The “borrowing” site gets lots of traffic and makes money off selling ads on their own site. The newspaper might see some uptick in traffic, but they’re sure not getting any of the “borrowing” site’s revenue.

In the biz, these types of sites are known as aggregators – the Drudge Report, Newser, Gawker and the like. They’re popular. You can visit one of these sites and get a pretty good snapshot of the biggest news of the day.

I bring all this up because reporter Ian Shapira of The Washington Post wrote about this very thing. And because it happened to him when Gawker redid one of his stories. You can check out Shapira’s column here. It’s worth reading and does a pretty good job of showing how it all works.

Shapira’s 1,500-word article involved, among other things: an hour-long phone interview and typing out 3,000 words of notes; attending a two-hour seminar conducted by the subject of the article; four hours of transcribing those notes; and then writing the article.

Quote:

After all the reporting, it took me about a day to write the 1,500-word piece. How long did it take Gawker to rewrite and republish it, cherry-pick the funniest quotes, sell ads against it and ultimately reap 9,500 (and counting) page views?  I called up Hamilton Nolan, the Gawker writer to whom I had been so grateful. “Probably took me,” he said, “you know . . . a half-hour to an hour.”

The problem is pretty basic. Shapira does all the work; another site does a quick rewrite and makes money basically off someone else’s work.

I have a problem with that.

Newspapers are in dire straits. And somehow allowing someone else to profit off a newspaper’s hard work without due compensation doesn’t sit well with me.  I’m not blaming the aggregators for becoming aggregators – they were smart.  But this whole idea that since it’s out on the Internet then it’s free-for-all is wrong.

Would you seriously not have a problem if someone else took your hard work, revamped it a little and made money off it?

Although tongue-in-cheek, or maybe not, Shapira ends his article on his article in a pretty good summation:

Quote:

After talking with Denton, Nolan and others for this article, I still want a fluid blogosphere, but one where aggregators — newspapers included — are more transparent about whom they’re heavily excerpting. They should mention the original source immediately. And if bloggers want to excerpt at length, a fee would be the nice, ethical gesture.

So, Gawker, do me a favor. At least blog this piece. I’ll even write a headline for you (free of charge). How about: “Whiny WashPost Reporter Makes His Point: Respect the Genuine Article”? Oh — one other thing. If you sell ads against your posting, can you cut The Post a check?

And now I’ve said it. And it sucks saying it because it was my life for roughly a quarter of a century.

I’m afraid the only thing  keeping print versions alive right now  is habit. It’s what you’ve always done, what you’ve always known. It’s a comfort zone.

And you know, a habit is basically an addiction. And addictions can be expensive, but they can also be broken.  And it’s a lot easier to break an addiction if you can keep your addiction, and suddenly get it for “free.”

Damn, somehow I brought in that whole paid verses free online content thing again, didn’t I?

I love newspapers. And with that I want to point out the English language is simply lacking in adequately descriptive words. The word “love” should be reserved for, well, poems and songs and significant others, like the Little Black Dress. And yeah, newspapers, but the LBD understands that.

But adulation, affection, allegiance, amity, amorousness, amour, appreciation, ardency, ardor, attachment, crush, delight, devotedness, devotion. enchantment, enjoyment, fervor, fidelity, flame, fondness, friendship, hankering, idolatry, inclination, infatuation, involvement, like, lust, mad for, partiality, passion, piety, rapture, regard, relish, respect, sentiment, soft spot, taste, tenderness, weakness, worship, yearning and zeal don’t quite get it.

Change that. “Passion” does. So does “Zeal.”

Anyway, why do I “love” print newspapers.

1. They’re cheap.

2. Absurdly portable

3. No boot-up time

4. No crash

5. Airport Security. Nuff said.

6. Throw it down, stomp on it, dust it off and back to square one.

7. Okay yes, bird cages and puppy training and packing up Aunt Emma’s old china.  Happy?

8. Because the people who write for print newspapers have a passion, a zeal, a love, for what they do. They are underpaid, overworked (okay, that applies to everyone now), and yet they still care.

9.  It’s a one-shot deal. It’s printed, it’s done. Tomorrow’s another day. We rip the whole thing up and start all over. It’s a new day, every day.

10.  There is no No. 10. I friggin hate “Top 10″ lists.

And honestly, great print journalists have no fear. They might get nervous before a big interview, but they have no fear. They might get sick and throw up if there’s an error in their story, but they have no fear. They have a passion, a drive.

Yet that incredible product is going the way of the dinosaur, partly because it’s being given away for free, and partly because the product  is starting to lose its value.

The cost of a daily newspaper continues to go up. Yet its size continues to shrink and shrink. Not only are there fewer pages, but the width is shrinking as well.

