Gannett Tries Pay Walls at Three Papers
Eagle-eyed Doug Fisher at South Carolina spied “a low-key announcement buried in the business briefs of my local (McClatchy) paper” announcing the coming of pay-per-view to Gannett’s Greenville News, one of three papers the chain is taking to pay-per-view on the Web. See his commentary.
Pay Walls Debut at Three Gannett Papers Testing ‘Journalism as a Service’ is the headline on Poynter Online’s NewsPay column by Bill Mitchell.
Included are The Tallahassee Democrat, The Greenville S.C. News and The St. George, Utah Spectrum.
Mitchell notes that Gannett called this "a small-scale test."
Gannett publishes 82 daily U.S. newspapers, including USA TODAY, the nation’s largest-selling daily newspaper, and more than 600 magazines and other non-dailies including USA WEEKEND. Gannett also operates 23 television stations in 19 U.S. markets.–Corp.HQ
At http://tallahassee.com, for an example of the pay system, the Web front page headlines and summaries are still visible, but clicking through to read a full local story results in a table of pay rates.
Original Tallahassee.com stories require one of several subscription plans or a $2 day pass. Options include a $9.95 monthly Web-only subscription or various Web/Print combinations.
Still free are stories from USA Today and other sources woven into the site, such as those under the heading “From our news network” on the “Topic: Oil Spill” pages.
It probably goes without saying that the local business directories and ads are still free, too.
CNN drops AP
CNN.com may not be the first place I go to immerse myself in the familiar comforts of Associated Press stories, but still, this has to be seen as another blow to the venerable wire service.
For those of us who have spent semester after semester training students on how it’s Pa. (not PA, Penn., Penna, ad nauseam), we once again have yet another reason, perhaps, to add more asterisks to the teaching of newspaper style guide rules and another reason to teach the very historiography of style guides.
According to the Huffington Post:
The AP confirmed that the two news organizations differed on terms for licensing AP stories, photos, video and other content beyond the June 30 expiration of the existing contract. CNN has been an AP customer since the cable network launched in 1980.
AP and CNN officials would not comment on why the talks broke down or how much the expiring contract was worth. CNN spokesman Nigel Pritchard would only say that the terms AP was offering “did not fit our business model.”
“We will no longer use AP materials or services,” CNN Worldwide President Jim Walton told employees in an internal memo Monday. “The content we offer will be distinctive, compelling and, I am proud to say, our own.”
What do you think? Should CNN have stuck with AP, or dump it?
Newspapers ‘strange survival’ in Economist
“Newspapers have escaped cataclysm by becoming leaner and more focused” according to The Economist‘s Newspapers: The strange survival of ink, a story rich in European examples.
But even in the U.S., it says, “some companies are now worth ten times as much as in the spring of 2009, although they remain far from pre-recession heights.”
(See the article for some interesting details on McClatchy and Gannett, including a report that more Gannett papers using USA Today material.)
“The survival of newspapers is by no means guaranteed,” the article concludes, after discussing business strategies that involve iPads and smartphones, more local news and sports, etc. Emphasis added below:
“They still face big structural obstacles: it remains unclear, for example, whether the young will pay for news in any form. But the recession brought out an impressive and unexpected ability to adapt. If newspapers can keep that up in better times, they may be able to contemplate more than mere survival.”
Are more jobs appearing?
I’ve made it an irregular habit since the mid-naughties to scan the total number of jobs listed at JournalismJobs.com, and I was surprised recently to see the number back to pre-recession numbers at a whopping 738 ads!
I know, I know: there are all kinds of valid reasons why this number is worthless. Perhaps they’re all ad sales jobs (they’re not, I see), or JournalismJobs.com is more popular than ever (which could very well be true). For comparison, for “the longest time” (another precise term on my part) “a few years ago,” I noticed that the number hovered in the low 400s. And now it’s 738.
The figure may be a dubious and inexact barometer of the journalism employment picture in America, but I’ll take it.
A paywall against humiliation?
The indispensable paidContent has an interesting story on a bit of apparent site traffic numerical jujitsu from the Murdoch empire as News International approaches the raising of a paywall in June, when the Times and Sunday Times will start costing online readers £2 a week:
… both Times Online and Sun Online have stopped publishing their user numbers through the ABC [circulation auditors] in the UK.
March monthly figures for UK newspaper sites were issued Thursday – but both Murdoch sites are absent.
ABC confirmed to paidContent:UK that it is still auditing the publisher’s traffic numbers – but it is keeping the figures private at News International’s request and, at present, publication is not due to resume next month.
