Anyone in the Newspaper/Web business is aware of print-to-web products. Here is an example from the Allentown Morning Call.

The idea is that these special sections, which are often(but not always) advertorial, are put online in an awkward format, but since advertisers are willing to pay an upsell fee, it can end up being a decent percentage of the online revenue.

Something like that. It varies.

A more horrific example is when the print product is emulated with a Flash flipbook.

I think it’s high time that newspapers ended this ridiculous practice. It’s harming their reputation by making them look clueless in the online marketing arena.

If you want to offer the PDF of the print product, do so. But let’s not feign to be doing anything for our print advertisers by throwing this crap up. The usability is so horrible, it is of practically no value to the users, which means it can’t be of any value to the advertisers.

It’s no wonder that local online advertising is a hard sell. It’s been presented in a way that lacks any real value and the advertisers sense that.

Sure, it might hurt in the short-run, but maybe it doesn’t have to. Offer the advertisers an option to do some “real” online marketing with that forced upsell.

The real issue is the conflict of interest of saving declining print revenues, while trying to build online ones, as I mentioned about classified ads in my last post.

This conflict includes circulation revenue, as pointed out by Richard Addis, and expounded upon by Jeff Jarvis. I’ll only add to their points that circulation revenue covers print and distribution costs. When those costs are largely removed, there is no need to pass them on to user, and that’s the reason why web content is free.

At one point someone got it into their head that people were paying content. They weren’t. They were paying for print and distribution costs.

And all of this really goes back to my point about the value of the distribution channel.

When you control the channel, which could be the press, or it could be a cable box or a radio frequency, that channel has value.

When the channel is a commodity like the web, your content doesn’t necessarily become less valuable, but all other content is potentially equally valuable.

That means that you need to change the way you create content and do business. I hate to quote myself, but  I think an old post of mine was on the right track.

I once had an editor tell me that the value of our newspaper’s organization was in the process we had created for producing good journalism.

Not so.

For newspapers, the business value was that they owned a press, and therefore a distribution channel, not in any of the journalism that resulted.

Read that carefully. I’m not saying there was no value in the journalism. It held tremendous value. It still does.

That editor, though, was not giving due credit to the medium. The product which is created is a direct result of the medium which it is created for. Remember your Mcluhan, folks.

I rushed this post do to a busy schedule, but I think the conclusion is somewhat clear.

Newspapers need to free themselves of the baggage that is weighing down their online strategies. Let print be print, and online be online, and don’t let one hinder the other.

May the best man win.

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Jarvis notes the changing role of journalists:

A change of the role of journalists — and their relationship with the public — from owner sof the story to moderators, editors, enablers, and educators.

Networked news is good, but “SharedNews” is better. Well, that’s just a term I coined some time back to talk about two-way RSS or what might be called RSS Groups.

This is where everyone has access to a feed, much like an email or usenet group. It’s a more sophisticated way to structure a group blog, and it can be completely distributed. Check out SkinnyFarm for an example.

I’ll remind Jeff about a post he wrote about SSE , and I commented on it.

If RSS is two-way, like it can be, then networked news collaboration can be taken to a much higher level.

I’m digressing somewhat, because the real issue here is that news organizations must realize they need to approach the conversation from a peer level.

It’s no longer a lecture, where audience members must raise their hand to contribute. It’s one big dinner party, and no-one likes the guy who tries to dominate the conversation.

That’s why Dave Winer is right about exclusivity. There is an implicit understanding that we are all equal on the web, and any attempts to create a class system will fail. Exclusive 2.0 conferences are making the same mistake that the Old Regimes made.

It’s also why the user-generated content strategies of news organizations are driving me nuts.

By it’s nature, it’s treating the site-user as a lesser voice.

It’s as if newspapers think users will feel priveliged to get their stuff on the organization’s website.

While that may be somewhat true for the New York Times, I don’t think the local newspaper in many towns holds that kind of reverence, especially with the younger follks.

Their friends are more impressed with their MySpace page, than with your poorly designed, million dollar content management system.

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My big push this week was for full-text feeds in the RSS feeds from all Tribune newspapers sites.

Not a new argument by any means but . . .(cue up quotable excerpt)
In the light of the blogosphere going apeshit over Dave’s “mobile river of news,” I think it’s more critical than ever that media companies stop clinging to the out-dated page-view model and begin offering full-text feeds.