And how about that customer service? Used to be the paper was delivered right at your doorstep. Now I have to hike all the way up my drive. Why? Heck, in some places you can’t even get a daily newspaper delivered any more – Detroit.

And what about content. By the time I read the newspaper, it’s literally old news. I’ve already read it online, or someone emailed me a story, or I got a text version, or something. Why should I pay for a newspaper I’ve already read?

We’re getting to the point where the print product is only a delivery mechanism for coupons.

Here’s how Jen of Editor and Publisher’s Fitz and Jen column summed it up: “Too many newspapers lately seemed preoccupied with getting people to pay for online content while treating those people who actually pay for the content via print subscriptions as second-class readers. How? They drop frequency. They kick home-delivery to the curb. They raise the price of subscriptions (and especially newsstand copies) and give less in return. For all the blubbering about hyper local, I’ve noticed a lack of focus in daily metros when I’m lucky enough to travel around the U.S. It’s full of AP and wire copy with a handful of “local” stories broken into digestible chunks with lots of pictures. I wouldn’t pay for that.

The print version needs to be, must be, unique. It has to have content not available elsewhere. It has to have value or it will simply become high-priced packing paper.

I ran a news service for five years, which included more than 30 papers.  During that time, I could count on two hands, okay and maybe one foot, how many times I touched a print newspaper.

Yet I was able to hold an intelligent conversation with any of those papers’ editors about what was going on in their community. That’s obviously a plug for the value of an online paper, but it doesn’t bode well for the print product.

Basically, the paper is withholding certain stories from the the web until they appear in the print edition.  Those stories focus on great features, investigative pieces and non-breaking news stories.

Breaking news and daily stories and such will remain the first domain of the web, as they should be.

It’s where we’re headed, and I think we need to move a little more aggressively toward it.

Editor Nancy Barnes, in a note to readers, said, “I’m not sure anyone knows what the right answer is for our business right now. What I do know is that good journalism, the kind an enlightened community like the Twin Cities demands and appreciates, cannot be produced for free. I also believe that we, as an industry, have to drive more value into our printed papers so long as we continue to deliver news that way. So starting last week, we began experimenting with giving some of the best of our journalism to you, our paying print customers, first.”

I think that last sentence should be one of those “duh” moments. I’m not sure why it hasn’t hit others yet.

Why should I pay for something I can get for free?

The print newspaper of the future, if it will exist that is, must focus on in-depth, well-written reporting and storytelling (not lies, but gripping reading.)

“Jen” from Editor and Publisher’s Fitz and Jen column, summed it up perfectly: “Using the print edition as a vehicle for in-depth analysis is something that newspapers should be doing more. Break news online, aggregate local content, upload video, but please don’t forget the very people, the print subscribers, who are footing the bill. They deserve something extra.”

I’ve always advocated newspaper should charge for online content.No one, myself included, knows how that will play out.

But maybe one option toward that end is to create a specialized online version that includes those “print exclusives.” If you want it all, in whatever version/form, you pay for it.

I would argue overall newspaper traffic is of secondary importance, if  even that. Or to put it another way, what’s important is quality over quantity.

Too often proponents of free newspaper sites bow before the altar of Web Traffic Numbers and pontificate about their 10% growth in on-line readership. Bonuses are tied to increasing web traffic and revenue; with revenue tied to traffic in a vicious circle.

More traffic? We can increase on-line ad rates and save the day. It’s why newspaper web sites must be free, we must have the traffic. Not quite.

We’re forgetting a fundamental rule of journalism – what does it mean to me?  Me (the local advertiser), Me (the local reader). In reality, often times those big jumps in on-line readership are completely irrelevant to those two groups.

Case in point: I was working with a mid-size newspaper in the Heartland. One day we got a massive jump in on-line readership. I mean six-digits worth. And that carried over for a couple of days. All told, those couple of days were more than our entire on-line viewership for the month.

The reason? A story we ran got linked on The Drudge Report. The story? Someone found a severed penis at a car wash. Okay, so it turns out it wasn’t a human one, but rather a bull. But it was quite the story for a couple of days until that was resolved.

My point is that huge jump in traffic was of no use to our local readers or our local advertisers. The local grocery story wasn’t going to sell more food, the local tire store wasn’t going to sell more tires and so on.

Why? Because the vast majority of those viewers were from out of state, or even out of country.

When I ran newspapers, I cared about four things: my local advertisers, my local readers, my newspaper and my employees. Take care of the first two, the third is covered. Take care of the fourth, the first two are covered. And round and round.

Hey, it’s great to consistently increase web traffic. But it needs to be traffic that matters.

Web traffic for newspapers needs to focus on quality.  And quality for those that matter – their readers, their advertisers.

