No, no, no. Newspapers are not about news
In a blogpost from Tuesday, Scott Karp of Publish2 said:
The publishing business has always been about packaging content. Newspapers. Magazines. Newsletters
Errr… No. At least not all. Actually, it’s just a tiny minority of them that have always been about packaging content. The rest have long crossed over to a business model that had nothing to do with content and was all about selling people to advertisers and advertisements to people.
That is why newspapers are finding it hard to charge for content: they haven’t done it for so long they’ve forgotten how it’s done.
There are some noteable examples of publishers who are selling content. For instance, you have to buy games TM if you want to read it: there is no free online version. It is hard to judge how successful they are, since publisher Imagine Publishing does not release financial results, but the firm has been snatching up assets (including the Linux User & Developer magazine and website and car-magazine publisher Total 911 and its website) while others have been desperate to sell bits of their business in order to survive.
This does not mean that any newspaper would flourish if they shut down their websites or make web content more expensive than the print product (like the Newport Daily News has done). Since games TM is in the business of selling content, it makes it its job to produce top-notch quality content that people will want to pay for. But this is not the case with the majority of newspapers.
Publishers want to charge for content and newspaper publishers specifically want to charge for news. However, they are new to this business and yet many of them still behave like they know it all. It’s time they got told otherwise.
Hi Dilyan,
I think what you’re saying is interesting. One link in the chain I think you’ve forgotten is that newspapers are in the business of creating audiences. They have to be because, without that, what would they sell to advertisers?
How newspapers are creating audiences is up for debate. Many will argue it’s about creating the best quality content you can. Of course that argument is fraught with complications as “quality” is so subjective.
To generate a mass audience a funny home video of a cat may be good enough. If you have a specific type of audience in mind… well that’s where the expertise in generating targeted, sell-able content comes to the fore.
It’s an interesting one this; what do people pay for when they buy a newspaper – the advertising, the paper, the newsprint, the journalism, the physical fact of the purchase?
When I buy a paper I hand over money in exchange for a tangible item, although I know perhaps 50% of the content it contains is of little interest to me, or tells me something I already know.
It’s the other 50% that I happily pay for – investigations, features, letters pages etc.
I guess the value of the content goes up or down depending on the time I have free to spend on it, how relevant that content is to me, and what other sources are providing the same information.
As a user, I’m so used to the free model that the whole ‘charging for content’ issue sits badly with me. As someone working in the newspaper industry, I think the situation simply cannot continue as it is but that putting a paywall on the front gate isn’t the answer. We have to think about what content has worth to our audiences, and ways of provding that. Which means asking what people want and listening to the answers.
Hi,
I have to agree with Joanna in suggesting that while papers aren’t selling content, they are using content to sell advertising and to create audiences.
Historically it’s been the job of the editorial department to write stories that people want to read, and the marketing department’s task to sell that audience to the advertisers.
Now, because old methods of audience creation are dying, editorial aren’t managing to create or sustain their audiences. The issue most papers are tackling now is how to create content people want via media they want to use, publicising it and getting those audiences back so they can carry on selling them to advertisers just like old times.
Whether that’s a viable business model or not remains to be seen. And, as you’ve said, charging for content isn’t particularly conducive to building audiences unless you’ve got exclusive information or technical expertise and there’s no other way to get it. The news just isn’t that valuable to most people.
One of the key issues here is that the model of using advertising to support the content hasn’t worked online in the way media organisations expected it to.
Paywalls are only one way to make content pay. Freesports (the Channel 4 extreme sports show) has acquired its own snowboarding magazine and is running a huge event at Battersea Power Station. Now how nice would it be to see the Observer running music events to tie in with its music section.
A key thing to remember is that Stewart Brand is reported to have said “Information wants to be free” in about 1984 – but the second half of that quote is “information also wants to be expensive”.
There are things I’d pay for – an app that meant I could get my news more efficiently on my phone is one way.
My take on what the FT is up to is that it is selling corporate information and not news.
So a key question is not should we make people pay, but what are our strategies for monetising our content – because as there is no one future for journalism there is no one way to make it pay either.
And if we want someone to provide us with news/information or whatever we call it, there are cost implications involved.
