CultureGrrl’s very porous paywall
If newspapers want to make money online, they’ve got to beef up their online offerings—not just by adding more bells and whistles, but also by ramping up the types of serious content that only digital media can provide. For this, they’re going to need journalists who think in terms of links and multimedia at the same time they’re pounding out their copy.
For the NY Times and other publications that are urgently hoping to get readers to pay for online content, a reality check came yesterday when John Koblin, the NY Observer‘s media columnist reported that Newsday, Long Island’s premier newspaper, had garnered a mere 35 online subscribers during the first three months since putting up an online paywall.
While highly respected, Newsday is not as much of a much-read as the NY Times. And there were extenuating circumstances: Some 75 percent of Long Islanders, Koblin reports, can get Newsday online for free, as subscribers to the hardcopy or to Optimum Cable (owned by Newsday’s owner). Still, the three-month results are, as John describes them, “astoundingly low.”
As a content consumer and blogger, I want to be able to click on news website links for free. As a content provider, I’m in Arthur Sulzberger Jr.‘s camp—desperately seeking some way to get paid for the valuable information and insights that I provide online. My plead-for-donations model is not a brilliant success. (Speaking of which, please join CultureGrrl Donor 110 from New York City, by clicking my yellow button, above.)
I still don’t know what my blog’s business plan should be. (Find another business?) But I do know that mainstream media publications in general, and the NY Times in particular, have got to think at least as much about providing substantial value-added features in their online editions as about devising the best way to design the meter.
In their full-page ad in the NY Times on Jan. 21 (the same day that the story announcing the paywall plans ran in the paper), Sulzberger and Janet Robinson, the Times’ president and CEO, wrote:
Looking ahead, we are excited about enchancing the user experience for our readers and advertisers, to make NYTimes.com even more compelling, interactive and entertaining.
Here’s how—my suggestions on how newspapers can make their digital editions more informative and essential (not just more flashy) than their dead-tree counterparts. The big guys can learn much from the little blogs—not about how to make money (for which we’re miserable models), but about how to take advantage of the unique content-enhancing qualities of the web:
—Provide substantive links to all primary sources
This is CultureGrrl 101, but its importance seems to elude the web wizards at the NY Times and other publications, who seem more print-oriented than computer-focused: If you cite a source, link to the statement, report, document or article (even if from another newspaper) to which you are referring.
Take, for example, my CultureGrrl report and Robin Pogrebin‘s NY Times report on the recent “deaccession roundtable” in New York. Both of us were writing about the Brodsky Bill, which would regulate New York State museums’ art sales. But only CultureGrrl linked (in my first sentence) to the actual text of the bill that was the subject of the meeting that we covered.
(Speaking of links to documents, here’s the memo to staff from Sulzberger and Robinson about the NY Times’ paywall plans, via Romenesko.)
—Ditch the irrelevant links
This is a corollary to the first imperative. In Pogrebin’s above-linked article, she provides this quote from one of the participants in the meeting: “We would hope this bill would be clarified to, as Samuel Goldwyn said, ‘Include me out.'” That “Samuel Goldwyn” link, if you click on it, takes you to the Times’ website for its own movie coverage (not even to information about the movie mogul himself, as I had been expecting). Similarly, if you click on the National Archives link in this Times article about damage to Haiti’s cultural riches, you’re taken to information about the National Archives in the U.S., not Haiti.
Who is going to bother clicking on links if they connect you to information that is completely irrelevant to what you are reading? It’s an exercise in frustration, not illumination. It happens all the time at many online sites of mainstream media publications.
—Use slideshows and video clips that directly relate to what is discussed in the accompanying article
When it comes to cultural coverage, newspapers tend to create slideshows by posting whatever digital images happen to be supplied by the cultural institution, whether or not those images illustrate what’s actually discussed in the article. Captions for slideshows should excerpt related text in the article, but often don’t.
My self-created images for CultureGrrl photo essays and videos (scroll down) are low in resolution and amateurish in quality. But at least they closely correspond to what I’m writing about. Big-budget mainstream media operations should assign photographers and videographers to tag along with art critics, or else give those scribes some good cameras and show them how to shoot. A little coaching on how to narrate videos with enthusiasm and personality would also help.
—In the hardcopy newspaper, always call conspicuous attention to related online content that supplements an article
Yesterday, I embedded on my blog a powerful Wall Street Journal video related to the cultural calamity in Haiti and linked to Pooja Bhatia‘s article that it illustrated. But the printed version of the article (buried at the bottom of p. A9) provided no clue that such powerful multimedia (also including a slideshow of Haitian works from the collection of the Waterloo Center for the Arts, Iowa) was there for the clicking at wsj.com. (The WSJ already has a paywall for much of its online content.)
For those who care about cashing in online, there’s a star-studded conference about Discussing the Economics of Content, organized by paidContent.org, coming up in New York on Feb. 19.
It’ll cost you, though: This content will set you back $895.