you can still get traffic from aggregators like Google News or Drudge or Fark or Reddit or Digg etc.), offer premium content & archives at a price. It’s a very delicate line to walk, and cut off too much and you’re going to lose a lot of eyeballs.
Consider licensing your news library as to universities or law firms. Pay $x, get a rack in your IT department that auto-updates with new content, and is easily searchable, with the option to do more robust queries against the data.
Connect with your readers, embrace them. Give them a reason to buy.
February 5th, 2009 at 10:50 am
In fact, I would say, encourage the distribution of your content, with the minor caveat that you MUST ATTRIBUTE with a link back to the original article.
How timely — the New York Times JUST opened up their archives from 1981 on: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/nytimes_exposes_huge_api.php
February 5th, 2009 at 11:36 am
Wow, You’re right about the NYT. But there’s a catch. They limit you to just 5000 archive searches a day. How am I supposed work with this kind of limit? (just kidding) I am amazed that they have done this. But how does this improve the NYT’s revenue outlook?
February 5th, 2009 at 11:50 am
Wait…there’s more to this story. The editor of the NYT also said this week that he’s considering charging people to see the NYT online. So maybe the opening of the archives is going to be like opium for its readers. Then they’ll put up access fees later. see article.
http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/7013955352
Also, On the Media discussion of NYT’s revenue declines
http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2009/01/30/03
February 5th, 2009 at 11:59 am
I don’t mind paying for content, but news needs to remain accessible. I’d like to see a daily rate too - perhaps 50¢/day. I’d also like to see room for enterprise subscriptions (free or chared) - like libraries, community non-profits, schools, etc.
February 5th, 2009 at 12:07 pm
I don’t know if anyone has see the Inky’s latest experiment with online news called e-Inquirer. I tried it for a few days (free trial membership) and thought it worked well because it looks and moves like a traditional newspaper. I won’t be subscribing because I get all of the Inquirer’s stories for free using an RSS reader.
http://epaper.philly.com/
February 5th, 2009 at 1:26 pm
“CEO of struggling Sun-Times Media Group resigns”, “McClatchy reports 4Q loss on newspapers’ decline”, Time’s next cover is “Save the newspapers,” I’m guessing there was some kind of big meeting recently…
As far as how one monetizes an API, if you can use it to lead people back to the site, there’s plenty of potential. In addition, while you joke about the 5000-per-day limit, this is almost exactly along the lines of what I was proposing in my post - companies that would rely heavily on the content can pay a premium for unfettered access.
For people who are sent back to the site, maybe offer a nicely formatted PDF version for $0.50 or something, with a license that allows you to send it via email to your friends and family or something.
Follow what people are already doing and build something off of that.
February 5th, 2009 at 4:51 pm
Of course it sounds great, Stu’s idea, but we all know it’s anti-capitalistic. The game is over, news is free. If all the newspapers decided it cost from the beginning, I don’t know, maybe that’d work, but it doesn’t now. If PMH puts up a paywall, wouldn’t WHYY just cover those stories and all Philly.com readers flush your way?
February 6th, 2009 at 7:13 am
I’d happily pay $20/yr for a good source of local news, whether or not that was Inky/DN.
February 7th, 2009 at 4:38 pm
paradigm shift in progress and the newsies are still on the LOST island. Seriously - what dark hole do you have your heads up? Is your ego really that big that you believe there are not other ‘legitimate’ information outlets available to me at no cost - other than my eyes glancing at a few ads.
The operators of trains discovered the hard way they were in the transportation business not the train business.
The music publishers have discovered they are insignificant players in today’s music stream. Aside from the avalanche of technology that the ‘established’ music industry cannot keep up with Prince put everyone on notice this past fall with his free release of his new CD while garnering the revenue stream from live appearances. Where’s the music industry in that equation?
The examples are almost endless and the text publishers are next in line for an economic ’spanking’
Stu - wake up - you are no longer important. In fact you never were. Your access to the print presses was important - not you.
Find a niche and address that. WHYY has a niche - few viewers comparatively but dedicated viewers.
The new paradigm is about the community not the individual. Stu et al - get over yourselves. Go home. Retire. Please.
February 7th, 2009 at 7:27 pm
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February 9th, 2009 at 8:41 am
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February 9th, 2009 at 9:56 am
[...] Stu’s column bolstering a paywall, it sure makes sense for link-longevity for me to link to WHYY’s mention of the story. You just sent me to the [...]
March 15th, 2010 at 10:23 pm
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