Eric Kaiser

I was a great video that I’m reposting from “The Next Newsroom Project” web site:
Wire Magazine

Just substitute “newspaper” where you here “magazine”. Exciting use of the iPad for publishing. I especially like how they treat advertising.

Back in 2004 Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson, with music by Aaron McLeran, created a video called Epic 2014. The video painted a bleak future for newspapers where Google and Amazon took over the media landscape. This foretelling video was received with skepticism by many in the newspaper industry, but some did see it as a wake up call. It’s interesting to look at that video now some 5+ years later.

Google indeed has changed the media landscape through Google News and the host of other tools and applications they provide in addition to their search. Amazon recently released the Kindle, which isn’t in direct competition with newspapers, but certainly puts another nail in the coffin of print.

Google’s latest foray into journalism comes in the form of “Patch“. Patch is being underwritten by Google’s president of advertising for North America and Latin America Tim Armstrong through his private investment company, Polar Capital Group.

Patch, in a nutshell, is a way to find about, and participate in, what’s going on around you. Google’s plan is to put small teams of journalists around the country to produce hyper-local content. This is not a new idea, Yahoo had a similar newspaper initiative some 6 years ago that failed. But oh how times have changed. Thousands of journalists are out of jobs. Talk about ripe for the picking.

Google was asked why don’t they bail out newspapers, now we know why. This is a serious shift in their business from indexing content to creating content.

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know this could be devastating to newspapers. I’m sure this action by Google will spawn numerous lawsuits.  I would imagine most newspapers will take measures to prevent their news from appearing on Google News. I also wonder what this will do to their relationship with the Associated Press.

What’s equally surprising is how this venture has remained below the radar screen. Thanks to John Battelle for posting this on his blog. Please check his post out for more information.

Do you hear them? It’s the sound of newspaper management pounding their desks. It started out faint about a year ago, but has grown louder and louder the past month. Why all the noise? They want payment for their content.

Please, let’s silence this once and for all. I will tell you, from experience, that any barrier between viewers and content will fail, and fail miserably.

Oh, but we own our local news, people will pay. Really? I think you would be amazed to find out what people will settle for and how creative they will get to fill the void your newspaper’s content used to fill.

We had a paid model at the Sun Journal for two years. TWO YEARS! We implemented it at a time when we were rolling out a new site that included all our news from our four editions. The management team felt we should charge for this so people won’t drop the print edition for the free online product.

I wasn’t in favor of this for many reasons. After some convincing arguments we were able to reach a compromise, sorta.

We drafted a system where “premium” content, which were staff generated stories, were behind a pay wall. However, the compromise was viewers could access up to five (count ‘em), five premium stories a day for free. AP content and other wire content was wide open. We also didn’t include obituaries as premium content. To this day obits are the most viewed section of the site.

We launched this system in September 2004. Up to that point we were enjoying about 2 million pageviews a month. After we launched we saw less than 100,ooo pageviews for the month. We expected a drastic drop, but didn’t think it would be that bad. If that wasn’t bad enough I received nearly 500 emails and voicemails from viewers who were confused and angry.

We rode it out for two very long years. Before we pulled the plug we had 198 paid subscribers which did count towards our circulation numbers. But any circulation director will tell you that isn’t significant.

In the end, what we did was ruin a growing part of our business. We alienated our audience and pushed them to other free web sites providing similar news. And in most cases the same news if they waited a day when it hit the AP wire and made available to other Maine newspaper sites.

Another important factor, at least for us, was more than 65% of our traffic was from outside of our circulation area.

It has taken us nearly three years to bounce back to the 2 million pageviews per month. And consequently our online ad revenues to rise to an appreciable amount as well. Our online revenue is less than 2% of the overall revenue for the company.

You could argue the model here, but it clearly shows that any kind of barrier between viewers and your content is a bad idea.

I can’t help but think newspapers are just relapsing to old strategies. There needs to be more creativity in revenue models. What do those models look like? We’re all trying to figure that out. Check out John Newby’s blog at “Newsmedia Innovation” for some creative ideas as well as Steve Outing’s.

I will be posting our initiatives at the Sun Journal here after we launch them. For obvious reasons I cannot do it now ;+)