Newspapers are finally accounting for their assumptions of necessity throughout the last 15 years. My family was involved in what at one time was the second largest paper in CA (the OC Register). My mom was the CFO and I started there at 15 as their first webmaster.
My mom would always bring home things for me to test as "threats" to the paper rather than opportunities. Delphi, Prodigy, Aol, compuserve, eworld, Microsoft blackbird, cd-I and finally a BRI ISDN PPP account.
Threats. Not opportunities. When they finally put the entire newspaper online it was in PDF. I left in 2001.
And then went into the music business in 2005. Hah.
The publisher was right. It's 2012 and we still don't know how to make newsgathering profitable online. It's easy to say that news organizations should have been on the forefront of adopting new technologies, but even today in the internet's adolescence, print journalism is significantly more profitable. Convincing people to stick with print as long as possible while staving off "threats" was the right strategy as far as I can tell.
Right? I don't think so. I didn't mention the Craigslist "We will never sell classified space online!" diatribe either.
The point was: THEY WERE on the forefront of new technologies. OCR was the 5th newspaper online (after Mercury News, SF Chronicle, NY Times, Detroit Free Press).
And I don't think you understand the cost of print journalism. Print journalism might be more profitable if you have an economy of scale to support is infrastructure, but even in 1999 the display ad and classified business was waning to the point where it didn't break even on a single property. Only in aggregate for OCR's parent (Freedom Communications).
And lets not even talk daily subscription numbers, which were on the decline starting around the same time.
Newspapers followed a similar, albeit slower arc that the music business has, especially the recorded music business. A lot of the same hubris included.
Classifieds were a huge oversight that the industry deserves to be excoriated for.
The print newspaper I worked for is still limping along on its print revenues. If the OCR wasn't making money on print ads, how did it stay in business?
It was the right short-term strategy. Would you rather be in charge of a media enterprise that is producing dwindling revenue, has a limited lifespan, aging workforce and no way to attract new talent, or one with smaller but rising revenue, sexy requisitions and massive future opportunities?
That dichotomy is convenient, but false. News organizations have no problem attracting new talent. It is difficult to get a job as a journalist.
The only news organizations that both have had a print product and meet your latter description stopped printing because they'd squeezed all of the profit out of it that was there to have, and their "smaller but rising revenue" from their online operations are all that remain. Until you can point to an online business model that is more profitable than print, preserving print and its attendant profits was clearly the right strategy.
I used to work at a medium sized regional paper...by the time I started, around '05, veterans were already complaining about how the good times had passed. In the 90s, a senior writer could get a project approved that involved going to Russia over the course of the year, ostensibly to write something relevant for our somewhat large Russian immigrant population. When I started, things still seemed good in that I could spend a week on a local story, even driving out to a city several hours away just to talk to people. Today, they don't even have the resources to cover huge events, like earthquakes that hit nearby, and instead rely on AP copy.
Last time I visited, nearly everyone I knew was gone, usually for a job working in PR. And even the young idealistic reporters who were my age were all secretly interviewing for PR jobs. There really is little hope of turning things around. It's not just the lack of technical innovation...it's the constant downhill slide...it's hard enough to do good work on an average reporters pay...but to do it as your pay gets constantly cut and your hours constantly extended because other colleagues are let go is psychologically draining.
And newspapers need more than just good work, or even Pulitzer level work...they need groundbreaking innovation that changes/streamlines the very core of what they do...from the reporters to the editors to the ad people. But there's no capacity or motivation for such entrepreneurship
To survive, newspapers need to create significantly more value for readers and advertisers to drive demand and revenue, and lower their cost structures to about 10% of their historical levels. Any incremental steps, from pay walls to moderate layoffs, are totally inadequate to turn their fortunes around.
Let me explain.
The value proposition of most newspapers for both readers and advertisers pales in comparison to many new media options. For instance, who here gets their technology or sports news from a national or local newspaper? Who looks to newspapers for the latest stock market performance, restaurant reviews, or movie showtimes?
Since their value proposition is depressed, newspapers are attracting fewer readers (and subscription dollars) and, in turn, fewer advertising dollars.
And then you have typical newspapers' unwieldy cost structures. Many newspapers are still operating with staff levels that are multiples greater than their new media counterparts. I don't have any current examples, but during the 2008 elections the Huffington Post was driving as much online traffic as the Washington Post, with a headcount of about 6.25% (50 employees versus 800).
In short, lower value begets lower revenue, and if we assume a high cost structure, it's a downward spiral to oblivion.
