In the past few months, plenty of turmoil has swept through the
newspaper industry both in northwest Louisiana and the state as a whole. You
may thank this column in part for that.
Earlier in the year, Gannett Corporation, the owner of the Shreveport Times and several others
newspapers in Louisiana, notified the world that by the end of the year its
websites would be converted to paid models of delivery as a response to the
rapidly declining revenues from its print versions. The idea is that too much
of the product was going out for free and therefore to monetize it beyond the small
contributions of digital ad sales.
But this tactic only will slow the decline, because you can’t compete
against others still giving away essentially the same content for free. In the
good old days, in almost any area of interest, the only source of information
or entertainment one could get in a portable, on-demand way was a newspaper. However,
you had to pay for it.
Then came the Internet, and by the 21st Century people could
get state, national, and international news for free. Then came widespread blogging,
where their multiplicity provided increasingly more and greater numbers of alternative
sources of information and entertainment. Worse, more and more Internet-only
sites that could use technology’s gifts could produce their own original
content scalable so that they could give it away for free while collecting sufficient
revenues from advertisers and market researchers.
Finally, portability has arrived with digital tablets and phones. And
other media, already more amenable to digitalization, could take better
advantage of the situation. This is why Gannett’s efforts only will slow the
slide: in a few keystrokes, television stations just rip their content right
off the air, transcript molded into a narrative in words, and put it out there
on the Internet, already paid for by the ads during broadcast.
The Gannett strategy is predicated on the idea that people will pay for
unique content. But unless you’re absurdly wedded to a particular writer or the
comics, none of their content will be unique. For example, if you want general local
political news, the TV stations’ sites will give that to you for free. If you
want specific analysis or more in-depth coverage, you can get it here – and at
a rate cheaper than daily, even weekend, subscription to The Times.
Lou Burnett, FAX-Net’s publisher, has been covering politics around northwest
Louisiana, and deeply embedded, for almost two decades – and this after him
being in Washington, DC, for another quarter century or so. I’ve been here over
20 years analyzing and writing about state and local politics. And you don’t
even have to pay for other sources about that news on the Internet such as you
are doing right now. The problem with the Gannett model is that the value added
from their coverage is less than the price they charge for it, compared to value
offered by alternative sources, segmented and tailored to meet an audience’s
needs both for content and format.
This comparative disadvantage gets further aggravated as cost savings
measures decrease the potential value added. More recently, Gannett pushed into
retirement several individuals from The
Times, most relevant to readers of this space being longtime employee and likely
the last full-time editorial page coordinator of it Craig Durrett. He wasn’t
always correct on the issues, but when he was and it addressed a topic of local
concern, he provided valuable input into the policy-making process. Perhaps his
finest efforts came in the year before getting his parachute, where he played a
major role in elevating the issue of LA
Highway 3132 extension to public consciousness, and his several editorials
on the matter likely were significant in efforts to keep the process transparent
and official accountable.
But that expertise got wiped away, and over time it in fact it might
end up getting replicated by the free content community. Thus, local print
journalism entities are getting eroded from the top end by the plethora of national
news freely available, at the bottom end by the presence of individuals at the
local level who can claim plausibly as much or not much less expertise in
provision of information and for free, and for where specialty or intense
interest in a subject requires some expertise, platforms now exist that render
it at reduced prices.
Political news, the subject of this publication and column, is even more
openly and freely available than most kinds. If candidates for office aren’t trying
to give it away in order to get elected, all sorts of legal requirements make a
lot of information public, and plenty of volunteers exist to disseminate at
least some of what is not required to be public, or to interpret what is.
Newspapers have to realize that they don’t have anything that is difficult to
find, or any demonstrably expert ability in delivering it. In sum, they are
just trying to make money with a product to which they can’t add much value and
in getting it they face relatively higher gathering and distribution costs.
When this reality catches up with The
Times, whether it will or can go the way of the New Orleans Times-Picayune is another matter. Before the end of the
year the doyen of the state’s journalism will cut back to thrice-weekly
distribution and concentrate more of its efforts on web content and distribution.
Its sister paper in Ann Arbor, MI has eliminated completely print. Its
scalability in a far larger metropolitan area and local market penetration might
bring it success where if The Times
did the same it would fold.
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