Survey Shows Readers Won't Pay for Online News
By Gina Cuclis
If I worked at the San Francisco Chronicle or the Santa Rosa Press Democrat I would be very concerned about the results of a survey conducted in January by the PEW Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism and its Internet & American Life Project.
Four in Five Don't Want to Pay
Pew's annual State of the News Media report released this week indicates newspapers' economic future will continue to be bleak. There is still no identified effective method for monetizing the growing online news audience. As stated in the report's overview, "... even among the most avid news consumers online, only about one in five at this point say they would be willing to pay, and this does not include less voracious news consumers."
What I find interesting is how the Internet has changed readers' expectations. News from print newspapers, with the exception of local entertainment tabloids, was never free. I've discussed this issue in previous posts, and received a lot of comments when I asked Sonoma County residents, Would you pay to read the Press Democrat online?
What's Next for the North Bays' Dailies?
The regions' daily papers keep getting smaller, with fewer pages and fewer people on staff. Even though the Press Democrat publishes a print edition each day, it's not unusual to read reports about meetings or situations that occurred several days earlier. More than once, I've read about something in the PD that I'd already learned about days prior via social media.
PD Trumps Itself with Twitter
On March 11 there was a tweet and numerous reteets from a PD reporter announcing that the FPPC had exonerated the nonprofit environmental group Sonoma County Conservation Action. The full story wasn't on the PD's website until three days later, and wasn't in print until March 15. In an era when we can get the latest news from around the world online 24 hours a day, it's taking days for local news to get reported.
My point is, as more people continue to migrate to getting their news online, and they don't want to pay for it, how is the Press Democrat going to keep up? I would appreciate your thoughts. Comments welcomed.
If I worked at the San Francisco Chronicle or the Santa Rosa Press Democrat I would be very concerned about the results of a survey conducted in January by the PEW Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism and its Internet & American Life Project.
Four in Five Don't Want to Pay
Pew's annual State of the News Media report released this week indicates newspapers' economic future will continue to be bleak. There is still no identified effective method for monetizing the growing online news audience. As stated in the report's overview, "... even among the most avid news consumers online, only about one in five at this point say they would be willing to pay, and this does not include less voracious news consumers."
What I find interesting is how the Internet has changed readers' expectations. News from print newspapers, with the exception of local entertainment tabloids, was never free. I've discussed this issue in previous posts, and received a lot of comments when I asked Sonoma County residents, Would you pay to read the Press Democrat online?
What's Next for the North Bays' Dailies?
The regions' daily papers keep getting smaller, with fewer pages and fewer people on staff. Even though the Press Democrat publishes a print edition each day, it's not unusual to read reports about meetings or situations that occurred several days earlier. More than once, I've read about something in the PD that I'd already learned about days prior via social media.
PD Trumps Itself with Twitter
On March 11 there was a tweet and numerous reteets from a PD reporter announcing that the FPPC had exonerated the nonprofit environmental group Sonoma County Conservation Action. The full story wasn't on the PD's website until three days later, and wasn't in print until March 15. In an era when we can get the latest news from around the world online 24 hours a day, it's taking days for local news to get reported.
My point is, as more people continue to migrate to getting their news online, and they don't want to pay for it, how is the Press Democrat going to keep up? I would appreciate your thoughts. Comments welcomed.
Posted by Gina Cuclis at 3/16/2010 3:14 PM 
Categories: Newspapers, State of the Media
Tags: San Francisco Chronicle Twitter Sonoma County newspapers Santa Rosa Press Democrat PEW
Categories: Newspapers, State of the Media
Tags: San Francisco Chronicle Twitter Sonoma County newspapers Santa Rosa Press Democrat PEW
Anyone have some hard numbers for relative cost of printing hardcopy vs relative cost of publishing on the web?
My suspicion is that the problem isn't that readers aren't willing to pay for the news, they haven't been for years. I believe that advertisers (the real customers of newspapers) are unwilling to pay for online readers.
And they "why" of that has, I think, some more interesting answers.
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Dan,
Thanks for your question and comments. I can't give you figures, but the main costs of producing the news is in personnel. To pay professional reporters and editors is the same. Paper, ink and delivery make print editions more costly.
Advertisers don't like online ads, because they don't work. There's data in the PEW report about how online readers ignore ads.
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Thanks, that's what I thought. So the advertiser portion of the costs of supporting an incremental online reader should be far more than the costs of supporting an incremental paper reader.
I'll dig deeper on the "they don't work" on online ads. Google seems to disagree, as do a bunch of web comics and similar sites I read that are advertiser supported.
I see two reasons for "they don't work" from the ads at newspaper sites I read:
First is that the style of the ads is the sort that I actively don't read. The pop-ups, or the ones that clamor for my attention by changing the layout of the screen, are worth actively blocking. I don't, but I definitely don't click on anything that tries to make itself deliberately intrusive.
The second is the issue of measurement: I talked to a guy once who sold coupons, and he said that the first sale was easy, setting up the first sale so there would be subsequent sales was super hard because he had to prime the merchants to expect that there'd be a somewhere <1% response rate.
I think these two things feed on each other: Advertisers haven't thought about or haven't been educated about what the response rate for print really is (do you really expect 50% on a paper with circulation of 30k?), so when they're told there have been 50k impressions and they've gotten 10 click-throughs they should be ecstatic, not bummed.
But as I said, I'm going off without having read the report, I'll try to get to that.
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By pure chance I happen to be interested in the subject of stores scanning drivers' licenses for certain purchases. In additiion to the usual real world "field invesitgations" I ran a few quick searches on Google. Guess what? There was a lot of information on the topic--mostly from bloggers reporting on their real life experiences. Very little, so far, from the traditional media sources--print or otherwise.
So is this a sign that bloggers & social media are the wave of the future??? Not sure that is a "good" thing but it does seem to be a possible direction at this point.
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An update to respond to my question about how is the PD going to keep up? Yesterday it launched a new website that seems designed to build an online community of folks interested in local politics: http://www.watchsonomacounty.com. This is a move to have a conversation with politicians and local political insiders. Check out the twitter feed scroll on the home page of local political tweeters. You'll see @ginacuclis.
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