The Washington Post also does actual reporting, unlike the Huffington Post; they actually produce something of value, even if they don't monetize it as successfully.
Perhaps those activities are being bifurcated, then. Perhaps the future of journalism looks like this: on one hand, you have news/data sources, like AP, who put the boots on the ground, do the reporting, and license that information to a wide variety of news outlets. On the other hand, you have the news outlets, who buy the information and translate it into content. The supplier gathers news and sells it to the publisher, who adds value to the raw news in the form of X, Y, Z, and sells ads around it. It's an industrial supply chain, like any other.
This has been happening for many decades now, especially in the TV news industry. If anything, I would expect the trend to accelerate and proliferate. It's going to become increasingly unprofitable to house the costs of news-gathering, and the revenue of ad-selling, under the same roof. A few outlets will keep at it, but on a much smaller and more selective scale, and mainly for specialized stories (investigative pieces, like the ones HuffPo does on occasion).
The implication is that the aggregated content lifted from other sites and the original content created by HuffPo writers gets 100x the traffic and eyeballs.
I wasn't; this is my serious face. I have yet to be impressed with the value of any of the content produced by HuffPo. In contrast, I regularly read Washington Post coverage, and the company has historically been involved in some of the major news stories that have shaped our society, such as Woodward and Berstein's Watergate Papers which they produced while working for the Washington Post. To this day, the company covers world events with reporters on the ground, with significant resources for them to leverage, and a relatively high level of journalistic integrity and editorial oversight, all brought to bear in order to bring us newsworthy stories with a solid reputation at stake.
HuffPo might grow into a respectable news organization one day, but they still have a long road to get there.
Not like HuffPo has some secret monetisation strategy, do they? Aren't they running online ads like most other news sites?
Could you have more accurately finished "even if most people don't care for content of value" or "even if they use more staff, resources and care to produce it"?
"For instance, who here gets their technology or sports news from a national or local newspaper? Who looks to newspapers for the latest stock market performance, restaurant reviews, or movie showtimes?"
Guess that question was rhetorical, but I'm going to answer it anyway:
I do! (well, maybe not movie showtimes)
There are many reasons I prefer an old-school newspaper for some things:
- I already spend every waking hour looking at screens,
paper is a nice break. Paper has some nice qualities too.
- Easier to read on a crowded subway than a pad [1],
no need to charge them, lighter, I throw it away when
I'm finished with it so I don't have to carry it around
all day
- I hate most online newspapers: 80% adds, shitty design,
seems to emphasise short stories to drive page views.
- Sometimes it's important that the news a "fresh",
and of course on-line wins there. But more often, the
stuff I read does not suffer much from being a few
hours old [2].
1 - I suspect.. they might be bigger but they are also soft and "bendable", and they don't break when that guy with the huge backpack turns and smashes it into you.
2 - Here in Scandinavia online news became popular early, and the newspapers have had more time to adapt to the threat/opportunity. I suspect this affects what they put in the paper editions.
Just a quibble: the news:ad ratio for most print papers also runs about 20:80. There are exceptions for some subscription/newstand-sales driven publications (The Economist, the WSJ pre-Murdoch), but that's been a pretty solid rule of thumb for the past 30-40 years or more.
I've known a few old newspapermen in my various jobs, and they have all been fascinated by the speed of information in this new order. They see the opportunity and the power.
But they also like to wax about the old times... and make no mistake, the old times was just a big boys club. Alcoholism was rampant, misogyny was par. A big story or scoop would take weeks if not months to develop and it might get buried on some fucked up principle (see Caro's excerpt in the New Yorker this year on LBJ's impending downfall until JFK and Dallas... a scoop, if not buried, alters the history of a million young American men and American foreign policy in profound ways), and then, once ready for the presses, after the editor trimmed it down, they'd all go celebrate their Pulitzer chances at a pub. It was a culture of exclusion and entitlement; your entree was "J-School" pedigree, or worse, your ability to kowtow to as a junior to an established writer until you got your chance, because that was your only path to being heard.
It was a time where accountability was proportional to distribution, which is to say, tightly controlled at all levels and, for better or for worse, self regulated. It was also a culture of self-congratulation. The only redeeming quality of the old school is that self-control over distribution gave them stupendous levels of access and leverage, something that doesn't seemingly exist anymore.
This is fundamentally not true. The massive disruption of this industry isn't from Japan/Germany or banana republics or China, this is pure change in distribution. It's analogous to music or movies or tv, only none of those industries fancied themselves as the "fourth estate" while the getting was good.
