I thought this story was not worth spending the time on but changed my mind. This has been covered by other local blogs such as Claycord and Crazy in Suburbia which also got some attention from CBS5.

Newspapers are feeling the crunch of the economic downturn just like many industries but newspapers have been feeling the pinch for a long time. Traditional news is an online world now and paper is a waste of money. Some estimates are that a normal newspaper that costs $1.25 on the stand actually costs the company as much as $10 to print it. That can’t be good news for newspapers. MediaNews is making their employees take a furlough just to save from having layoffs. The newspaper industry has gone through many changes over the past couple decades, one of which was their adoption of the internet as a viable source of publication.

As this explains, back in 1981 some of the largest papers in the US took ahold of the internet to spread the latest news. It was a big gamble that has paid off well for some and not so well for others. The Silicon Alley Insider explained that printing the NY Times costs twice as much as giving every subscriber a new Amazon Kindle. Because of the dramatic drop in newspaper sales, news groups are relying more and more on internet ad sales to stay afloat. The problem is that most newspapers are late to the game and the revenue still isn’t there.

Yes, newspaper Web advertising is growing, but not fast enough to cover the declines in print advertising. A paper gets about one-tenth or one-twentieth the advertising revenue for a Web reader as it does a print reader, he notes.

Traditional newspapers that used to rely heavily on revenue from classified and other ads saw their profits disappear as websites like Crigslist, apartments.com and cars.com came onto the scene. Charging for ads when so many popular sites are doing this for free makes a seller’s decision VERY easy.

News for the New Generation

I laugh when I get a call from a newspaper telemarketer trying to sell me a subscription for $2 a month. Even at $2.00 it’s not a deal. I’m a child of the internet, I get all my news online when I want it. Traditional newspapers come out once a day and by the time it hits my doorstep by the local paperboy or I grab it from the news kiosk, all I’m reading is news from yesterday that I already know.

Many newspapers are still managed by the same upper management that have been around for decades. I think the idea of no newspapers scares them as apposed to being a call to action. Many newspapers are like massive ships and they find it difficult if not impossible to turn and adapt to the changing world. Yes, most major newspapers have websites but they are still missing a huge part of the equation. Community.

Building a News Community

One of the things I pulled out of my meeting with the CCTIMES a couple weeks back was the fact that they desire the community aspect us local bloggers have. Paper is going away and they need people on their sites. I write 1-3 posts a week and some of them are hits and some are misses when it comes to a discussion. Even if I don’t have 20 comments, I do have people reading it and passing the story to others.

Many newspaper websites have a section for comments. They are either inline with the stories or they are through reader forums. The issue I have with this and I am sure I’m not the only one is that you need to sign up for multiple other accounts just to leave a comment. By the time I sign up, wait for a confirmation email and go back to the story, I’ve lost my desire to leave a comment. By the time another story comes along that I want to leave a comment with, I need to dig through my emails to remember what my password was again or I have to go through the entire process again for a new password. Leaving a comment should be easy. Spending even 2-3 minutes just to write a 30 second couple of sentences on my thoughts is too much. My time is valuable. If you want more comments, open it up for anyone.

I send out updates on local news through Twitter. Recently I started tracking how many people are actually looking at the news links I’m sharing. I wasn’t sure if they were providing any value to my followers. Turns out every link is clicked through and some are even shared. Conservative numbers are around 400-500 people a day. In turn, people are sharing those links with their networks and the numbers grow from there. I do my best to communicate with my followers. I answer questions, I take story ideas from them. That’s what people want. They want a connection with the news. I asked a couple of the news agencies that I follow if they had any concerns about me sharing their links with my network It sounds like a dumb question but I wanted to see where they stood. Overwhelmingly, every agency responded telling me they are excited to have their links rebroadcast by me to my followers.

I may start throttling back on the extra links. I was contacted by a news agency about a week ago asking about why I do this. As I said, mainstream news wants their stories spread but they also are not familiar with the average joe like me helping them out for nothing in return. I want to continue doing this but this paper made a good point. If I am going to help push readers to your site, shouldn’t I get the same favor in return?