I’ve got my tip jar ready, just in case ;D
I think the example of the games magazine you used is interesting Dilyan.
On the one hand, I’m sure you’re right that it’s doing well because of its high quality content.
But (and disclaimer – I haven’t heard of it before), I suspect its success may be as much to do with the fact its catering to a defined community, who will go out of their way to get more information about their hobby. Same with football supporters, new mums, allotment keepers, the list is endless.
The other great example of paywall success, business news, works because its audience feels a duty to seek out the information they are providing, or they get a tangible benefit from being informed by it.
However with a lot of news, the audience which would be interested in knowing it often doesn’t know they’re interested until they know it – by which point, the opportunity to sell that information has passed. And the secondary market for in-depth analysis of this news is much smaller.
So I would disagree that non-specialist news isn’t valuable to people. It’s just that at the precise point it becomes valuable to people, it loses a chunk of that value. Does that make sense?
One major area where news websites can add value is by becoming the hub for discussion, as we’ve seen. And the most valuable discussions will include temporary members of your community who will flock around one article – e.g. the family of the teenager killed in a crash, the commuters who meet each other on your boards and organise a campaign against timetable changes, the ex-pat who recognises the woman in the lost picture.
So in these cases, putting up paywalls actually takes away value from your “content”.
you mention that publications have long been selling people to advertisers – yes I agree that probably is what they believed they were doing but…. as soon as a properly measurable way of counting those readers came along (online) it seems they find themselves largely unable to sell that audience.
Why is that? Was it an illusion that the advertisers can now see through?
I don’t have the answers but you’ve sparked some interesting questions.
If you have content that people are willing to pay for, you can sell it, regardless of whether it’s supported by advertising or not. Twenty years ago I was editor of The Public Ledger, which used to be available on news stands. By the time I was at the helm it had become a subscription-only print edition with almost no ads (IIRC, just a couple of tiny box ads per issue) – it sold because subscribers were willing to pay for specialist commodities news. It’s now online as well, and behind a paywall, again with limited advertising. Maybe this model works best for niche publications, I don’t know. But it can be made to work. And I think it will work where a publication has content worth selling – that’s unlikely to be news itself, which people will be able to read for free online anywhere, but for background features, the in-depth reports, data (such as commodities prices) and so on. Publications need to think about what content they have that is actually worth paying for.
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Thank you all for your comments.
Glyn, Jo and Louise, I agree that there is a market for niche content: such newspapers do exist and we all can think of examples. They are the games TMs and The Economists of the world. However, I think they are a tiny minority and my issue with the vast majority of newspapers is that they behave as though they were part of that small group of worthwhile-content producers while they’re clearly not. I have no problem with games TM making it hard for me to read it, because I know it is worth it. But I do have a problem with boring old publications that expect me to pay for them because they believe the crap they are peddling MUST be of interest to me.
Joanna, Mary and Sarah, yes, in order to sell audiences, you have to build them first. And yes, it is widely anticipated that newspapers can create audiences by creating quality content to pique their interest. Let me use this as a starting point.
Suppose people have in the past been buying newspapers not for the news but because they wanted to sell their old car or find their soulmate. It doesn’t have to be the majority of readers; maybe most of them were, like Alison, buying it for the investigations and features. But suppose enough people were in for the classifieds so that they accumulated critical mass. When the classifieds were ripped off newspapers’ hands, those people followed their interest and the remainder of the readers were simply not enough to sustain the newspaper model anymore.
If that were true, what would be the signs? First off, there would be a fall in circulation as fewer people buy the newspaper. Check. Then, there would be a boom in an alternative advertising platform. Check. Newspapers would face declining ad revenues as advertisers realise they’ve lost the most relevant chunk of the audience — those who were actually interested in the ads. Check. The industry would run into financial troubles. Check.
So, if advertising was so lucrative that it could sustain an operation that served a much larger audience than there would be for just ads, why didn’t newspapers just scrap news altogether and become ad directories. There were attempts to do just that, but they didn’t work. Why? Well, suppose that disruptive advertising on TV has created a culture where consumers feel cheated when they are shown ads and expect any advertising to be linked to something they are getting free in exchange for their tolerance — a movie, an interview, a feature — even if the ads are useful to them. Is it completely unthinkable that newspaper companies might have been forced by circumstances to keep the content-creation bit running just to appease the crowd they want to sell to advertisers?
