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.)
“Who will pay?” Dougherty had the Knight Foundation paying for a while as part of its commitment to “advance the best values of journalism through rapidly developing digital media.” (In the interest of full disclosure, Knight funds my chair at Medill.) But the money ran out, and yesterday he had to lay off his four full-time staffers. Now he’s looking to transition to a for-profit model.
Turned out that, even though nearly every story on the site carried a label announcing how much it cost to produce, people were not being motivated by what they were reading … to pay.
“The Daily News needs $1 million to $2 million per year to do a great job of covering a city as sprawling and complex as Chicago,” Dougherty wrote today. “And despite hundreds of phone calls and letters to foundations, corporations and individual donors over the past four years, we’ve never come close to that. Last year, we raised about $300,000.”
This morning’s NYT had brought another story in the unending series about newspapers trying to figure out how to extract revenue from online readers. “Ideas for Online Media Pay Wall Create Buzz,” said one online version of the headline. “Lots of Fee Ideas for Media Online,” said another.
In other words, Who will pay?
I am persuaded that one thing newspapers have not yet done is recognize the fact that a lot of the print readers they no longer have are print readers who hated them in the first place. They needed to be informed, but they had no alternative to getting their fingertips dirty. They wanted the news, but they wanted more than the few words and few stories they could get on TV.
The newspaper haters are no longer reading newspapers. They no longer have to be accommodated. Newspapers need a new formula, of value and of content, that identifies the ones who will indeed pay, and treat them really well for doing so. Offline, we are seeing prices rise accordingly, here and there.
Online, treating these people really well will not mean charging for commodity content that is already in the cloud. That’s the kind of fee idea that creates a buzzsaw, not a buzz. Charging them for something relevant and timely and tailored and requested? A different story, I believe.
Although I, myself, am still working on a good answer to that question.
Who will pay?