My Twitter following has grown a lot over the past couple months. It is a testament to the desire from people wanting to gather news in alternative ways. Not all of my readers have Twitter accounts and many news outlets do not either, so that means that people outside my typical reach of the blog are finding the news online in a more social atmosphere.

Social media is like speaking Greek to a lot of news execs. There are those that ‘get’ it but the vast majority get a glazed look in their eyes when someone tries to explain it to them. The LA Times seems to be one of the newspapers that are on the bandwagon. They have profiles on the most popular news and communication sites like Digg and Twitter and are seeing some decent responses from them. But that isn’t enough, having 1000 people visit your website doesn’t produce revenue.

Making Money For News

Newspapers need to find a way to fill the revenue gap or they are going to disappear. The idea of selling banner space is nice but it’s not going to be enough. There is no banner that a company will pay for that an online newspaper can live off. Newspapers need to find multiple revenue streams.

The greatest asset any newspaper has is its archive of content. With on-demand technologies being what they are today, there’s no reason for newspapers not to have an on-demand publishing company. How much does that cost? It costs whatever the going rate for a good graphic designer and a content/copy editor is in your area. How difficult is it? Not at all.

Social Networks and Conferences:

Newspapers have a lot of information of their subscribers. Many have tried setting up discussions for their stories on their sites but failed when they put so many processes in place for people to go through in order to comment. That’s why a local blog is gaining steam. If a newspaper held a community meetup to hang out with other people involving a topic and then found ways to hook those people up with advertisers, it could produce revenue. If you could find clusters of people (and that’s what the Web is good for), you could hold monthly symposiums, have an advertiser sponsor the gathering and connect them with real people. That works particularly well if you can built a microsite into the deal, creating a multi-platform package.

Video:

One of the things that surprises me the most about mainstream media is their absolute fear of sharing their videos with the outside world. In order to share a video on a story you like, you have to email your friends a link. That is so 1980. We live in a world of shared content. Create a YouTube site and host your videos there. You will get paid for revenue from the ads in the video. You don’t have the overhead of managing the servers and your content is accessable by millions. There are regular people making $100,000 and up every year by doing this. If you have a great news clip, people will share it, post it on their blog, and link to it. Wrap a relevant ad around the news clip and make some money from the people that watch it.

Products and Services:

If you run a story on a product or service you can monetize the links in the story. Don’t go crazy and have every third word a link but having a couple links in a story about a product or service that you can make revenue from is acceptable and profitable. Selling keywords in your online news website would open a new revenue stream for you and be a very attractive to advertisers.

Your Newspaper Articles:

This is one that I’ve wondered about for a while. You’re a newspaper and you have a group of reporters writing stories. You have an RSS feed for people like me to scan headlines and read interesting news. The RSS Feed is only a few sentences along with a headline so if I want to read more I have to click the link. Why not offer a full feed to paying customers that want to repost your news on their sites. You have to be better at making very specific feeds for topics but it can be done and people would pay for it.

Stop the Presses.

Another thing about newspapers that baffles me is their restrictions on content. I understand there is only so much physical space in a paper to write in but the same restraints are made for online content. Why can’t a reporter have a 200 word article in the paper and have an unedited 450 word article online? It’s all about the content and if you put more online then there is more of a reason for people to go there for the news.

Get some SEO into your site. One of the greatest things about being a blogger is that I can manipulate the web in a sense. I started this site with 2 keywords in mind that I wanted to dominate in and I have done it flawlessly. Now I have to work on more. When I write a headline or build a post I do it for maximum searchablity. Online newspapers are not doing this very well so if I wanted to search on a piece of local news then chances are you are getting scooped by more tech savy sites.

The worst thing to do is revert back to the old mentality that access will only be granted by paying subscribers. Maybe that’s the only option though. The New York Times is wondering about that currently. In may ways this would work for them in the short term but putting a band aid on a sucking chest wound is not going to do much. If papers start charging for access they better think really hard about the price points they suggest. The plan could backfire and you will see a decline in readership turn into an absence of it. There are too many FREE alternatives to this model that I may never pay for your stories.

In the end, newspapers need to figure out whats going to work best for them and their readers.

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