…my pal Glenn Fleishman believes the paper’s online revenues, at the industry’s current low ad rates, simply can’t support a newsgathering staff of more than 10 or so people.
Of course, if the P-I were to go web-only with fewer than 10 percent of its current personnel, the resulting product would likely generate far fewer online readers.
My thoughts:
A purely online local-news venture is a far different beast from a printed daily with a Web presence. It will need to be conceived, designed, and nurtured (yes, that includes startup-period losses) as its own thang. For the P-I to evolve into such a product, it will need deep-pocketed owners willing to steer it through this morphosis without immediately, excessively chopping the staff (the P-I’s one valuable asset).
U.S. daily papers evolved, especially during the local-monopoly era of the late 20th century, as bland mass-market products intended to be everything to everybody. Online content is far more of a niche business.
Seattlepi.com would need to evolve into a niche operation—or several niche operations. That’s why I previously suggested the news/opinion, business, sports, arts, and lifestyle departments be treated as separate sites, with separate balance sheets.
And each of these sites (subsites, if you will) will need to establish a newer, more direct rapport with its audience. (The P-I has already done a lot of preliminary work in this regard.)
The business, sports, arts, and lifestyles subsites could each be run by a dozen or so journalists (including those unsung heroes, copy editors) with about the breadth and depth of coverage the print P-I currently enjoys in those departments.
What the Seattle Times used to call “General News” is different. It encompasses everything from politics and the environment to human-interest profiles and pictures of scenic sunsets.
It’s the part that would/will need to evolve the most in a transition to an all-online or predominantly-online news space.
More on this later.
But, for now, back to Fleishman’s main argument: Yes, online banner ad rates are too low to support professional team content creation. These rates will likely stay low for the near future; even after the general economy improves, marketers will still think cheap, and sites based upon unpaid or “aggregated” content are cheaper to operate than pro sites.
Pro news sites will have to stand out from the deluge if they’re ever going to command higher rates.
Cutting the reporting team down to the level of a small group blog would hurt seattlepi.com’s chief point of differentiation.
Keeping a daily print edition, even in a digest version, would help promote the seattlepi.com brand.
In any event, there’s going to be a monetary burn rate. In the early dot-com mania, there were plenty of investors, here and nationally, willing to lose money up front in order to build their brands. Is there anybody like that left today?
Meanwhile, the P-I and Times have shrunk their daily classified sections to a single page in large type. The last time the local dailies had only one page of want ads was during the nadir of WWII paper rationing.
