Money for nothing
Imagine stepping into Great Harvest Bread where they give you a free slice of bread to sample. You get your free slice and complain that you don't like the taste, but you buy a loaf anyway. Then imagine going in the next day, sampling the bread, complaining about the taste and buying another loaf. Then imagine going in a third time, sampling the bread and announcing that you'll never buy any bread there again. Fair enough. You don't like the bread so why buy it?
But there you are the next day, sampling the bread, pronouncing it bad and leaving the store without buying. The same thing the next day and the next. What should the bread store do?
There is an interesting discussion going on at the letters about people who have canceled their newspaper subscriptions in protest of something we've done, but still read the paper online. For free. Are they guilty of hypocrisy, as one commenter says, or are they simply gaming the system or both?
Feel free to answer that question. I won't. As an editor, my primary interest is reaching readers; whether they've paid is a lesser concern. (Which is good because I don't have to ponder the philosophical questions: "If they aren't buying anything, are they customers? And if they aren't customers, do I have to listen to their complaints?") Yet, the business model of newspapers is based on revenue generated from circulation and advertising. That pays my salary and the salaries of all the people who generate the content we publish online.
Putting newspaper stories online for free concerns the business people in our company, as it does in most newspaper companies. "Why would anyone buy the cow when we give them the milk for free?" they ask. We make money on our online site, but not nearly enough to support the reporting staff. And that's one of the reasons that all of our content is not posted online.
This isn't the beginning of an effort to charge for access to the Web site. We've reinforced the habit of providing the news online for free, and I don't believe there's any going back. But as we experiment with the content online, we're going to experiment with business models online, with forms of registration and advertising.
People have asked me why we publish letters from writers who freely acknowledge that they don't buy the paper. "I guess they get what they pay for," one woman said to me. And that brings us back to that philosophical question I posited above. To a journalist, readers are customers and need to be heard, payment or not.
Comments (4)
To report abuse of the comment feature on this site, please use the feedback form at the bottom of any page.
"Money for nothin' and the chics for free..."
It's certainly beyond me even though I find myself in the same boat. While money trickles in from the blog it's not enough to support a writer, hence the day job.
But alas, what if we never tried?
Posted on June 18, 2005 7:44 PM
The op-ed dept, while always friendly to dissent, seems locked in tradition. Why have a staff that is mostly liberal or conservative?
Why do reporters and op-ed writers guard their political leanings from the public? Why is it the MSM is dominated by liberals, when the few conservative publications, radio and TV networks have growing circulation/viewership and are more profitable?
Why do people on staff like Lex Alexander call themselves Republican when there is not a conservative position they agree with? Why not have a point/counterpoint debate every day on every issue? Why not have written debates between local college students/high school seniors and readers?
Posted on June 22, 2005 7:14 AM
I'll gladly comment on the free online version of the News & Record. First, if the online News & Record isn't profitable, then perhaps that is an issue that the Marketing department needs to address. I would think high online readership would generate more online ads which would generate more revenue to cover the costs. I've always heard that the real money is in the ads, not subscription charges. If you started charging a fee for the online version, I feel your readership would drastically fall off. Reason being, there are multiple websites available for local news (WFMY, WXII, WGHPFOX, etc)
Second, some of us have a subscription to the paper version of the News & Record. Any charge associated for an online version could be waived for these folks. Only nonsubscribers would pay. Once again, your readership may be drastically reduced.
The main problem with any fee-based service is your illustration of free milk. Just because News & Record isn't willing to give away free milk, does not mean that we are going to buy the cow from you. We'll just get our milk free from somebody else.
Posted on June 22, 2005 2:32 PM
Good point truth. This happened at my old hometown paper, Daily Hampshire Gazette in Northampton. I bought the paper at lunchtime anyway but would link to the on-line articles when I was blogging.
Once they went to a pay system, I started linking to the other paper that covered local news. They have nasty pop-up ads but it's still free and I won't link to articles that my readers can't access.
In terms of the Gazette, now being a Noho ex-pat as it were, I still wasn't willing to pay for the content. It wasn't worth the couple of articles a week I might be interested in reading and anything major is covered by the Union News.
Still, they've kept the pay model for some time now and the Greenfield Recorder has always had it. I don't believe they ever offered more than one story for free, but they're a tiny paper in a rural area and the hard copy is about four pages long.
You might want to check out the Gazette and see why and if that model is working for them. It certainly doesn't work for me.
Posted on June 22, 2005 5:46 PM