This means it will be hard to see exactly how many readers Times Online will lose when it starts charging …
Since the the Times and Sunday Times still plan to use advertising, it’s perhaps not surprising that the corporation wants, in advance, to apply a layer of lipstick on what will surely be, in the short term at least, a pig in the spotlight.
NAA has hopes for targeted ads
From Online Media Daily:
“The Newspaper Association of America is touting online behavioral targeting as a partial fix for the industry’s revenue woes.
“‘Targeted advertising shows significant promise for newspapers seeking new ways to support local journalism,’ the organization writes in comments filed with the Federal Trade Commission. The comments were filed in advance of this week’s FTC public workshops about media, ‘From Town Crier to Bloggers: How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age.’”
The NAA questions the idea of regulations that would require a consumer “opt in” system for targeted ad programs. Some privacy advocates think opt-in is a good idea.
More from OMD reporter Wendy Davis: Newspaper Group Argues Against Opt-In Consent For Behavioral Targeting. Via MediaPost Publications
McChesney & Nichols on “enlightened” subsidies
Yes, journalists deserve subsidies too
So say Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols, writing at washingtonpost.com. They quote President Obama’s comments to newspaper editors who asked about the industry’s crisis:
“I am concerned that if the direction of the news is all blogosphere, all opinions, with no serious fact-checking, no serious attempts to put stories in context,” he said, “that what you will end up getting is people shouting at each other across the void but not a lot of mutual understanding.”
McChesney and Nichols add:
“What’s notable about Obama’s response to the question, posed during an Oval Office interview with editors from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Toledo Blade, was his consciousness that the problem is not that print is fading.
“The problem is that newspaper newsrooms, once packed with reporters, are disappearing, and neither broadcast nor digital media are filling the void.”
McChesney, of UIUC, and Nichols, who writes for the Nation, are founders of the media reform organization, Free Press. “Saving newspapers may be impossible,” they write. “But we can save journalism. Step one is to begin ways for enlightened public subsidies to provide a competitive and independent digital news media…”
Read it all here: Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols, at washingtonpost.com,
Picturing the industry
It’s been floating around the net for almost a month, but if you haven’t seen it and need an infographic to make clear the state of the traditional newspaper biz to anyone, try this picture from Mint.com, a financial-management website. The original is 1100×2001 pixels, if you’re counting, big enough to see the sad details.
Extra points to the copydesk veterans who catch the biggest error in the multi-part graphic, or for adding comments to this post to point out specific pages at NAA, Bloomberg, or elsewhere, with the graphic’s source statistics.
The accompanying blog post is here, with discussion, including at least one eagle-eyed reader’s comment on a “do the math!” error of the sort we try to impress on beginning reporters and editors:
http://www.mint.com/blog/trends/the-death-of-the-newspaper/
If you don’t mind the distraction of discouraging news, you might use the graphic as a math-literacy teaching tool, with a hat-tip to Joe Murphy of the Denver Post for catching the error. Not much of a silver lining, but…
Loosely related (and some more-optimistic) items, rather than have an depressing block of white space next to the long, tall depressing graphic:
- Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy (Oct. 2009) report: Informing Communities Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age
- Dan McDonough Jr. and Alan Bauer (May 2009) in The Christian Science Monitor, A newspaper business model that’s working.
- Paul Starr in The New Republic (March 2009), Goodbye to the Age of Newspapers (Hello to a new era of corruption)
- Walter Isaacson (Feb. 2009) in Time, How to Save Your Newspaper.
- Eric Alterman (2008), in The New Yorker, on Out of Print: The Death and Life of an American Newspaper.
- NAA Presstime Blog
WS Journal challenges USA Today as US circ champ
The nation’s two largest-circulation newspapers, USA Today and The Wall Street Journal, are already arguing over which will have the biggest circulation number when figures are announced Oct. 26, according to a Reuters blog, Media File.
The Journal said Saturday that it expects to pass USA Today. Editor & Publisher magazine predicted that USA Today’s circulation will dip below 2 million in the Audit Bureau of Circulations six-month stats.
USA Today says Rupert Murdoch’s Journal will still be second in print circulation, when its paid Web edition is subtracted from the total.
The New York Times runs a distant third in print and doesn’t charge for its main Web edition, although it does have additional paid circulation for its electronic edition and Times Digest.
The Media Decoder Blog at NYTimes.com linked to Reuters’ Media File account of the USA Today vs. WSJ argument, poetically describing the Journal as “a business newspaper with an increasing interest in the general interest.”