Getting page views from England or Australia or even another state doesn’t help a local advertiser. Advertisers care only – and should – about traffic that will help them sell their product. And that’s where newspapers need to focus their on-line efforts. Not on some overall number.

Bill Grueskin, former managing editor of WSJ.com, said pretty much the same thing in a guest post today over at Reflections of a Newsosaur. (Smart guy).

Quote: You see this error in the way online publishers gauge their traffic. They usually cite monthly unique users, but, in fact, I’ve always thought total time spent per user, or page views per visitor, were more meaningful metrics.

If a news site gets 250,000 new unique users thanks to a link on Drudge, and that generates exactly 250,000 page views, the value of that traffic is minimal. All it shows is that those readers are engaged with Drudge, not the news site.

Newspapers need to quit worrying about the overall traffic numbers and start zeroing in on their local numbers.And I think newspapers can/should start charging for an on-line subscription IF, 1.) they provide unique content for their readers, 2.) provide local traffic for local advertisers.

People will pay for something they really want provided they see the value. Advertisers won’t care if a site is paid or free provided they get the right traffic.

If the mantra is “local, local, local” then quit focusing – or even caring – about non-local traffic. Non-local traffic might be great for the ego, but it means diddly to the newspapers’ customers.

In a nutshell – advertising is going down, down and down (well duh), but there’s some interesting /scary numbers highlighted.

And another article discusses why advertising isn’t working on the Internet – “not wanted, not trusted and not needed.”

Over at Advertising Age, author Bob Garfield (Chaos Scenario) says we’re pretty much in the Apocalypse.

Quote: This isn’t about the end of commerce or the end of marketing or news or entertainment. All of the above are finding new expressions online, and in time will flourish thanks to the very digital revolution that is now ravaging them. The future is bright. But the present is apocalyptic. Any hope for a seamless transition — or any transition at all — from mass media and marketing to micro media and marketing are absurd.

Not to be outdone, The Wharton School Professor Eric Clemons has more than 350 comments as of this writing on his post about why “Advertising is failing on the Internet.”

Quote: It is frequently argued that the advertising industry will provide sufficient innovation to replace the loss of traditional ads on traditional mass media.  Again, my basic premise rejects this, suggesting that simple commercial messages, pushed through whatever medium, in order to reach a potential customer who is in the middle of doing something else, will fail.  It’s not that we no longer need information to initiate or to complete a transaction; rather, we will no longer need advertising to obtain that information.  We will see the information we want, when we want it, from sources that we trust more than paid advertising.  We will find out what we need to know, when we want to make a commercial transaction of any kind.  The conventional wisdom is that this is exactly what paid search helps us to do, but all too often they are nothing more than a form of misdirection, as I explain further below.  Instead, we will use information that we trust, obtained at the time that we want to see it.

Let’s hope tomorrow is a better day.

And here are actually a couple of people who know about the subject – Jeff Jarvis and Alan Mutter in an LA Times Op-Ed debate.

Bios from the article:

Jeff Jarvis, author of “What Would Google Do?,” teaches journalism at the City University of New York and writes about news and media on his blog, Buzzmachine.com, and as a columnist for the Guardian.

Alan D. Mutter is a former newspaper editor turned businessman turned independent media analyst. He lives in San Francisco and writes about the impact of technology on the media at his blog, Reflections of a Newsosaur.

Think about it. News links sites like The Drudge Report run links of newspaper headlines. Nothing against Drudge, I use it all the time.

But I also notice there’s lots of ads on those sites. I doubt that money is being shared with newspapers – and it’s the newspapers’ content.

It’s very creative: simply start a link site, build up a lot of traffic and start selling ads. Not a lot of work involved – the newspapers are doing it all for you. Plus their content is free, so what’s the harm?

There are also any number of blog sites – liberal and conservative – that exist for the most part to comment on the news stories they pick up from newspapers. Again, they’ve got ads all over the place. They aren’t sharing that revenue with newspapers.

I just don’t understand why some other entity/person should make money off my (newspaper’s) content, without my getting something out of it.

Newspapers may want to continue down the wrong path of giving away their product (content), but they need to address others who profit from it without fair compensation.

Update: In thinking about this some more, credit is due to those sites that at least do link back; thus driving traffic to the newspapers’ sites. But my point still remains, newspapers need to stop this third-party free use of their content.

Everyone has the right to comment on news, but I’d prefer to see the newspapers somehow driving that conversation, and not just anyone.

2nd update: Found this article in The New York Times, which also looks at this issue.  And no, I didn’t pay for the article, and yes, I see the irony.

