It was a piquant question . . . well, piquant if you took it the right way . . . and then-Chicago Tribune publisher Scott Smith seemed to ask it at all the right times.
“Who will pay?”
There was never any shortage of product ideas, and in fact never a shortage of good product ideas, at the Tribune during Scott’s era, roughly 1997 to 2008. For nearly all of these ideas, it was a simple matter to quantify and project the costs. For nearly as many, it was pretty straightforward to estimate the size of the audience and its members’ potential enthusiasm.
“But who will pay?”
Were there advertisers out there – real ones, not notional ones – ready to support this idea with actual dollars (and would those dollars be new, or just shifted from somewhere else?)? Were there potential partners willing to help bear the costs due to mutual self-interest? Or might there be actual consumers ready to fork out a quarter, or a couple of bucks?
Once in a while, we could answer Scott’s “pleasantly stimulating” question, and before long we’d have a RedEye or a Chicago Home & Garden or a Triblocal.com. But probably more often, we had to confess that we just had no idea.
I flashed back to this question today when I read of the demise, or transition, of the Chi-Town Daily News, ex-Tribune reporter Geoff Dougherty’s effort at nonprofit community journalism. (For a dandy compendium of links to reports and analysis, from harsh to hushed, head over to Eric Zorn’s Change of Subject at chicagotribune.com.)
