Would You Pay to Read the Press Democrat Online?
By Gina Cuclis
NY Times to Charge for Frequent Access of Its Web Site
The New York Times announced today that it plans to charge frequent readers of its web site starting next year. The Times said readers will get a certain number of articles free each month, then be charged a flat fee for unlimited access. It didn't specify how many free articles a reader would be able to access. I can't help wonder what this may eventually mean for the NY Times Company's other newspapers, particularly the North Bay region's Santa Rosa Press Democrat.
Newspapers Need to Make Money to Survive
The question I asked in the heading is being asked in some fashion by every newspaper. The culture of the Internet has lead us to expect online content to be free. But newspapers can't survive by continuing to give all their content away. The professionals who research, write and organize the content need to make a living. Online advertising raises peanuts compared to what newspapers earn from print ads. Classified advertising used to be the bread and butter of newspaper revenue. Craig's List and other online classifieds have cost newspapers that revenue source.
News Still Originates with Traditional Media
PEW's Project for Excellence in Journalism recently published a study showing, even with the proliferation of online news sources, most original news reporting still comes from traditional media: newspapers, radio and television. The study showed "95% of stories with fresh information came from 'old media', and the vast majority of that from newspapers."
If newspapers die, who will do the work in our communities to find out and report what our institutions, businesses and government are doing? There's plenty of people online who will comment and respond to the news. (Yours truly, for example). But it takes traditional journalists to uncover the initial information.
What Would You Do?
If you read a daily newspaper online and don't subscribe to its print version, would you pay to keep accessing its web site? Would you pay if the paper stopped publishing a print edition? I'm interested in reading your response.
NY Times to Charge for Frequent Access of Its Web Site
The New York Times announced today that it plans to charge frequent readers of its web site starting next year. The Times said readers will get a certain number of articles free each month, then be charged a flat fee for unlimited access. It didn't specify how many free articles a reader would be able to access. I can't help wonder what this may eventually mean for the NY Times Company's other newspapers, particularly the North Bay region's Santa Rosa Press Democrat.
Newspapers Need to Make Money to Survive
The question I asked in the heading is being asked in some fashion by every newspaper. The culture of the Internet has lead us to expect online content to be free. But newspapers can't survive by continuing to give all their content away. The professionals who research, write and organize the content need to make a living. Online advertising raises peanuts compared to what newspapers earn from print ads. Classified advertising used to be the bread and butter of newspaper revenue. Craig's List and other online classifieds have cost newspapers that revenue source.
News Still Originates with Traditional Media
PEW's Project for Excellence in Journalism recently published a study showing, even with the proliferation of online news sources, most original news reporting still comes from traditional media: newspapers, radio and television. The study showed "95% of stories with fresh information came from 'old media', and the vast majority of that from newspapers."
If newspapers die, who will do the work in our communities to find out and report what our institutions, businesses and government are doing? There's plenty of people online who will comment and respond to the news. (Yours truly, for example). But it takes traditional journalists to uncover the initial information.
What Would You Do?
If you read a daily newspaper online and don't subscribe to its print version, would you pay to keep accessing its web site? Would you pay if the paper stopped publishing a print edition? I'm interested in reading your response.
Posted by Gina Cuclis at 1/20/2010 6:22 PM 
Categories: Newspapers, State of the Media
Tags: news Gina Cuclis television Santa Rosa Press Democrat radio newspapers New York Times PEW Craig's List
Categories: Newspapers, State of the Media
Tags: news Gina Cuclis television Santa Rosa Press Democrat radio newspapers New York Times PEW Craig's List
I do want to support the continuing reporting of objective news, especially investigative reporting, and for the most part the print media probably do the best job with this. The media is facing a very basic change in how they can maintain their quality and objectivity and still afford to remain in business. Therefore I would most likely agree to pay for some online news sources, but how much and which publications would depend on how much they would charge, how important their news is to me, and how much respect I have for their reportorial abilities. It would also depend on whether I was already paying for their print editions, if they have any. We all need to see where the entire industry is headed before deciding how best to access the news in the future, but one way or another I will continue to support reliable sources of objective news reporting which is absolutely essential to our democracy.
Reply to this
Keeping professional journalism supported and thriving is crucial to our nation and the world. Without objective news, public opinion would be shaped by those with the loudest voices and self-centered agendas. I would definitely pay for online news from our traditional media. Diana
Reply to this
You raise what I think is the key issue: Where is the entire industry heading? The U.S. news media used to be called the Fourth Estate. This referred to its role in our democracy as the watchdog of government. Who will be the watchdog if there are no local newspapers to send reporters to city hall, school board meetings, etc. Volunteers blogging their opinions won't replace the trained journalist striving to be objective. Thanks Yale for your insightful comments.
Reply to this
Readers have never supported newspapers. The nominal cost of a newspaper has always been about showing to the advertiser that the readers wanted the content.
