Get What You Don’t Pay For

Copyright 2007 Ben S. Pollock

Last Monday, the 7th, newspaper publisher Walter E. Hussman, Jr. had an op-ed piece published in The Wall Street Journal. The essay already had been distributed to employees. The Journal apparently cut his first graf, a soft intro. It read fine this way.

As usual the hyperlink won’t be provided here, because it’s a fee-paid site; you’d be frustrated. If you subscribe, then “search.” You know how to do that, don’t you, Bogie? Just purse your lips and whistle up some keywords.

As it happens, Hussman’s guest column not only endorses fee-paid Web sites but argues the future of solid journalism depends on them. Nearly all of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette’s site is subscriber-only. Here in the Ozarks, however, the content is largely free. I can guess why, but I don’t know for sure so I won’t step in it.

The boss is right, and I’m not just saying that. He would not like my reasoning, should he ever see it. He is looking at this not just as a businessman but as one who over several decades has made profitable decisions that sometimes defied conventional thinking. I’m a tech enthusiast but nowhere near a geek in knowledge or obsession. I like free.

Free is how the Internet largely developed and is what nearly every user expects: Yahoo, Google, YouTube, MySpace etc. TV is free, right, and phone service isn’t too expensive. Free is just a perception, though. The Internet comes with a monthly fee at home, or furtive surfing at work. The coffee shop on the corner is expecting you to buy a scone and a double-latte while you check your e-mail there. TV now means cable; here, basic service is $50 a month. Free?

Free news. Other news media have been taking newspaper content for nearly a century. Newspapers survived radio national and local, television national and local, and even seemed to continue making huge profits in the heyday of cable TV news.

Hussman says this, too. Internet using content that newspapers create does seem to take a lot more from print financially than its broadcast predecessors. I suspect it’s because the Net is a text-based medium.

He gives numbers. Yup. Can’t make money when you give out nearly all or it’s taken from you with hyperlinks. The ads don’t travel. Online ads don’t bring in much, anyway, as the system “works” now.

Solution: Charge. OK. I am not opposed to that. I do pay up: Salon.com, the Journal and the Demzette. The last, yes, is at an employee discount, but about the same as the deepest subscription rate.

Why do I pony up for Salon? Subscribers don’t have to wade through ads. The Journal: ease of rereading articles from the print edition, left on the dining table. Demzette: The online fee is included in the print subscription — that has been a convenience. Someday I will give credit card numbers to Consumer Reports and Cooks Illustrated, where the advantage is access to all of their useful archive ratings and recipes, respectively.

Hussman in his column offers video and photo galleries as value-added features. I almost said value-added commodities, but that’s a term he uses very specifically, which I attempt to explore tomorrow.

I am not sold on these. Video on a computer is grainy with poor sound quality in the best of circumstance (not including MP3 downloads and the like). In a time where big box stores push High-Definition Television, or HDTV, computer video cannot fare better than LDTV. Monitors are not television receivers. Besides what are newspaper videos but long minutes of intact news conferences. C-SPAN is in cable-basic for a reason: few watch it. Journalism — both serious and gossipy — is digested data: Its customers buy (or grab) researched then edited info.

Quality is relative — meaning low — with online newspaper photo galleries. Its pictures are not downloadable in the sense you can make a Kodak- or Fuji-quality print. Digital resolution of images has to be kept low so that they download fairly quickly. They look bright only on computer screens, which are LDTV.

Hussman also mentioned archival searches and e-mail alerts. Some businesses need newspaper archives, the lawyer profession comes to mind, but the rest of us? I can search instead then pay by the piece. And how many want news bulletins by e-mail — Coach Couches Comments — or perhaps cell-phone text message — Sky Falling! Duck!

Content is in the end what newspapers can sell, in any medium.

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