The ground moved beneath the feet of this industry and as much as they like to sit around and acknowledge that with self-loathing NYT pieces, I'm not sure they've accepted it. Seems like there's still a lot of sitting about and grumbling about how bad it is and how much better it was when back when. Or worse, how relevant they really, really, really still are cough David Carr cough.
See The Newsroom on HBO for example of this version of onanistic self flagellation.
What does an HBO-produced show about TV news, written by someone who majored in musical theater and never practiced journalism, have to do with the newspaper industry's self-image?
My point was that every profession has times when it's full of elitists that think they've got some special dispensation to carry out their work. That comes with the mindset of being a professional. And eventually walls come down as the output of a profession becomes commoditized.
Why does the elitism inherent to "every profession" of the "last century" have more relevance than a piece of socially critical art by a writer who has made a career of cultural criticism (however flawed). Is the critique of news in The Newsroom irrelevant to this conversation because of the platform or because the guy had a theatre degree? Both?
Regardless, I don't get your point. All things fail? Everything comes to an end? Great. Write an existential letter to NYT.
My point is there is a generational myopia that is pervasive in journalism still. There is an unwillingness to acknowledge, fully, that it's over. Donezo. It's never coming back. You can call out NYT in an NYT column and you can call out Newhouse and you can point out how fucked AOL Patch is and yet you are just writing for all the readers and writers who are terrified that things are changing.
It's probably the same point you are making, but I find your approach annoyingly pithy.
"The unthinkable scenario unfolded something like this: The ability to share content wouldn’t shrink, it would grow. Walled gardens would prove unpopular. Digital advertising would reduce inefficiencies, and therefore profits. Dislike of micropayments would prevent widespread use. People would resist being educated to act against their own desires. Old habits of advertisers and readers would not transfer online. Even ferocious litigation would be inadequate to constrain massive, sustained law-breaking...
Journalism has always been subsidized."
From Clay Shirky's essay, "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable"
> ...newspapers are being clobbered by paltry returns on underfunded pension plans.
So that would be "defined benefit" pension plans then. The markets have no obligation to meet absurdly optimistic forecasts of returns on investment.
If you're looking for someone to blame, consider that 10-year Treasury yields are under 2%, of which the single biggest buyer is the Federal Reserve.
> The bread and butter for most of the [newspaper] industry is local information.
No, the bread and butter of the newspaper industry is celebrity gossip, which is the very opposite of local information, and is a commodity product, which is why people are unwilling to pay for local newspapers.
> the bread and butter of the newspaper industry is celebrity gossip, which is the very opposite of local information, and is a commodity product, which is why people are unwilling to pay for local newspapers.
This directly contradicts itself, which is probably your point.
Focusing on local news is a necessary but perhaps not a sufficient condition for local newspapers to survive: They don't have a monopoly on any other product, but there's no guarantee they'll be able to survive on that one.
Or maybe they can create local celebrities to follow around and gossip about. (They might run up against tougher defamation laws that way, though.)
Celebrity gossip is fungible. E.g., suppose I cared about the gory details of the Cruise/Holmes divorce. A quick search tells me there are almost 2600 articles on Google News for "TomKat". Clearly there is very little incentive to buy a local newspaper when so much information is available for free from so many different suppliers online.
Anecdotally, I live in Melbourne and get a weekly local newspaper, but I don't pay for it since it comes with a bundle of advertising flyers. We sometimes glance through the newspaper, but I wouldn't be willing to pay for it. I'll wager that given the choice, most people would rather ditch the newspaper and keep the flyers.
FWIW the future of journalism will probably increasingly look like http://www.dailymail.co.uk/. It's trivia and gossip mainlined straight to the optic nerve. Addictive and profitable? Sure. "Great journalism"? No.
>Focusing on local news is a necessary but perhaps not a sufficient condition for local newspapers to survive: They don't have a monopoly on any other product, but there's no guarantee they'll be able to survive on that one.
I disagree. I think we'll still have local coverage. I just don't think it'll be very in depth for a long time, and it will be very understaffed. (And in case there's any doubt, I mean these statements from a personal, moral standpoint, not an economics one.)
My city (Albany, Georgia,)has one supremely dominating TV station, one tiny one, one dominating newspaper, and one that puts out 50 issues a year. The neighboring, largely rural, Worth County, has a news site called WorthIt2U.net
Sure, that's an infuriatingly bad name to me, but to the people of the community there, who kinda new AOL, and got faster Internet when it came bundled with their TV and came with their phones? It's where they go. And often times, they beat the larger places to stories that get hits (wrecks, arrests,) because they're local. People have responded.
