Saturday, August 06, 2005
Spokesman-Review's Ken Sands on charging for content
POSTED AT ONLINE-NEWS
http://talk.poynter.org/cgi-bin/lyris.pl?sub=8424&id=270896130
Date: Mon, 14 Mar 2005 17:56:49 -0500
Author: "Ken Sands" <kens@spokesman.com>
Subject: Paid vs. free? Maybe there's a third way...
Body: We're at an interesting period in the evolution of online news. Many
newspapers simply put their print content online, add some breaking news
and maybe a few bells-and-whistles multimedia and interactivity and call
it good. Sell a bunch of online advertising and everybody's happy, right?
I don't think so. In the next few years, in my view, online news should
become much more independent of that print content. If you think about it,
posting a newspaper online is giving people a snapshot of yesterday's
news. We should instead, give them today's news and a bit of tomorrow's
news, as well as making full use of the unique attributes of the web,
including: immediacy, interactivity, utility, multimedia, entertainment,
archiving, aggregation and community publishing. When you truly take
advantage of those attributes, you've got a much different web site.
Here in Spokane, we started on Sept. 1 charging an online subscription
fee, but it's ONLY for the repurposed print content. Everything else on
the web site is free. As it is now, we frequently post breaking news and
have between 20 and 25 staff-written blogs (immediacy and interactivity).
We have multiple databases of information (the utility function). We have
video, photo galleries, etc. Is it enough web-original content to
withstand the partitioning of our print content behind a subscription
wall? Obviously not, as we saw our year-over-year traffic growth go from
plus 42 percent to zero.
In a perfect world, I would have preferred to wait a couple of years to
let the evolution proceed toward web-original content before charging for
the repurposed print content. (But you can hardly blame the print
circulation folks for being antsy as their numbers decline.)
I'm hoping that what it really means is that we're simply ahead of the
evolutionary curve. Give us a couple of years to jack-up the web-original
content and people will come for that first and foremost. Then, who cares
if we charge for the print content? (Of course, we could find out that the
evolution is going an entirely different direction.)
Regardless, we really have no choice but to look for a better business
model. If print circulation and advertising drop significantly, there's
probably no way an increase in online revenue can make up the difference.
Who's going to pay all of the reporters and editors? Maybe those of us who
are left in the future will simply aggregate and edit the news that's
provided by citizen journalists. I don't pretend to have all of the
answers, but you can't say we aren't looking...
Ken Sands
Online Publisher
The Spokesman-Review
www.spokesmanreview.com
kens@spokesman.com