Added: See what I mean? If we concentrate on relationships and not traffic, we will get paid more. Huh? The doctor uses a scalpel not a cave-man club. Whuh? The graduate student studies The Battle of Gettysburg, the 8th grader studies American History (And never gets past World War I). Is it clear now?

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I’m glad Jeff Jarvis pointed to this report again. Here’s an idea.

None of the newspapers include ads in their RSS feeds. That’s a good thing, as I’m a firm believer that the RSS item is the ad.

But many people do read ads in Newspapers. Some look for grocery coupons or department store sales.

I’d like to see how many Newspapers are providing RSS feeds of print ads. They key is to tag them well; fashion, restaurants etc.

A lot of Tribune’s ( I work for them ) print ads go into ShopLocal.com, along with ads from Gannett and McClatchy the other part-owners of the service.

I don’t see any RSS feeds there. If that’s true, it’s a shame.

Instead, they try to stuff them into mini-sites or worse, mock-print flipbooks .

A long time ago, I suggested personal RSS feeds using SSE in a creative way that could create customized, two-way marketing conversations (I’ll post more later), but I backed off because for editorial content, I agreed it added little value to the user and meant registering.

But for people explicitly looking for commercial content targeted at their wants, they seem to be perfect.

Until we have decent attention filters, this seems to be the best option we can offer the users, and I think they would recognize that and participate.

Then it wouldn’t be long before the local merchants realize they don’t need big graphic print ads and should just converse directly with the users.

But the newspapers would still be adding value by having an aggregated and targeted audience. Like they did in the old days but in a way that makes sense online.

I have yet to even see an email program of this nature from the Newspapers, but RSS works much better anyway, for obvious reasons.

Conclusion: Forget about your old model of interuption and embrace permission marketing. Build an audience and connect buyers and sellers in the most efficient way for the users, not the advertisers. They will appreciate it and you will profit from it.

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Newsome counters a Jarvis post on Social Networks by saying he is singing to the choir :

As as far as niches go- the entire blogosphere is a niche. The tech blogosphere, where most of us hang out, would be a sub niche. A niche inside a sub-niche is not a niche. It’s a clique. That’s a quotable excerpt that will almost certainly not make its way up the mountain.

I don’t normally subscribe to the A-List argument, but it is true that, as in life, there are cliques in Social Networks.

Some are more enviable than others and some are more open to outside input than others.

But Kent has been linked to nearly a thousand times and I see Doc Searls and Dave Winer in that group.

Between both of my blogs, I’ve been linked to about one-tenth of that amount and linkers have included Jarvis, Searls and Winer.

I think they are doing an excellent job.

So is small the new big?

Yes, but look at it this way. I think it compliments Jarvis’s Law of Open Networks.
The Law of Network Fluidity: The number of working affinity groups within a social network should increase proportionately with its number of nodes. All nodes must be able to freely pass into and out of existing and new affinity groups.

If not, then you may have an A-list syndrome.One last point of clarity. I do not mean that a network cannot have a private or exclusive group. Just that there is no unintentional blockage that might signify a network design flaw or central control.

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Reading this post, it occurred to me that at one time everyone wanted to work for a newspaper.

Then everyone wanted to work for Microsoft.

Then Google.

Now everyone wants to work for Jason Calacanis (aka Charles Foster Kane)

[scary music] or is he Boss Jim Gettys?

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Print-side sales, editorial, PR folks have too great of a conflict of interest to effectively succeed online.

And frankly, very few have the prerequisite knowledge of the web to succeed if they wanted to.

I often get the impression that many of these folks don’t even use the web often, never mind having enough savvy to successfully turn it into a business.

Plus, how can you be aggressive in promoting a product that you know is going to cause downsizing in your department, or take revenue away from your already shrinking P&L, especially if Wall Street is breathing down your neck.

As Jarvis points out, we are considered a threat because of this and our online experience is diminished often because the print folks really don’t understand that the rules have changed.

And if they did, they’d be reluctant to embrace those changes anyway.

If a print person understands the web fully enough to succeed there, then they should be given some latitude, but just try to tell them that ten years of journalism or business experience  doesn’t mean a hill of beans out here.

Newspapers are more religion than business to many of their producers. We need a left turn and it’s nearly impossible to get them to budge a few degrees.

One more thing.

It is my opinion that it would be much easier and faster to get the online folks up to speed on traditional journalism and print business practices than it would be to get the print folks to understand the web.

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