People that stereotypically would be considered as "not online" have a new primary source of local information, it's just ran by a much smaller crowd. What's not able to survive is an old model, and I don't think anyone on HN has a problem leaving behind old models. The only thing missing is this same thing targeting the prime demographic.
Local news seems more and more that it's being served by ad-supported local/hyper local blogs and blog aggregators. What used to be the province of ultra thin printed dailies (when I was a kid, many neighborhoods seemed to have one in Brooklyn) is now handled by one and two person operations. Take a look at the blogroll covering neighborhoods in Brooklyn:
You've also got aggregatorish/news sites like Nearsay and regionals like Gothamist. They may need local, but it remains to be seen how much local needs them anymore.
Certainly, in-depth local reporting is in trouble in this new world, but it's hard to see right now how we'd fund such things. So far, that seems like it'll be covered by large regionals (or bigger), and only when it crosses over with bigger national/regional issues or is sufficiently dramatic/quirky.
And all those sites are struggling and barely making money. It's a tough, tough scene. That's why Gawker pivoted into national news and celeb gossip a few years back. The only way to make lots of money from blog advertising (i.e. enough to support a full-time staff) is to snag national brand dollars. Indi hyperlocals are beloved and do great stuff, but they're replacing companies that used to make millions providing similar services.
Agree completely. The hyperlocals seem like they'll be cost-covering only operations run by what amount to dedicated, self-motivated volunteers. Big wads of cash do not seem to be in their futures anytime soon.
I agree the money isn't flowing in yet, but I have no doubt it will. That's where my last line about demographics comes into play. It's hilarious/depressing that a generation with the demand for more information than ever before, and the technology to make it happen, is written off.
"That group doesn't read news." Sure they do. Just on Twitter or Facebook, or in texts.
Also, I wonder if a tv station will ever attempt to contract these sites directly as bureaus. Pay them as a reporter, but let them work for themselves as well. Just demand copyright save a non-transferable license to the reporter. That would give more money, and thus more resources, to a reporter.
The term "commodity product" in this context refers a product that has been commoditized[1], and thus no premium price is possible.
From Wikipedia:
The more specific meaning of the term commodity is applied to goods only. It is used to describe a class of goods for which there is demand, but which is supplied without qualitative differentiation across a market.[2]
Yes, I know what a commodity is. Thanks for insulting my intelligence. I was distinguishing between a commodity product and a non-product, which is something people don't even bother paying money for because it's practically free. A commodity product can't earn a premium price, but a non-product earns approximately epsilon.
I have no opinion on your intelligence. However, given that you were getting down votes I think it is clear I wasn't the only one who thought your writing could be clearer.
I often see an article appear in a newspaper a good 2 or 3 days after I first found out about it on HN or twitter. For me, that's the main reason they are losing customers - they are not doing the job they used to be good at, i.e. coming up with news or in-depth reporting you can't find anywhere else.
I work for a digital agency that is owned by a very large newspaper company having been bought to help them adapt to a "digital future". The newspaper company is becoming increasingly desperate - the latest product they've launched is a Groupon clone, which they are pushing pretty hard.
Whilst digging around on one of their servers, I've found a few sites which are "virtual shopping malls" with multiple levels and numerous "shops" that you can "buy" (i.e. advertise your site on). I think that they're not too sure what to make of this "Internet thing" so are just trying to port concepts from offline to online and it's not working too well.
I worked for a small local radio station and was asked to implement something similar to the "virtual mall" last year on the station website. I was only asked to do it as a neighbouring station had one.
It was laid out like a simple street map, in a grid formation, and companies could "rent" a "shop," or more accurately, place their logo in one of the spaces in the grid.
I did it, then left the station, and it still sits there online, the "streets" filled with For Rent signs. It's like a failed SimCity, or a 2D version of Second Life...
Seems to me that too often news sources make the decision to consolidate when general offerings mean they'll face more competition and leave them with a very broad, poorly-defined userbase.
Target a specific area, get local readers and you're an advertising option for local businesses.
My local paper (in Australia) has cut back its basketball reporting (for example) over the years and instead covered some pretty generic stories. e.g., instead of covering a domestic league, the writer has instead covered the US college Final Four. A few points:
- their contacts and history are in covering local sport
- why would I read this generic coverage over ESPN and American sources who have writers in the thick of the action?
