This article by David Carr came through my feed this morning, and I disagree on a lot of levels, and hope to illustrate some of the finer points here.
Firstly – the basic gist of the article is that Carr believes newspapers should start charging for content. Putting news behind a paywall is NOT the way to save newspapers in 2009 – and for one basic reason – news (and newsgathering) is no longer solely in the realm of journalists. There are more and more news outlets, crowd-sourced news sources, news aggregators and the like these days. The cost of finding and or producing news is now in large part free (save the mainstream media – TV, newspapers, radio, which are admittedly the largest news sources today).
Now – just to clarify – all high-quality, well researched news costs something. The A-Roid story (ESPN), any WSJ article on the current financial crisis – these are well researched pieces of information from extremely reputable and well-respected writers and organizations. However – there are plenty of other pieces of news surrounding these stories that were produced and distributed for free. What I am trying to say is that there is still some news that costs money, and in the cases of the 2 examples above – lots of money (reporter salaries, travel expenses, etc.).
However – the fact that some news costs money and some news does not is irrelevant. What newspapers need now is a viable business model. According to Nicholas Carlson at SAI, printing the NYT costs twice as much as sending every subscriber a free Amazon Kindle. Printing and distributing newspapers costs a lot – one that is dragging newspapers down. Cut out the cost of traditional printing and distribution – voila, you have a viable news business.
Now – I am not advocating that newspapers stop printing their editions across the board – there are still too many people who like the feel of newsprint on their fingers (however that number will continue to decrease as the years go by and more and more people grow up with an iPhone or Blackberry in their crib). But what I am saying is that the cost structures that these news organizations have is too much for them to bear.
Back to Carr’s point – charge for online content. The first effect of that plan would will be a drop in traffic. Cablevision Corp. has announced that that is what they plan to do with Newsday.com – if they go ahead with that plan, pay close attention to their visitor numbers (and the resulting falloff in ad revenues from the site). A secondary effect is that readers will find their news somewhere else. Short of industry-wide collusion to charge for online content (which, by the way, Carr recommends) there will always be someone who thinks they can grab some marketshare by keeping their site free to everybody. This also brings up the point of how newspapers make money – subscription dollars, or ad revenues? I choose to look at it like this: In the printed world, the costs of disseminating the news are high and the companies rely on subscription fees to cover the cost of printing, and ad revenues to bring in the money. In the online world the ‘cost’ of disseminating the news is very low – site hosting fees, graphic designers, etc. and the ad revenues bring in all of the money.
So what should they do? I don’t know. The Wall Street Journal charges for most of their website, as does the Financial Times. The New York Times used to charge for their archives (although I believe they are now free or only behind a registration wall). Experiment, innovate – create an app for phones in which a user would pay a nominal monthly fee to access the news in a really intuitive application. Restructure newsroom operations (which most companies have already started doing) – the economics behind the 21st century newspaper can’t support a multi-thousand person news operation; and realize that big doesn’t necessarily mean high-quality. People have been saying that the very fabric of the Fourth Estate is under seige – I don’t think so. There are enough people in this world who want and demand the truth and have easy access to the tools required to produce that reporting – that the Fourth Estate will never go away. But the newspaper delivery guy might.
While I don’t agree that Carr’s central point is to charge for content, I do agree that this is not a significant part of the answer. Even WSJ doesn’t make lots of money from their pay content – their core still comes from their subscriptions and the print ad revenue that goes along with it. Sure, that print revenue i as Josh suggests, experiment and innovate. Simply adding a paywall won’t work – it didn’t work even when the consumers could afford the content.
I think Carr’s central point is to bring deliberate collusion to the realm of journalism. As ridiculous as this sounds, I think I agree with him. Why does NY have the Post and the Daily News? Neither is making money.
But I suggest that this collusion include broadcast journalism as well. There are too many 24-hour news channels, too many print newspapers and too many news based blogs. We can’t (and shouldn’t) regulate the blogs. But professional journalism needs to return to its roots of professionalism. And if that means less professional journalists, so be it. The bloggers can break the stories and the journalists can do what they do best – the full court press of accurate (and fact-checked [yes, they need to do ths]) information to support the big stories.