The overriding theme these days seems to be borrowed from the debate over the war in Afghanistan: dithering. Waffling. Hemming and hawing.

The newspaper industry is shifting from foot to foot, licking its lips, and generally acting like a 14-year-old boy at his first school dance, afraid to take the Big Leap.

This is the screen that pops up on Newsday.com, bugging you to subscribe.

It’s noted that the New York Times, while still cutting editorial staff, is hiring techs to build out its web presence. They recently listed their “Seven Digital Priorities,” which are not to be confused with the Seven Deadly Sins, or the excellent Brad Pitt & Morgan Freeman movie made about them. http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/10/new-york-times-still-uncertain-on-charging-sets-seven-digital-priorities/ Here are the “seven “questions that loom largest to us at the moment”:

1. the future role of Times Topics and other “living articles”
2. openness of Times content, integration of non-Times content, and social media
3. integration of print and digital operations, particularly for department heads
4. improved collaboration between technologists and the newsroom
5. thinking “web first”
6. a stronger strategy for cell phones and other mobile devices
7. redesigning Times article pages to create “an engine of engagement”

Newsday has gone ahead and taken the plunge, just as the New York Times itself predicted here http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/23/business/media/23newsday.html?_r=2&emc=tnt&tntemail1=y

But cynics are starting to point out that the Newsday paywall strategy has less to do with newspaper revenues, and more to do with Cablevision’s lucrative ISP business http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1004031001

Amos Gelb, professor at George Washington U, formerly producer at CNN and ABC, says that the news industry has to start aping the cable-TV industry: http://paidcontent.org/article/419-a-new-financial-model-for-news-straight-from-the-cable-industry/ He’s basically looked at how the BBC manages to subsidize its news operation by charging a tax on every TV in the UK, and decided that the news industry must start taxing ISPs to pay for the content that flows through the intertubes. Good luck with that one.

The excellent Citizen Journalism site Soitu.es,  which has won awards internationally for its elegant design, folded up shop after 22 months, unable to make their business model function to the satisfaction of key investor BBVA http://www.soitu.es/soitu/2009/10/27/actualidad/1256642105_453965.html This article is in Spanish, but there are others, less canonical (to borrow a Google phrase) that you can look at that detail the fall of this innovative website here http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2009/oct/28/digital-media-soitu-advertising and here http://www.editorsweblog.org/web_20/2009/10/hasta_la_vista_y_gracias_spanish_news_we.php

Michael Wolff (of Newser) takes on Murdoch and his grandiose dreams of paid content on the internet in a long Vanity Fair piece http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2009/11/michael-wolff-200911
The subject of Reinventing the Newspaper gets another going-over at Blogging Innovation http://www.business-strategy-innovation.com/2009/10/reinventing-newspaper.html Drew Boyd, the “Director of Marketing Mastery” for Johnson & Johnson say that the key lies in using technology to revamp the printing, distribution and newsgathering functions. A sampling:

“Companies like Siemens that produce these machines need to engineer new versions of large volume printers that can take custom digital content and print one unique copy of a paper, then print a different one, the next one, etc, at very high speeds. This would allow news companies to create a custom newspaper for every single subscriber.”

Not sure if it’s worth going through all the trouble of installing hugely expensive printing presses to accomplish what a free RSS reader does for the user.  He proposes that the burgeoning army of Citizen Journalists get rewarded for their efforts through micro-payments, and that this will drive advertising:

“A custom newspaper has advantages for the advertisers … [who] could target their ads in line with the keyword tags so that the ad appeals to that subscriber’s interests and values. My bet is advertisers would pay more for this with the promise of more effective ad placement. More money on the table leaves more room for micropayments to journalists. The loop is closed.”

A recent poll showed that more than 50% of readers won’t pay for news, thus shocking no one (“Hey – that stuff that was free? Would you like to hand me some money for that?” has never been a great marketing strategy.) http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/departments/business/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1004030681

“Ipsos findings didn’t bode well for the future of paid online content. There was little crossover between a publication’s online and print content, with 40.7 percent saying they looked into a print pub exclusively and only 3.1 percent saying they read the print and online version of the same publication.”

In England, the Guardian writes that a newspaper need only convert about 5% of its online audience into paid subscribers to profitably support the entire online news operation http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/nov/03/dharmash-mistry-newspapers-paid-content

“On a like-for-like basis, if newspapers convert an order of magnitude of 3% to 4% unique users to a pay model – at roughly £3 a month or 10% of the monthly price of buying print editions daily – you could probably generate as much in revenue as is being made from total online ad revenue currently,” Mistry said.

Apparently not satisfied with the $20,000-per-year income stream for the rental of its specialized news machines, Bloomberg is looking at extending its paid content, charging $600 to $1,000 for some narrower information/topic feeds. http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424052748703294004574514140239380158-lMyQjAxMDA5MDAwNDEwNDQyWj.html If there’s still a market for financial news in the middle-income area of the U.S. it is a market whose existence has escaped the imploding business magazine sector.

