The Mark 2010

Thirty years into the digital revolution, newspaper publishers are still clinging to a linear and lazy approach to the internet.

Serious news production is an expensive business. There are few shortcuts for effective journalism, especially international and specialist coverage. The cost to a major daily newspaper of a foreign correspondent can exceed half a million dollars a year. The cost of a foreign bureau of a television network can be five times that amount. And the productivity of those investments can be terrible. Even the Kabul correspondent of a major news organization cannot promise an interesting story on a daily basis and sometimes not even weekly. Using freelance or part-time employees is a cost-saver many news organizations have reverted to, paying on a per-use or small retainer basis. This adds two potentially threatening risks for any editor or publisher, however: it dilutes the brand, as there is no promise of exclusivity, and there is a far weaker ability to demand stories relevant to home readers.

Like record company executives stumbling and tripping into the digital age, being dragged by their customers and markets into a terrain they hoped was just a teenage fad that would soon fade, newspaper publishers have made the same dumb mistakes and then invented a few of their own. In most cases, they ignored the internet for years, eventually creating websites hilarious for their static, poorly designed and buggy operation.

Then many decided that the solution was “eyeballs,” so distributing their content far and wide for free would generate so much traffic that advertisers would compete for the opportunity to irritate readers with silly pop-up ads in the middle of a news story. It turned out that readers were not amused and installed ad-blocking devices to stop the intrusions (and advertisers were less than thrilled with the click-through rates anyway).

Then the fad became “the walled garden”: We’ll lock out readers who haven’t paid! Except that there was a hole in the garden wall from the beginning, and readers could get the same content from a news aggregator, supported by someone else’s advertisers, for free. Some papers even irritate their non-home audience by making it impossible to gain access to their online content unless you are a local print subscriber. Try explaining that business model to someone trying to send an electronic obit from the local paper to a distant parent.

Most bizarrely to this newspaper lover, I cannot even read the real newspaper online in most cases. Some publishers have subscribed to a software platform that allows online readers to see a screen image at about half the size of the real paper. Again, with a strange approach to market development, most of them require you to pay $15 to $20 a month, on top of your print subscription, for the privilege.

Now this strikes me as foolish on at least three levels. First, newspaper layout and design is an art form developed over centuries, and the best in the field are genuine delights of colour, form, graphics, and text. Digital newspapers mostly resemble Yellow Pages ads in design sophistication. Secondly, the blend of elegant display advertising and good page design makes a combination pleasing to the eye of the reader. Digital display advertising consists mainly of flashing, garish attention-demanders guaranteed to irritate. Finally, the limitation of a print display ad is, of course, that it is static. That same ad displayed on a computer monitor is instantly interactive, capable of linking to advertisers, special offers or reader-selected data.

The same is true of every other element of the page: each photo could click to open a slide-show of additional material; each graph or illustration could support thousands of lines of data and additional information at the click of a mouse; each editorial could link to every other editorial in the paper on that subject over decades, or to other newspapers’ editorials on the same subject that day.

Newspaper publishers’ linear, literal and lazy approach to the digital age might have been understandable in 1995 or a few years later: like the early coach-makers who insisted on retaining the buggy whip holder on early motorized vehicles, or the television producers who used their radio stars to read, scripts in hand, to the camera. But we are now approaching the third decade of the digital revolution and their traditional business model is dying at a visible pace in front of everyone’s eyes.

This text was drawn from the June 2009 issue of Policy Options, the magazine published by the Institute for Research on Public Policy.