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Interesting article. I’d read the whole thing.

In short, a bunch of anonymous claims that online folks should have a greater leadership role in newspaper organizations.

They are speaking mostly of editorial, but I’d say it’s even more important for the business/strategy side to be run by folks who grasp the technology. After all, if you don’t understand something like RSS, how can you envision using it to make money, or even realize it’s the most important initiative we have in front of us. There is no getting around the fact that we are managing a software product.

Like Gretzky said, “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.”

On a more immediate note, the article touches upon something I’ve been debating for a while.

“. . .We live in a Google economy, where a wealth of news and information is at our fingertips. There’s simply too much available, so easily and free, for it to make sense for most news companies to charge for most of their content. ”

Which makes me think, I strongly believe that if every article newspapers ever published online was still available at it’s original location, their monthly traffic would be double what it is today. Maybe more.

I see no reason why ad programs like Google would not scale monetarily with traffic, which means they’d probably be  bringing in double  the amount of revenue from those programs.

Which leads to the question of whether  that sum would be  greater than the potential sum of sold archives. I think it would be, but time will tell.

In addition, there is the unmeasurable other 99.99% of the visitors to those pages that won’t click a google ad, but appreciate our content being available.

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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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Around six or seven years ago the subject of free site vs. subscriber-based was a big one. Big surprise that I have never waivered from free.

But I just realized how ahead of the game I was back then when I said to one editor, “we may want to charge different rates, because some of the site-users will be causing a drain on us, but others will be contributing. ya know what I mean?”

“No,” she said, which was understandable since we didn’t have forums of any kind at the time.

On a side note, at that time I was pushing for the company to adopt the Arsdigita Community System (see OpenACS ), and I admit that my notion of “paying contributors” was heavily influenced by Philip Greenspun.

Scott Karp seems to be thinking that the time has come to pay the users.

What a great way to promote Citizen Journalism (or whatever you want to call hyper-local-non-journalist-majors-traditional-media-aggregated-content)

For less than one yearly salary (I hope!) a news company could pay for ten local blog posts a day at ten bucks a piece.

10 X 10 X 365 = $36,500

Fifteen bucks if a photo, audio or video is included, of course. ; )
But really, we should just let the bloggers keep all the Google ad money, even though we might be driving traffic, and figure we’ll make it up at a higher level of long term relationship marketing.

In other words, they get the nickle and dimes and we get the gesture and attention data for the big payoff.

Sounds perfectly fair to me.

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So I’m in a meeting with some Newsroom folks and all of Senior Management.

After most everybody laid out their views on where we should take our web strategy and what concerns they had about allowing user-generated content (their new buzzword) they turned to me and said “What do you think?”

I said, “I disagree with most of what has been said here, because it’s mostly based on the false premise that the Web is a publishing medium and it’s not.

(short pause for effect)

It’s a communications medium.”

Some polite nods followed and some quizzical looks.

I continued, “You are speaking as if we are some sort of gatekeepers, but that was only true because we owned a printing press. We controlled the distribution channel.

Now we are on a level playing field. So it’s meaningless when you tell a user that they can’t upload that photo. They don’t care. They’ve already got it up on Flickr. They were doing you a favor.”

Most likely very few people in the room knew what Flickr was, would never ask because of corporate posturing, and never felt compelled to find out later)

So then the discussion leader says, “I think we all on the same page.”

Oh really.

I don’t think so.

You think so because Corporate Central has mandated we embrace user-generated content. I know what that means, even if they don’t truly mean it. If you really want it to be a success, it better damn well mean what I take it to mean. It doesn’t.
What it means in your mind is that we allow others to publish moderated content on our site and play by our rules.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but I don’t think that’s good enough.

Here is the bottom line:

The next generation of News websites that attempt user-generated content will initially attract some users but eventually fail to be compelling enough to retain them in an ever-growing sea of user-control and distribution commoditization.

Over-supply of journalism has been a concept traveling around the blogosphere of late. We certainly know we have an over-supply of information in general. That makes just about anything digital a commodity. And  a commodity is not something to build a business upon.

I’d like to say that relationships are not a commodity and that’s where we should head. It certainly seems where many startups and established players are with the whole social software movement. But relationships too may get commoditized if social networks become fluid and agile.

What can’t be commoditized? Creativity, perhaps. Perhaps not. I’ll guess we eventually land somewhere and just get compensated for our contribution and compensate others for theirs, with no intermediaries. But we have some time before then.

So back to the news.

Perhaps in the next iteration, the news organizations will finally wake up and realize the conversation is happening, and “user-generated content” is not a conversation because it literally bespeaks the fact you don’t consider the user an equal.

Let’s get rid of that buzzword. Let’s get rid of this condescension.

Let’s get it on. [disclosure: I am not Marvin Gaye]

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Do you think this guy could be right?

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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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