http://www.ibrattleboro.com/article.php/20100928111243173
Paywalls and Papers - Rutland Herald Plans To Hide
Tuesday, September 28 2010 @ 11:25 AM GMT+5
Contributed by: cgrotke
On October 1, 2010, the Rutland Herald is scheduled (says WCAX) to put their online news behind a paywall. This move is fraught with risk.
Most experiments with paywalls have been miserable failures due to a combination of factors:
1. Readership drops. Those unwilling to pay will go somewhere else.
2. As readership drops, advertising drops. Fewer eyeballs equals less ad revenue. (Attention Rutland Herald advertisers: iBrattleboro sells ads that reach southern Vermont readers).
3. As readership drops, good reporters leave to work for papers with larger readership.
4. With inexperienced reporters, low readership, and declining advertising, sources will begin to favor other media outlets that get them the crowds they are looking for. If time is limited and there are many media folk to meet with, professionals will favor those with the biggest audiences.
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The Rutland Herald was begun as a weekly on December 8. 1794. It didn't have much local news at the onset, or for the first 40 years or so, instead focusing on biblical tales and poems.
The paper looked outward and began to document the community. Their editors argued against slavery and in favor of Vermont railroads. Their reporters covered politics and business, and the Rutland Herald grew to become the second largest paper in Vermont.
In 1964 the paper purchased the Barre-Montpelier Times Argus, and in 1975 began a joint Sunday edition.
The paper has successfully remained a local newspaper operation, with the Mitchell family being owners and publishers since 1948.
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The Rutland Herald is an excellent news operation, and it's frustrating to see the paper go in the disappointing direction of a paywall.
To be sure, newspapers have had to adapt to changing business models. Paywalls, though, haven't been successful at improving the situation for those who have tried them.
Is there another way?
The traditional media model is to deliver a compelling product to as many people as possible, then make money selling advertising space. Revenue from subscriptions was always extra - it never paid the bills. Adding a paywall breaks this model by asking readers, not advertisers, to pay the way.
Editor & Publisher quotes publisher R. John Mitchell as saying "We are asking people to pay for the news, plain and simple... That is the service we provide. We can no longer afford to give it away on the Web. It continues to take significant resources to provide our content."
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I like the Rutland Herald and would like to help. Here's my advice:
1. Skip the paywall.
2. Redesign the website. Use professional design principles, improve the use of type, use better headers, and improve the overall layout and organization.
3. Promote your stars. The Rutland Herald has many of the state's best reporters - great writers who know their beat. Take a cue from TV and radio and start an ad campaign to let readers know that the Rutland Herald has a top-notch news team.
4. Focus on excellence. The Rutland Herald often beats other papers on quality. Maintain and increase this lead and work to become known as Vermont's trusted source of information. Use the paper's in-house expertise to become curators of news.
5. Start thinking about the difference between infinite and scarce goods, and aim to make revenue off of the scarce goods.
An infinite good is something that can be "manufactured" infinitely at no cost - a PDF file or mp3 would be an example. People can "take" these off your shelves for free, endlessly, and it doesn't cost extra for you to make the additional copies.
Scarce goods have limits, and therefore more value. A scarce good could be access to an event of limited seating, or a unique, one-of-a-kind object.
For the Rutland Herald, the infinite good is the news on the web page. One obvious scarce good is the physical paper. Other scarce goods can be identified and monetized if the paper continues to have a firewall between financial matters and editorial decisions.
6. Get people hooked. Instead of spending money to equip writers with video cameras or have developers install paywall software, why not spend that money to mail a copy of the paper to every Vermont household for 6 months, then hit everyone up with an offer to continue a subscription? Would your advertisers be pleased to be reaching 100% of homes in Vermont? Would that have value to them?
7. Reinvent the printed newspaper. Go in the opposite direction of the papers trying to become online multimedia broadcast centers and focus on making a compelling, new, printed product. Use the web to support this effort, not duplicate it. Currently the site is pushing information from the paper out. Consider turning it around to use the site to bring it in, then sort and make sense of this for print readers.
8. Think again about why people like newspapers and why we like print. A newspaper is more than news and ads to a reader. A newspaper is a very close personal friend. We have them at our breakfast tables. We eat lunch with them, take them on trains and planes, and can read them anywhere. Why not take advantage of our fond feelings and nostalgia to market the paper?
9. Work with schools. Help guarantee generations of civic-minded citizens who are connected to newspapers as part of their life.
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I hope the Rutland Herald quickly abandons the paywall experiment and begins looking at other ways to stay competitive. It would be nice to have them around in 2094 for their 300th birthday. : )
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