And finally, to sum it all up, Alan Mutter says that newspaper publishers are “getting cold feet” about paid content http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/2009/11/pay-walls-never-may-come-at-some-papers.html

Well, there are two schools of thought to this.  The first is the one that was espoused there:

What exactly do these people think that newspaper execs will do with
data showing exactly how profitable every single article is? Just sit
on that information? Or will they use it to make business decisions
about which departments, types of articles and individual journalists
are delivering the most ROI? “Sorry, Woodward, we know you won the
Pulitzer last year, but your articles only generated $97.85 in revenue,
so we’re going to have to let you go.” Of course, it wouldn’t just
influence the executives. Journalists themselves would start shading
their stories to what sells, and the most successful would be the ones
who were the best salespeople (or who knew the most tricks). Get ready
for a lot less zoning-board recaps and a lot more “Top 10 Sexual
Positions.”

You can see one example of this over at the Santiago, Chile daily Las Ultimas Noticias, where the publisher started to let the tail wag the dog — that is, the stories that garnered the most clicks on the website would be the ones given the biggest play in the paper edition the next day.

Also, the stories that got lots of attention would lead to follow-ups. The upshot of this was that the coverage did start to resemble a deranged issue of Maxim magazine.

Business news? “Picture of Women Executives Working Out & Getting Sweaty”

Political news? “Vote on Whether Japanese Women Have Cute Butts.”

Religious news? “Priest Develops the ‘Catholic Kama Sutra.”

…and so on.

But before everyone starts jumping on the already-crowded “I Told You So” train, LUN was always a bit of a downmarket paper.  They were #8 out of 8 daily newspapers in Santiago, Chile.  So their core, and the people they attracted with their marketing blitz, were readers that were not already dedicated to the bigger papers, such as El Mercurio and La Tercera.

And yes, LUN did vault from last to first, and a big part of this was the aggressive strategy.

But since then, LUN has been branching out in its coverage; they no longer have T&A on every page.  They have the core audience of what the British call “Lager Louts” or “Yobbos,” but they are branching out to include more technical content that appeals to the same young webheads that come for the biscuit shots.

And for the editors and reporters who fear that switching over to a reader-driven basis for content is going to lead to endless pages of bikini shots and [fill in the anatomical blank] slips … well there are plenty of sites dedicated to that kind of content already.

The users have the power, you see, to go to wherever it is that we want to go to, to find the kind of pictures/video/stories that we want.

If all there were on the web was imitations of Maxim-meets-Ogrish, that would be unbelievably boring after a while.

And as we’ve seen with OhMyNews, even when users are allowed to pick their perfect, tailored mix of stories and information, after a while, we kinda want someone (read: an editor/blogger/”curator”) to surprise us.

We want to see things from outside the bubble.  Well, most of us do. Some people will gleefully sustain themselves on a steady diet of mental Twinkies, and never get tired of them.  Never mind them. They were never your readers anyway.

I think that the recent political campaign and the economic meltdown have hammered home to a generation of news consumers that it’s kind of a good idea to pull our heads away from whatever dingbat thing Paris & Britney did this week, to see what it is that our elected officials are doing with our money … and how they’re funneling it to the equally dingbat financiers and bankers that bribe them.

So yeah, maybe there will be a bit of a blip when the micropayment model is implemented.  But it will shake itself out.

If you believe that all your audience wants is cheezcake … well, aren’t you saying then that your audience is a bunch of pervert dimwits?

To quote Frank Sinatra (as filtered through the late genius Phil Hartman): “Contempt for the audience! That’s what killed Dennis Day’s career!”

UPDATE: Over at The Editor’s Weblog, the debate over charging for online content has attracted comment from industry experts Jeff Jarvis and Rob Curley, as well as Agustin Edwards, the editor/managing director of LUN, speaking at the INMA World Congress:

In terms of charging for content, both Jarvis and Edwards are wholly in agreement. Jarvis is of the opinion that it is now more valuable to build audience – “I think the odds of success in charging now are slim to none”. Edwards echoes his sentiments, with his belief that “if we charged for content on the internet our traffic would go down significantly… It’s abandoning the trust in the advertising as a financial model.”

Well, that trust has been strained recently, and it is only going to get worse, unfortunately.  The continued soft economy is going to put some severe downward pressure on ad revenues, at least for the next nine months. The best news that I’ve seen today came out of the LA Times – a small article about how the bottom-feeders are out snarfing up low-priced houses in the Phoenix area (which was pretty much the most overinflated area in the U.S. when it came to the housing bubble).  If this holds up over the next couple of months, that would mean that a lot of the “frustrated money” that’s been sitting on the sidelines is going to start getting back into the game.

Again: I do think that there is a place for charging for content online.  But that model necessitates a radical change in how the news business does/would operate, one that makes shutting off the presses and moving only to web distribution look positively timid by comparison.  I’ve worked at magazines that were almost all circulation supported. The key to survival is that you have to have something that the consumers can get nowhere else.

Perhaps I’ll write more about my experiences in this vein in a post later this week.  It might be helpful for those considering this kind of a move.

Technorati Tags: micropayments, Phil Hartman, LUNH, cheesecake photos