- in covering domestic basketball, the audience might be smaller, but the paper would have virtually no competition in covering it
- cover local teams and you at least have a shot of building suburb-level audiences and hit up small businesses as a result
In print, I understand that newspapers will generally include content such that its level meets a ratio with the advertising at hand. e.g., they might not print an extra four pages because they don't have the ads for it.
But online is a different case. If your writer is getting paid a fixed rate, why wouldn't you have them at capacity whenever possible, generating unique, local content for your online version? They could be creating the Final Four fluff-piece for the print version, plus writing up online-only previews and quick opinion pieces on the domestic league. Categorise them by area (North, South, etc) and then find sponsors and advertisers for each. Small-fry ads maybe, but it wouldn't be shotgun advertising.
Shotgun advertising paid the bills for 60 years. Small-fry ads never have and it's very hard to make money from them. Newspaper sales reps that came into the industry more than 10 years ago came into it when they basically just processed incoming orders from chains, franchises, and ad agencies. That money is largely gone.
"Small-fry ads" means asking those same people to now go out and hunt down money from local businesses being courted by performance-based ad companies like Google, Groupon, Living Social, Twitter, Facebook, Constant Contact, Yelp...you name it.
That's a hard job. You need a superb sales staff to take business from those people.
If you were a superb sales person, you'd want to make a lot of money and sell a great product everyone wants to buy.
Besides their own blindness/fear, what's stopped newspapers from creating those new ventures themselves? Becoming the performance-based ad spin-off, recruiting the superb sales people? In the same way that a web celeb can bring a huge boost to anything they start, so can a newspaper drive instant publicity to a new venture of their own. Took the major networks here years before they started buying up each of a site re: cars, dating, travel, parenting, etc.
Is it a concern of driving away potential advertisers in those fields? Anti-competitive behaviour?
In Australia, fantasy comps (based around Australian Rules Football) are very popular and a huge boost to the big newspapers. I've been told that recent newspaper strategy meetings often boil down to "Wish we could come up with another thing like (insert fantasy comp name here)." Give me a meeting and eventual minimal shareholding and I'll give you five ideas straight up.
---
One example of the newspaper approach is in restaurant reviews. Before and after the success of sites like Yelp, newspapers here have continued with their review-a-restaurant-a-week approach. No categorised index of local restaurants. No repository of reviews beyond those that hit print. No crowdsourcing.
For a long time online, I turned repeatedly to a restaurant index (Miettas) with a crappy design, weak search and dated content just because it had remotely reliable and professional reviews that a Yelp-type site didn't have. Newspapers could have seen, and could still see, success in this space, IMO.
It comes down to people, like I said before. What you're suggesting is that newspapers have all these great people who should be able to cook up product ideas that generate great revenue for them.
If you were one of those people, would you do that for your newspaper, or would you apply to YCombinator?
Let's take Jack Dorsey as a recent example. He came up with Twitter while working at Odeo. He shared the idea with the rest of Odeo and eventually Odeo was shuttered and all resources were put into growing Twitter.
Now, let's imagine Jack Dorsey working at a beleaguered newspaper in Oregon, for example. First of all, it's hard to imagine, isn't it? Why would Jack Dorsey be at a newspaper instead of an SF startup? But assuming he was there and came up with Twitter the following things would likely happen:
1. Company would spend too much time evaluating the idea before deciding whether to put resources into it.
2. Company would assign a team to work on it, led by Jack. Abilities of team would vary wildly.
3. Jack's team would have to run everything through company I.T. which means hosted servers and more paperwork.
4. Jack's project would be expected to show results immediately and be commercialized swiftly, not 5 years after launch like with Twitter.
5. Newspaper company would eventually lose patience with project and pull the plug.
This happens at any big company. Newspapers are no different. No sense of ownership means its hard to focus and get great things done.
The time is fast approaching where there will be few local newspapers, just regional ones. For quite some time the newspaper business has been a game of musical chairs for employees and the music just sped up.
Things may shift in the future, but at the moment, it's the regional guys who are going under. The local guys are getting bought by Warren Buffet. This is because the local guys still have their "effective monopoly" over local advertising in their communities.
The regional guys and the guys covering large cities are the ones getting hammered hardest right now because they're being exposed as not being "essential reading" for any one thing.
In Chicago, for instance, the Chicago Tribune covers Illinois state politics, but the real wonks turn to insider blogs like Capitol Fax for that news. So Tribune's not needed for that.
Sports? ESPNChicago.com and all the Chicago-focused sports blogs have them beat there for resources and depth.