I don’t mean to say that there is some sort of conspiracy on the part of newspaper executives to keeps us blindfolded. What I suggest is a perfectly reasonable outcome of market forces at work. What do you think?
My point was really that if niche publications can charge successfully for content, I think mainstream newspapers can too. Right now, people are used to reading all the news and the features for free on the websites. But if the dailies can produce web content not available in the print edition and that is also high quality, people will pay for it. The papers just need to work out what they need to be selling. And, of course, to differentiate themselves. I’d happily pay to read lengthy background/contextual pieces that offer more depth to a story that than the rapidly changing headlines, for example. I’d also pay to read quality features – for me, that’s infinitely preferable to reading shallow celeb interviews or trivia for nothing. I don’t give a toss about Jordan or Katona but I do want to know more about the shifting dynamics of climate change or read a serious analysis of the last 20 years of errors in the banking world that led to the credit crunch…
Louise — of course! That is my point too. (Well, one of my points.) But why is the newspaper world abuzz with talk of paywalls? Have they already figured what the great content they are going to hide behind them would be?
Some have, and they are the ones that are keeping mum.
I’m afraid that generalisations of the type “The publishing business has always been about packaging content” prevent newspapers from seeing clearly what is the important thing they need to focus on. And I feel an expectation among newspaper folk that they’ve already done the hard bit, the content, and should now be paid for it. It drives me mad.
I think I agree with you, Dilyan! The spike in sales on the day the paper publishes the job ads is well-known – those readers are after the valuable ad content, and the newspaper is merely pretty wrapping. It makes perfect sense that the same is true for other forms of classified ads, for at least some of the readership.
The question then is how to regain those audiences – or whether to build new ones. Paywalling content isn’t going to help if that’s not what people are after. But, sticking with the job ads example, those audiences might be willing to pay for job alerts delivered via SMS, a one-off payment to register your CV and make it searchable by local companies, or a micropayment subscription to the job supplement – those might be sources of revenue, which could be packaged along with job-hunting advice and editorial articles to add value.
Of course, the problem is that other companies are already doing this, and many of them are more established web brands with wider reach and more experience. I’m not sure whether there’s a solution to that, but I definitely agree that being precious about where papers get their cash is not going to help.
I came across this today and thought it would widen this debate a little.
The Princeton professor, Paul Starr, wrote in the March 5 issue of the New Republic:
“News coverage is not all that newspapers have given us. They have lent the public a powerful means of leverage over the state, and this leverage is now at risk. If we take seriously the notion of newspapers as a fourth estate or a fourth branch of government, the end of the age of newspapers implies a change in our political system itself. Newspapers have helped to control corrupt tendencies in both government and business. If we are to avoid a new era of corruption, we are going to have to summon that power in other ways. Our new technologies do not retire our old responsibilities.”
Sarah, I for one would pay for newspapers that give me “a powerful means of leverage over the state”. Sadly, there is not one such newspaper in Bulgaria; and there are just a few that give me any leverage at all.
As an outside spectator, I’d say the situation is not that much different in the UK. The difference would be that newspapers over there pretend to be giving their readers that leverage. Take the MP expenses scandal for instance. The public has heard rumours that The Telegraph has paid for the data, which would have made it a true guardian of democracy if it were the full truth. But there is also word, and I am very inclined to believe it, that the source has made the rounds in newsrooms with their shocking revelations for months and nobody was willing to pay them. Also, The Telegraph released the information bit by bit. That was very wise business-wise, but not the behaviour of an organisation that genuinely wants to empower people.
There are countless other instances of newspapers acting in their selfish business interest instead of in the interest of the public. I am now reminded of a much less significant but equally telling example: http://cli.gs/0e5MPM
Excellent post.
But I’m not sure newspapers want to sell news … they do however want to make money from their content online.
That requires more web-savvy advertising staff who can find innovative ways of monetising the online product.
Instead most news company ad staffers are still working in the old way, thinking the old model will work online. It won’t.
This is still ‘new media’ (just), we need new ways of bringing in new money.