Barn Doors and Newspapers

 

 

Alarmed after finally noticing that readers and advertisers were out of the barn, the American newspaper industry has thought long and hard about what to do.

 

The emerging consensus is that it needs to design a better barn door.

 

Most designs lean heavily on subway turnstiles for inspiration – no pay, no service. It’s a concept simple enough for most newspaper executives to understand, which is a large part of its attraction.

 

Where the emerging designs are weakest is in a nagging little detail – getting readers and advertisers now frolicking in the fields of hypertext to want to come back in the barn.

 

As posted on Poynter Online’s Romenesko, a May 8 MediaNews memo from Dean Singleton and Judy Lodovic to their many minions embraces the turnstile, noting “First, we continue to do an injustice to our print subscribers and create perceptions that our content has no value by putting all of our print content online for free. Not only does this erode our print circulation, it devalues the core of our business - the great local journalism we (and only we) produce on a daily basis.”

 

Although coming from MediaNews brass, the sentiments are a safe bet to get embraced at other media companies, where doing an injustice has also become unpopular at about the same pace as it became unprofitable.

 

The memo goes on in MarketSpeak, but one quote stands out “To be clear, the brand value proposition to the consumer is that the newspaper is a product, whether in print or online, which must be paid for.”

 

Newspapers are compilations of the news of the day, whether that is a change of government or the price of broccoli. For readers, they compiled events and information that would be difficult or impossible for most readers to match. For advertisers, they compiled an audience, some of whom might be thinking of broccoli with dinner tonight.

 

Both readers and advertisers might grumble, but they paid up because there was no other practical way.  They stayed in the barn, and when they strayed with alternative media or direct mail, they came back.

 

That’s changing.

 

For readers, gathering – and often, publishing -- information is easy, quick and cheap. The old saw “Freedom of the press belongs to he who owns one,” is true with a vengeance. Just about everyone owns the means to distribute information widely, which is the same tool used to gather it.

For advertisers trying to peddle broccoli, it’s no longer required to pay for all the readers who don’t cook, or those who do but hate broccoli. Online ads after the first click are by definition viewed by those who might be interested in whatever you’re trying to sell. And if you have your own web site, regular customers will come to you for information instead of you sending it unbidden to them.

 

Newspaper brass should ponder that scribes in centuries long past once had a lucrative trade, since they could both read and write and a largely illiterate population had to use them to communicate at a distance. And then change in the form of widespread literacy came along.

 

Scribes disappeared.

 

Change has come again.

 

Newspapers. . .?

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