Among the reasons that advertisers have been unwilling to fund online publications is that with the more precise metrics of online tracking ads look less effective than print (when, done right, I believe that they're not, but "done right" is another discussion), and that they're enjoying the disintermediation of not having "reporters" in the loop: I enjoy woodworking, and right now the best links to articles about other woodworker's projects often come from a tool seller's mailing list, rather than a woodworking magazine.
On the value of reporting, a friend of mine tells the story of being in the lunch room at an animation studio you've heard of. He was reading a New York Times piece on computer animation, and saying "this is crap, and all wrong". He turned the page, or skipped to the next session, and was later heard to mumble "wow, this piece on terrorism in Afghanistan is fascinating".
A coworker turned to him and said "somewhere, in a camp in Afghanistan, there's a terrorist saying 'this piece on computer animation is fascinating'".
The rise of the amateur has shown just how misinformed and clueless many (dare I say most?) reporters and editors are. "The News" looks all authoritative and interesting 'til we see it cover a topic we actually know something about, then we realize that the skill of the "journalist" isn't in understanding the topic, it's in writing a compelling story. And, for the most part, the information they're writing about has been provided by organizations that have a very strong interest the tone of the story.
Often they're the same ones that have purchased the ads.
As I've noted for years now, long before the net threatened the papers: When it comes to media, you are not the consumer, you are the product. The advertisers are the consumer.
Yes, we need to support a way to get information about events that affect our political decisions, or our lives, but if that's been happening through the current system it's only been as a happy byproduct (witness, for instance, the malfeasance and single-sourcing of the New York Times in the whole Iraq war run-up).
So the question is not, and should not, be "how do we save newspapers", it should be "what are we going to replace them with". I think a good portion of this will be more informed citizen journalism, and I think we'll all be richer for it.
Reply to this
Oh, just to be a little less ornery and cranky: Yes, I will pay a subscription fee for news. I already send donations off to several content publishers I think are worthy of my support. As NPR does more written reporting, I'll probably get back on that bandwagon, though to the NPR organization directly as I can't handle the deluge of junk mail that comes from donating to a local radio station that I generally can't get good reception from anyway.
As a fairly recent (2 years) Petaluman trying to become active in my community I would *love* to pay a moderate amount for a good local news source. I haven't found that yet. The best I have found is following various local politicians and interested parties on their blogs and Twitter feeds.
I'd love to read someone who intelligently distilled meetings of various local governing boards effectively. Who was able to give intelligent background on the sides involved in various debates. I haven't seen that level of care in the Argus Courier, and the Press Democrat spreads its wings more broadly than I find useful.
The difference, for instance, between the actual papers and the Argus Courier article in the recent Regency vs Petaluma lawsuit was amazing. The Empire Report version was almost as concise, but had far more background and detail. So although I'm not necessarily a fan of his politics, I'd like to give Michael Aparicio incentive to write more on local issues.
I'd also love to get information feeds directly from local public safety and services organizations and administrations, rather than having local newspapers misspell and leave out critical information in their transcriptions.
Reply to this
Thanks for posing these questions, Gina. And also to everyone for participating.
Some fantastic points have been made here, I won't presume to think I can add too much more, but Dan Lyke has raised a couple items worth chiming in on:
The Santa Rosa Police Department (as do many other Santa Rosa chunks of data) has a feed for its press releases here:
http://ci.santa-rosa.ca.us/doclib/police_pr/_layouts/listfeed.aspx?List={557B8733-487E-43D8-93B1-E8B76C27C459}
see also: http://ci.santa-rosa.ca.us/doclib/police_pr/Pages/default.aspx
And, I've got to say, I agree that Michael Aparicio has done a marvelous job! He has managed to put the kind of effort into telling the Petaluma Regency story that NO OTHER information organization has. And he's done it for no pay, no reward. I can only guess that he's done it for the love of the adventure of the process, and for the personal value he finds in consensus seeking from a well informed discussion.
...and [fortunately] you CAN help make certain that people like Michael Aparicio are encouraged to participate for barely a buck a week: http://www.empirereport.org/fund-a-journalist/north-bay-community-beats/
I look forward to seeing some reporting and some sharing from all of you. No reason to hesitate. Nobody's making any money off of Empire Report. (another critical component of credibility and community-building that I'd love to talk about another time)
~jake bayless
Reply to this
Looks like the Feed URL got bungled above - the curly bracket at the end is part of the URL. Here it is pre-shortened: http://bit.ly/8iNLVl
~jake
Reply to this
Thank you Jake for answering Dan's question. The trend is for businesses and government agencies to have "newsrooms" on their websites. Corporations have had them for awhile.
As newspapers decline, the likelihood of having anyone covering local government meetings goes down. One volunteer with the passion to write about one issue doesn't scratch the surface. There are nine cities in Sonoma Co. Furthermore, the Press Democrat is the only news organization sending a reporter to the Board of Supervisors meeting each week.
