Gerry: Is that an argument? Straw men burn easily. I never said links are essential for communicating on the web. What I did say was that you can’t have a web without links. Not the same.

I didn’t realize you could use links in this comment system. So since you ask:

Tim Berners-Lee in 1991: “The WWW world consists of documents, and links.”
Me on this post (in which you will find more links)

Even on the face of it a paywall business model cannot work. You can’t charge for a delivery system which is essentially free. You can’t charge for what others will provide for free. You can’t sell to advertisers a readership that you have intentionally kept small. You can’t conduct business on the web in a fundamentally anti-web way (for long).

You also can’t support arguments with false premises. You said the newspaper industry is “the only one in America that is expected to give its product … in its electronic version … away for free.” But it’s not, broadcasters also do, in the exact same sense of “product” that you meant. (The actual product is readership – that is what is sold to advertisers.)

Look, you’re obviously not some kind of anti-web curmudgeon, wishing the Internet would just go away so proper journalists can get on with things. Some of what you say is spot on. The first two parts of your formula – go printless, and go local – I think are exactly right.

But waging technological warfare on readers with high-pressure vacuum seals around content just can not be the right way to go. It’s all about the readership numbers. Readership is the product.

1) Donations. In the San Francisco area, a reporter is seeking donations to cover the city for one year. Novel idea.

2) Another outfit uses contributions from readers to cover news. Readers can submit as little as $2 and once the pool of money is large enough, an editor will assign a reporter to check on the issue from problems with absenteeism at the Oakland Police Department, problems with clean water or conflict at the public school. The idea is that a news story cost a couple of hundred dollars in labor so once the money is raised, the reporter can be unleashed to do her work.

Obviously, both of these models are controversial, but both show some enterprise in a day of reckoning for newsrooms.

I would add one other model.
I teach at a university. What would happen if we used our student reporters to cover the community? Would any organization join that cause as dangerous as it is?

Michael Ray Smith
smith@featurewriting.net
Professor
Campbell University in Buies Creek
30 miles south of Raleigh, N.C.

I’ve been out of the journalism biz for more than seven years now … and glad of it. It must be miserable to still be in it. Sometimes an outsider can see things more clearly than an insider.

I’m not an economist, not an Internet expert. I’m just trying to write common sense. If I’m a newspaper publisher and I and almost all my colleagues around the nation are failing with Plan A, I would at least seriously consider a Plan B.

To Mr. Crosbie: no, I did not flunk Econ 101. I took it at a better school than you’re teaching at. Let me try another way with you: I would liken a local-only paper web site to a newsletter. Newsletters are very focused and most are quite expensive. They might be a good business model to emulate. But then, you might be right and I certainly might be wrong. So I would say, sir, hire yourself to a paper and show us all how you guide it out of financial ruin.

To David Westphal: David, I disagree that we’re “early” in the media transition. For all too many papers, they are late in the transition … i.e., about to fail. I just think they need to do something different and that is to stop giving it away for free.

To Damon Kiesow: Damon, I don’t know about you but I don’t get my TV for free. I pay $123 every month to Comcast (for cable TV and Internet access). Otherwise, I wouldn’t have TV (no rabbit ears). Similarly, isn’t conventional radio fading and being eased out by the pay satellite services?

To Steve Fox: you’re only 100 percent wrong. The old model, the one that doesn’t work, is the give it away for free model.

To David Weinstock: No way for me to disagree with you. I’m glad to hear there are plenty of good weekly papers and local TV news operations. All I know is, there were no good weekly papers in Northern Virginia when I lived there and no good ones in SW Florida where I live now. I’ve found it a waste of time to watch the local TV.

To Tim Burden: ah, Tim, I didn’t see any link in your missive. I know links can be useful but are they really essential to communicating on the Internet since you yourself didn’t use one? (Unless I missed it and sorry if I did.)

To Alan Langford: Your comment I found quite intelligent. I hope you’ll forgive me for disagreeing. To me, Twitter can augment how we learn what’s going on and in a few cases even be primary. I don’t see how it can be primary day in, day out on a multiplicity of local stories competing against a large, experienced staff of hopefully professional reporters. But I can’t prove I’m right or that you’re wrong. Technology can surprise and overwhelm us with its new directions and maybe you can see Twitter’s potential far better than I.

To Roger Plothow: to you, sir, my best wishes. A good friend of mine still at Gannett tells me a new round of buyout offers is being readied for her staff and that layoffs will be imposed if not enough opt for the buyout. It is people like her, and you, I was thinking of when I wrote this. You are the only poster who is actually faced with these terrible questions of a paper’s survival. I only worked for the big boys … AP, Gannett, big papers … so I certainly accede to your feeling that it may take a combination of strategies for papers your size to keep going.

