A very bad idea
By Doug Fisher
Somewhere in the back of our minds, I know many of us might like to return
to the "Lou Grant" era.
Life was good. You did your daily few hundred words or
minute-thirty broadcast story, maybe a weekly takeout or
that infamous five-part special package on city hall corruption, the disease
of the month or the latest consumer scam.
Except your readers were slowly finding ways to leave you.
They didn't particularly like you, and it irked them that
they could buy 100 types of phones but were stuck with a handful of take-it-or-leave-it
information providers. And then came the Internet.
"I'll come right out and say it: It's time for newspapers to stop giving
away the store. We as an industry need to start charging for – or at
the very least controlling – use of our products online," San Francisco
Chronicle/SFGate.com columnist David Lazarus recently wrote. And later: "My
thinking is that this is approaching a life-or-death struggle for newspapers,
and an antitrust exemption may be the only way that the industry can smoothly
make the transition to a digital future. Put simply, we need to charge a fair
price for our products, and we need to do so together."
That could be dismissed as a momentary loss of sense. But because I suspect
this secretly is harbored by more than one journalist, temporarily cheered
by Viacom's billion-dollar lawsuit against YouTube and a Belgian ruling
against Google News, it's worth looking at why going back to the future
is a very bad idea.
The strongest argument is that it just ignores reality.
First, papers have always "given away" the news, if you ignore
the ads. What they charged for was the distribution and scarcity. You
are not going to make scarce again that which is now abundant.
Lazarus seems to assume no other sources of news, but the
typical metro area, even a small one, has TV, radio (some
still do news), community papers, etc. Even if you could get 90 percent
of those to conspire, there's going to be leakage. All it takes is a little
leakage and you lose because (and I hate to say it) "they" – you know,
those readers Lazarus seems to want to be at war with – don't care
as much about your product anymore.
Part of it is our fault, our tendency to churn out commoditized
news. But our readers have changed, too. Bombarded by wall-to-wall
news and information, much of which they'd rather not deal with anyhow,
they are willing to snack and get on with their lives, not eat your full
meal.
My grandfather read at least two newspapers after work. My mother read
one, often falling asleep with it in her lap. I scan the papers before
I leave in the morning and vow to read them when I get home, but it's
mostly to check for things that didn't pop up online during the day (often
not on my local newspaper sites). And I struggle through sleepiness to
do it. I can function well without them, and I don't think I'm atypical.
So what Lazarus suggests is to create really great content and then put
it behind a wall when people increasingly find that content by search
engine or other referral. And if you have great content you'd want people
flocking to it, wouldn't you? (At least your advertisers would).
Raise the walls and you also encourage competitors because
it no longer takes a few million to buy a printing press.
The daunting cost of entry, that Economics 101 concept that kept profits
high, is almost nil. More competition is just what you want right now?
Take away the ability of others, like Drudge and Huffington,
to link to you, as Lazarus suggests, and you not only lose
referrals, you encourage others to do their own reporting. Or maybe they
start by summarizing your stories, but without ever sending people to
your site. Then your competitors link to that (it is the "Web," after all).
Before long, your readers, most of whom just wanted the first five to
seven inches of that 60-inch opus anyhow, can get it – or a summary
of it – and with feedback and commentary that actually enriches
the content.
You will have encouraged a parallel knowledge economy that
you will have a hard time tracking. And that violates one
of the basic principles of "war" – keep your "enemy" where
you can see him.
Finally, there is the reality Lazarus acknowledges. The
feds have to grant an exemption. What the feds give, they
can take away. And you think the industry's collective
chain is being jerked already?
The horse has left the barn, the train has left the station,
and all the cliches and antitrust exemptions in the world
won't change that. So let's get back to figuring out how
to make it all work in the new economy, the one that's reality.
Because Lazarus was right on one thing: It's a life-or-death
moment. Read his
column>