Nonprofit news organizations, like NPR, still have to sell sponsorships to pay for the cost of gathering news. The idea that we're going to have quality news reporting without anyone being paid to do the work is unrealistic.
Reply to this
Gina, on "newsrooms on the websites", a few anecdotes:
Sometime in the early '90s I was a naive young nerd starting an Internet company back before anyone had heard of this newfangled thing. Our project was the outgrowth of a community group of people who were trying to build a real-time network in Chattanooga Tennessee, and as such one of the people who was helping us was the brilliant publicist who managed to get Mother Jones magazine to declare Chattanooga the "greenest city in America" or something similar in one of those years.
We were a couple of techies, but R. got the local TV stations interested in us, and showed up with some local reporters and cameramen, and then handed them written copies of the interview they were about to conduct.
We naive geeks were aghast! We're telling the reporters what they're going to ask? Isn't that kind of condescending? Nope: That's exactly how it's done. In fact, until we figured it out, every time we showed up without R.'s help to an interview and weren't handing the reporter the written article they were about to file, we got rolled eyes and a lack of publicity.
So we dutifully recited the answers, they went back to the studios and dubbed in the questions, and everyone was happier.
So, yeah: What the corporate newsrooms are doing is putting out the content as they'd be giving it to the reporter.
Which brings me to: A few years later I was employed at Pixar during the launch of Toy Story. This was big news, both inside Pixar, because it was a formerly unknown company making a big splash, and in movies, because it was an animated film from Disney that wasn't from inside Disney.
As the week or two post-release went by the internal mailing list was flooded with news stories as we found 'em, as our families mailed them to us from their small hometown papers. Again and again I was completely floored by how reporters from all across the country, small towns and big cities, could take the same press kit and mis-spell stuff, introduce errors, mangle quotes, and make an absolute hash of some basic info.
So: We get the press kits directly from the companies without having them mangled by people who can't accurately transcribe the company's name? Heck yeah I'm excited about more direct news!
99.44% of "journalism" as its actively practiced is taking a press kit from a publicist, figuring out which publicist to call to get a press kit for the stock quotes from the "alternate view", mangling those together with some spelling and grammatical errors and a introducing a whole bunch of flaws and fuzzy thinking, and publishing that as an article.
If we could just get reporters to link to their original sources, these press kits from the organizations whose representatives they quote, we'd raise the bar dramatically.
So, thanks Michael Aparicio and the Santa Rosa PD and everyone else publishing those sources.
Reply to this
Two other anecdotes of dubious relevance:
In that same Internet startup era, we naive young geeks went into the offices of a muckety muck at the Chattanooga Times or News-Free Press, I forget which. We said "here's what's coming, do you want to be a part of it?" He said "I don't see the business model". We said "we don't know what your business model is either, but it's coming".
He had a decade and a half of clear warning, and he (and the whole rest of his industry) flubbed it.
Slightly previous to that, some friends had started a free weekly. In staid conservative Chattanooga, people ate up this slightly edgy paper that was willing to speak up. Among other things, they included "# of TVs" in their bar reviews, higher numbers leading to lower reviews. I forget whether the key badness was that or something else, but they panned a new eatery in town. The next week the funders of that eatery pulled all of their ads. The week after that the friends of said funders had pulled all their ads. After not terribly long, they couldn't afford to keep publishing even with the largesse of their friends and readers tossing press costs at them.
One honest review of a restaurant: One dead paper. Given that the local government was fairly well tied up with various local sources of capital, you can also imagine that had they managed to survive longer they'd have had to stay pretty generic on local political issues.
On writing reports of local government meetings: Alas, you're right. On the other hand, what I see coming out of the Argus Courier coverage of Petaluma issues is worse than having to read the minutes myself. I've currently volunteered and am about 6 months into a two year term serving on the Petaluma Technology & Telecommunications Advisory Committee, and am trying to stay abreast of various meetings related to that. I'm going to have to see if I can take my notes from things like the Petaluma economic development plan meetings and get 'em up on Empire Report, 'cause currently they're languishing with 3 or 4 readers on one of my web sites.
That doesn't solve the problem, but it might be a step.
Reply to this
Just to add to the mix--at times I wonder if the Interet (Old Media, New Media, Bloggers, etc.) isn't a modern day Tower of Babel. And this comes from one of the players
Reply to this
At what point--if we are not already there--does the Internet become a Tower of Babel?
Reply to this
It's the first time I've heard about an online news paper charging it's visitors. These kind of sited get a lot of money from advertising and I don't think it's such a loss for them to give free online access to the readers.
Reply to this
Trianz, Salon has experimented with charging readers, Wall Street Journal and The Economist both do (as do high end news and analysis sources like Stratfor), and the New York Times has been threatening to.
So it's not unheard of. And for some media outlets (ie: sources like Stratfor), the reader and the customer really are the same. For some, like WSJ and Economist, the customer is mixed between the reader and the advertiser. And then for more traditional papers, the advertiser is the customer and the reader is the product.
Reply to this