City Hall news? They're untouchable there...but who wants to buy ads against that content? And who really wants to read it other than local wonks and older people who own homes.
Entertainment? People find out what's going on from massive sites like FB, Twitter, Yelp, you name it.
And on and on. So a paper like the Tribune is left with a great brand, lots of exclusive content, and the ability to out-execute just about any of their competitors at anything it wants in terms of quality. But none of that matters so much to consumers who have tons of more convenient options.
Meanwhile, the internet hasn't really figured out hyper local yet, with the exception of Topix.com, which is huge in small towns. Everyblock might get there, and even Reddit eventually as geographic subreddits continue to grow.
I think consumers have this already in Facebook and Twitter. The news guys already post all their news there, for free, to try to generate ad revenues. People don't click through because often the entire story is there in the headlines and that's all they really cared about anyways.
But isn't it more like a medium that has changed? What stops those newspapers from running online versions? In fact, most or all already have an online presence. Wouldn't it be cheaper to run a website, versus running a printing press? In addition, the $ spent on ads in newspapers will surely shrink, but $ spent on online advertise continue to rise without signs of stopping.
To me this whole rant about running out of newspaper business is like a rant of messenger going out of business. No, you don't have to ride your bicycle through entire city to deliver message from Mr. X to Mr. Y; we have email and internet now. At the end of the day, the consumption of news will not change -- people will still want to know whats going on in the wild world, whether it is economy, politics, science or celeb gossips. Sure the medium will change, but lets stop crying over the fact that 99.999% of population is not using an electrical telegraph anymore (if most never did).
Ken Auletta of The New Yorker spoke about this on Charlie Rose a few years ago. He explained that while the operating costs for online news is lower than printing press / hard copy distribution, the advertising revenues are even lower still. If a newspaper went to an all online format, the differential would be negative.
And the advertising revenues are so much lower because on the web, advertisers measure actual impressions of their ads. They don't pay for ads that don't get loaded by a reader.
Meanwhile in print, advertisers have always paid no matter if anyone paged over to their ad or not. The lack of measurement was the secret sauce that made print publications profitable.
Did any newspaper try maintaining budgets across the transition? e.g., advertiser goes from paying $500 for their print advertising, to paying $500 for their print and web advertising, to (in the future) paying $500 for their web advertising?
The first stage was already active with every publication. The second stage could've been a reasonable upsell (same price, but get online coverage too!). By the third you're pushing better tracking/metrics, interactive ads, colour-by-default, animation, etc.
I get the impression that many papers treated it all very separately. In fact, for some time, one of the biggest entities in Australia maintained separate print and digital writing units (which strikes me as bizarre).
Once a newspaper sales rep starts talking "web ads" with an advertiser, the client has a host of other options. These options have more reach, are closer to people with purchasing intent, are performance based, self-service, and generate much higher ROI than banner ads on a newspaper site.
So the newspaper guys had to offer competitive pricing, or at least pricing in the same galaxy as the other web guys. So instead of a $50 or $100 CPM for inclusion in the print paper, they're getting a $5-10 CPM for includion on the web site.
See my mention of stage two - they're essentially getting web ads for free as an effort to maintain budget during a transition. How would the marketplace apply in that case?
Newspapers gave the web ads for free for a long time. Then when they tried selling them by themselves, the clients refused to pay for them because they'd received them for free for so long....and seen no real benefits or results from them during that time.
Print publications have four options when it comes to their digital side:
1.) Publish the exact same content
2.) Publish some of the print content, but only a fairly low percentage
3.) Create separate digital content
4.) Same content, put it behind a paywall
Newspapers have typically gone for 1 or 4, because if you do 2 then people will go somewhere where they can get all the news, and 3 seems like a waste of money to them.
Magazines generally go for 2 (e.g. Esquire) or 3 (e.g. Wired). These options make more sense to them than to newspapers because... well option 2, there's no "people will just go to a site that has all the news", because it's all custom content - another site might have more content, but it won't include any of the same content. Option 3 because they feel that if they just put the magazine's content online they can't make enough money, and it will lose them money with people reading it and not buying the magazine, on the other hand they don't want to miss out on digital money, so they essentially launch a new product there, under the same name.
My mom would always bring home things for me to test as "threats" to the paper rather than opportunities. Delphi, Prodigy, Aol, compuserve, eworld, Microsoft blackbird, cd-I and finally a BRI ISDN PPP account.
Threats. Not opportunities. When they finally put the entire newspaper online it was in PDF. I left in 2001.
And then went into the music business in 2005. Hah.