Twitter has merely brought something that has been happening for a very long time into the mainstream. As a case in point, I learnt about the death of Princess Diana via an international online chat almost three hours before the local media picked it up. This is a decade ago. Times have changed.

Information is now free it and will remain so. Any attempt to charge for access to it is absolutely doomed. The only hope that news media, particularly “print” media have for survival is by adding value. This means aggregating sources, adding perspective, and performing astute analysis. Even so, most of the revenue from these activities will be derived from online advertising, and those revenues will be orders of magnitude below what the industry currently sees as normal.

The newspaper as we know it is dead. There is no model that will resuscitate it, period. Rigor mortis has set in, the patient just doesn’t fully realize it yet.

Also, newspapers make their money off of advertising, not subscriptions.

Brian.

Note that is a precisely opposite outcome to the author’s thesis.

As another commenter pointed out, the news has always been given away free. Even a subscription to a print newspaper only helps offset the cost of that outdated and environmentally unsound delivery method.

As someone once said – I wish I could remember who – never in history has a company amassed a huge audience and then failed to make money from it. That is the business any content provider should be in, despite these incessant squawks to the contrary. And a large audience for news will fail to be amassed if it is hidden in private little walled content gardens.

The web is built on documents and links between documents. Just ask Berners-Lee, who invented it, and should know. Paywalls discourage links, and so are anathema to the web – probably not a good way to conduct business on the web, right?

So while I agree whole-heartedly that newspapers should get out of print and focus on developing audience on the web, I think constant attempts to revive paywalls run counter to the cause.

May I suggest some house rules?

1. Let’s begin any discussion of this issue by acknowledging the vast difference between the 100 or so large newspapers in the country and 1,000 or more newspapers serving smaller, more isolated markets. The issues between large and small markets couldn’t be more different.

2. People who disagree with someone’s position are obliged to proffer a better one, complete with a quantifiable defense of the alternative business model. Simply suggesting that someone’s position is “so 20th Century” is lazy and not helpful.

3. Let’s agree that there’s not going to be a silver bullet. We’re going to have to try many different approaches in various combinations before we discover a workable business model, and there may yet emerge any number of business models that apply to particular kinds of markets.

4. Let’s celebrate and encourage contrarian thinking. Taking a series of uniform approaches is one reason we’re in this mess.

Personally, I think some combination of online subscriptions, ad bundling that includes print and various non-print options, and the continued production of a compelling print product for the foreseeable future will likely be the ticket for most small- and medium-market newspapers where, yes, the standard for good, comprehensive and compelling journalism is still set by the local “paper.” If, indeed, we’re not producing a local news product that is unique and compelling, none of the rest of this matters.

Roger Plothow
Editor and Publisher
Post Register
Idaho Falls, ID

I thought this was a pretty good analytical piece until I came across that same old piece of tripe all newspaper people dish up and expect readers to relish:

“Who else can do it better? Local TV station news anchors and skimpy throwaway weekly papers can’t. They feed off the big local paper anyway.”

WRONG!!!!!

This is a fairly typical fallacy held closely to the breasts of nearly every daily newspaper person I have ever met.

Like it or not, there are a lot of very good weekly newspaper organizations out there in the world that got their start serving markets too small for the bigs to bother about. After a number of successful years, they usually start to encroach on the bigs’ territories.

And there are lots of good local TV broadcast news operations out there that beat newspapers to the story every single day. And then, they beat them again with updates throughout the day.

Why do you think there are so many TVs in news rooms these days? For the soaps? Newspapers leech so many stories from their local broadcast competitors and vice-versa that it can only be described as a symbiotic relationship.

FALLACY #2

“And there’s no good answer. The so-called experts use airy, meaningless phrases like ‘because that’s the Internet culture’ as if this notion just floated down from heaven somehow.”

Actually, this is a very good answer. You can cry foul until the cows come home, but this culture exists and those who choose to ignore it, are doomed to be swept away.

Your column advocates cultural change. Admit it and a lot of that Internet angst you’re feeling will just drift airily away.

The real problem here, as I see it, is that it is both easier and more preferable for people under the age of 44 (the average age of U.S. newspaper readers) to watch the news rather than read it.

Then there is that other HUGE slug of America who is not interested in the news…period. The ugly question there is: “Do they hate the news or the news media?”

I would commend your attention to some studies done by the Pew Internet and American Life Project (www.pewinternet.org) … yes, it’s some of that nasty, free Internet information. There are some pretty good studies on that site that indicate a general national decline in interest in all kinds of news.

Me? I think people hate to read…and a column that embraced the reality of that would be a helluva thing.