shorpy.com
The Seattle Times is working on tablet and smartphone apps, which will feature paid access.
The paper’s also considering adding a partial “paywall” to its regular website.
This post is not really about that.
That’s because these moves coincide with something I’ve been feeling for a few weeks now.
Hear me out on this:
I believe what we now know as web ads, by themselves, will never earn enough money to support professional local journalism. No matter how hard you game the search engines or hustle for page views.
The “Future of News” pundits (Clay Shirky, Dan Gillmor, Jeff Jarvis, et al.) not only don’t know how to fund journalism, but I’m convinced they don’t care.
Or rather, they care foremost about preserving an “open web,” in which everything is free for the taking, the slicing, the dicing, the aggregating, the sampling, and the reblogging.
Even if nobody gets paid for making the original content all these other ventures use.
Aggregation sites, and indeed much of the “Web 2.0” model, are like an ever expanding variety of beautiful packages, all of which contain identical globs of dryer lint.
No matter how pretty the box, it’s worthless unless you can put something good in it.
Something worthwhile. Something useful or entertaining.
And in most cases, the really good things cost time and money to make.
So: Unless there’s a massive retro newsprint revival similar to the vinyl record revival, news will need to be distributed in the form of “bits” instead of “atoms.”
But your typical ugly, cheap-ad laden, one-text-per-page websites can’t pay for it.
Some online-news entrepreneurs are soliciting donations, sometimes through nonprofit and “low profit” organizations.
But that’s not for everybody.
An outspokenly “free enterprise” outfit like the Times needs to make money the old fashioned way, by selling something.
In the past, that “something” was print advertising. (The cover price usually paid just for the printing and distro.)
Print ads are way down these days and might not come back.
Web ads earn much, much less per reader.
That leaves either shrinking to the size of SeattlePI.com or worse, soliciting local business leaders to help subsidize the operation somehow, or finding new revenue streams.
A tablet app adds value to the news “product.”
It brings back graphic design.
It brings back a sense of a newspaper as a “whole” document, not just individual text and directory pages.
And perhaps most importantly, it brings advertisers back in eyeball contact with a publication’s entire readership, not just with an individual page’s “hits.”
So yes, let’s have tablet newspapers.
And make them worth paying for.
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Papers that already have design-rich, paid-access tablet and/or web app versions include the Financial Times, the Guardian, the Vancouver Sun, the NY Daily News, and, of course, the NY Times.
They’re noble attempts.
And who knows, they just might succeed.