Quote: No more free ride to aggregators. Google announced that it would begin selling ads against Google News, with almost no financial accommodation to the organizations that generate that news. The book industry — of all Luddites — has extracted cash from Google, as did the wire services. Google, The Huffington Post and Newser have built their audiences and brands on other people’s labors. Most aggregators are not promoting newspaper content; they are repurposing it to their own ends. Newspapers’ audiences are harvested and sold divorced from the content that attracted them in the first place. The risk would be making Google, the kingmaker on the Web, angry.

I’ve got a link to his column on my blogroll, and like almost every other current/former journalist, I click it every day.

There’s an interesting story on NPR about Romenesko and a look at the future of newspapers  here.

Of note:  For many readers who love newspapers, it’s a sad state of affairs. If you clicked on Romenesko — as the blog is popularly known — over the past few days, here is essentially what you saw: “Washington Post profit falls 77% in fourth quarter,” “Will Rupert Murdoch end up owning the New York Times and Los Angeles Times?” “Hearst says it will sell or close the San Francisco Chronicle if cuts aren’t made in a hurry,” “Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News owner files for bankruptcy protection.” And that’s only a few of the entries.

Sprinkled among the list of sick-and-shut-in big-city newspapers were notices of others that are ailing and failing, such as the 150-year-old Rocky Mountain News, which published its last issue Friday. And an announcement that the American Society of Newspaper Editors has canceled its 2009 convention in April because of stress within the industry. And a slew of raging debates about whether newspapers can be saved, where news will come from in the future and how it will be delivered.

Not a title anyone would want, but Romenesko has basically become the obit writer for newspapers, and by that, I mean the actual newspaper.

So, who’s depressed?

When I was a publisher back in the 90s, I charged for content. I thought it was asinine to give our content away for free. I still do. And we had a great web site, thanks to the excellent folks at Morris Digital Works who built it. We even won the best designed web site for newspapers under 10,000 circulation from the Newspaper Association of America. So I think I can speak to this subject with some understanding.

Let’s face it, this is one of the most controversial subjects facing what’s left of the newspaper industry. Either the “web” should be free (it’s not, despite what you think, but that’s another post) or newspapers should charge for their content. There’s really no middle ground.

Hearst Corp. and Newsday recently announced they will start to charge for some content, but exactly how and what remains to be determined. Part of the problem I see is newspaper companies are looking/grasping for any revenue, and the “paid content” idea is an attempt to get something, anything. It’s a little late.

There’s a flurry of ideas out there, from “micropayments” to monthly subscriptions to donations. I’m not crazy about any of them really.

I understand all the arguments for free content – I lived it and debated it for years. There’s no sense rehashing all that here.

In my gut, I just don’t agree with giving away everything for free, especially when I was spending vast sums to gather/distribute it.  And that was/is part of the problem. I can understand “teasing” content on the web to drive readers to the print product – in fact I agree with that concept completely. But I’ve yet to hear a satisfactory answer as to why putting everything on the web will drive people to the print product.

I have yet to talk to anyone (who’s not in the newspaper or “web” business) who doesn’t agree. Every response, in a nutshell, is “why should I pay for the paper when I can read it online for free?”

I’d encourage you to read Alan Mutter’s post today - “Why Media Must Charge For Content” on this very subject.

Here’s an excerpt: When the Internet emerged, most publishers committed the Original Sin of thoughtlessly giving away their content for free in the hopes of attracting millions of page views where they could sell the sort of high-priced ads that had built the value of their print franchises. This monumental strategic blunder resulted in three major unintended, and unfortunate, consequences:

So what should newspaper do?

Well, I still like my original idea best, and yes, partly because it was my idea. And to be totally truthful, the “web” experts thought I was the Antichrist or something for charging.

Anyway, here’s what I did.

1. If you were a subscriber to the print product, we gave you access to the web for free. It was our way of saying “thank you loyal reader for buying our product. We’d like to give you something extra.”

2. Our newspaper was different than most in that about one-third of our readers were single copy. And they were religious about buying it every day. And I got lots of calls from these readers asking why they couldn’t get web access. I agreed with them. So we put a daily password in the paper to accommodate those people. Again, thanks for buying our product, here you go.

3. We charged a minimal amount for non-subscribers to read the paper online – as I recall it was $7 a month or $60 ($5 a month) for an annual subscription. It wasn’t much, probably half a print subscription, but that wasn’t the point. I just placed value in what we did and believed our product was worth something. And you know what, we actually made a nice little chunk of change from charging non-subscribers.

From a pure business standpoint, newspapers do one thing – they “sell” information. And that information comes in two basic forms: ”news” and “advertising.”

Bottom line, people buy newspapers to find out what’s going on and to be informed – whether that’s wondering if the city council raised their property taxes to who won the football game to finding out if their favorite clothing store is having a sale or to find a job.

If you quit “selling” your product, you simply aren’t going to make any money.