Digital Fish Wrap?

Peter Scheer, Executive Director of the California First Amendment Coalition, authored a provocative opinion piece in yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle, suggesting that newspapers should raise the value of subscription services by enforcing an industry-wide 24-hour embargo on news content before it is made accessible through the free portals and search engines. Scheer says that even the most successful newspapers have trouble selling online advertising that covers even 10 percent of what they have lost in print advertising, concluding that only by cutting off the portals from their sources of traffic-driving fresh news can newspapers win over subscribers to their own sites. Even ignoring the remoteness of possibility that large and small news organizations could ever cooperate on the scale that would be necessary to make this effective, or the more likely scenario that an industry-wide collusion that forced consumers to spend more for news would be declared a violation of antitrust laws, it still sounds like a bad approach to the problem.

A major flaw in Mr. Scheer’s argument is his assumption of an online business environment that still follows the rules of the pre-dot bomb era, back when page views and banner ads ruled the day, and site owners only made money by being destinations for users. That vision of the Internet was no more than an attempt to simply duplicate print ads onto a web page instead of a paper one – it never took into account the dynamic nature of the web. It took Google to recognize the possibilities that could be created when every search could be turned into a new opportunity for serving highly targeted ads. He ignores the revenue-generating possibilities of newer technologies like RSS and mash-ups and social tools that create new opportunities for engagement with users outside of the subscription model. What we are seeing today is the concentration of these tools in the hands of large technology companies, so they are the ones who happen to be profiting at the moment. However, most of these are open source technologies, and there is no reason why news organizations, with their well-established brands and their built in, loyal, local audiences could not use some of these tools to turn themselves into successful portals. The great majority of web users will probably never become subscribers, but they will continue to use the Web in more ways, for information, entertainment, and community. Newspapers would be kidding themselves if they thought that they could truly turn that tide by erecting new walls around fresh content. They would be much better served to follow the tide, i.e. learn what this new generation of web users is doing, and keep coming up with ways to make all of their content more engaging and more valuable.