The San Francisco Chronicle is removing its paywall after just four months and the Dallas Morning News plans to follow suit. Observers are speculating that this could be the end of the nearly two-year-old binge that has seen more than one-third of U.S. newspapers erect barriers to their online content.

Neither company is abandoning the idea of gated content entirely, but both are reportedly pursuing new models based on premium services. That’s basically a reversal of the paywall formula. The premium-service model is aimed at monetizing a small part of the audience while a paywall denies service to everyone except those willing to pay. We think this amounts to a concession from both papers that paywalls are ineffective in their geographies.

San Francisco is a particularly tough place to make a paywall work, with its abundance of media and its tech-savvy audience. Also, the Chron isn’t exactly The New York Times of the west coast. In our view, it was a mediocre newspaper before cutting more than half its staff over the last few years.

All the Chronicle content will now be available on SFGate.com. What content will remain paid? A vaguely worded message from the new publisher and president said the paid SFChronicle.com site “will continue to provide readers with an online version that replicates a newspaper experience and reflects the changes in the news throughout the day.”

Replicating the newspaper experience online is a non-starter. We assume they’re working on better ideas.

The premium content model that the Chron and Dallas Morning News reportedly hope to implement is difficult to pull off. It has worked for ESPN, Cooks Illustrated, Consumer Reports and a number of financial publishers, but we’re not aware of any successes in the general news market. The premium model works best with investor audiences or those who are passionate, affluent and have an insatiable thirst for knowledge about a topic. None of those characteristics applies to local news.

It could be that San Francisco and Dallas are just early indicators that paywalls are not a good strategy for most newspapers. If so, we’ll know soon. Many publishers are coming up on their first year of experience, and they’ll have both the data and the experience to make a decision.

Bezos-Watching

If you need any further evidence that Jeff Bezos is the Lady Gaga of media-watching, look no further than this roundup on Nieman Journalism Lab. Everyone is speculating about what the Amazon.com founder plans to do, but Bezos himself is offering few clues. We didn’t read everything Nieman’s Mark Coddington found, but we did peruse a few analyses.

A profile in The New York Times highlights the paradox of Bezos’ interest in being a media magnate, given that Amazon is an extremely secretive company. “There are fewer leaks out of Amazon than the National Security Agency,” write David Streitfeld and Christine Haughney.

What little we know of Amazon comes from its famously vague quarterly analyst calls. Outsiders are rarely permitted to tour its buildings and even its own executives don’t know where all its data centers are located. Bezos himself makes few public appearances and keeps a low profile in his hometown of Seattle.

So why does he now want to carry the First Amendment flag in our nation’s capitol? Ken Doctor sees three reasons why he and other super-rich people are buying into newspapers: Low valuations, a call of duty and the hubris to believe they can turn around an industry everyone thinks is dying. Also, no one else is willing to do it. “The few remaining people with the stomach to run daily newspapers have bank accounts with at least nine zeros after a non-zero numeral of some kind,” he writes at Nieman.

Kudos to Doctor for reminding us of EPIC 2014, a vaguely creepy spoof video made in 2004 that forecast the emergence of a media Death Star created by the merger of Amazon and Google in 2014. Some of the parallels are striking (watch below).

Writer and futurist Tim Carmody says he’s studied Bezos for years and believes the Amazon founder is driven by a fascination with the future and the urge to leave something behind other than the company he runs. Carmody also has interesting details about the sale of the Post, which appears to have been more a coincidence than a plan. “By all accounts, Bezos did not go looking to buy a newspaper,” he writes. “When he was approached by his friend Donald Graham about buying the Post, he initially begged off considering it.” It was Graham who pushed the deal more than Bezos sought it.

A few consistent threads run through the accounts we read. One is that Bezos is intensely focused on customer experience. The Times relates the story of how Amazon stationed ambulances outside its Allentown, Pa. warehouse during a heat wave rather than turn up the air conditioning or reduce the workload for its employees. Meeting shipping deadlines was more important than the health of its notoriously overworked fulfillment staff.

A second is that Bezos is a long-term thinker who aims high. Whereas many entrepreneurs would have been satisfied to build the world’s largest online bookseller, Bezos has set his sights on becoming an infrastructure powerhouse that can deliver goods and services physically or virtually anywhere in the world. The newspaper industry could benefit from this kind of vision right now.

The third is that Bezos is an unpredictable experimenter who disdains the status quo. It’s a given that he will ruffle feathers among his conservative colleagues in the publishing ranks. Again, not a bad thing.

There are also conflicts of interest that will merit scrutiny. The biggest is Amazon Web Services, a contract data center operation that hosts thousands of large research and commercial entities, including more than 500 government institutions. It’s Amazon’s fastest-growing business, and the government market is a huge opportunity.

Will Bezos be able to balance his dual role as free press agitator and major government contractor? Most people seem to think so. As the Times’ headline summed up:  “Expect the Unexpected.”

Related articles

• Five things Jeff Bezos should do to reinvent the sinking ship that is the Washington Post
• Is the SF Chronicle the beginning of a paywall rollback trend? [GigaOM]
• SF Chronicle Said to Demolish Paywall After Four Months
• Chronicle Kills its Paywall — After Only Four Months
• San Francisco Chronicle Drops Its Paywall
• Dallas Morning News Will Get Rid of Its Paywall and Debut New Premium Site in September (Eric Celeste/FrontBurner)
• This Week in Review: Gauging Bezos’ Post plan, and tech companies’ surveillance dilemma

The idea of convincing readers to pay a few pennies to read a single article has been largely scoffed at over the years, but Blendle may have cracked the code, at least a little bit.
Launched two years ago in Europe, Blendle says it just surpassed the one-million-member mark. It’s getting hundreds of thousands of monthly visitors and 20% are converting into paying customers. Users will have read more than 20 million articles on Blendle by the end of the year, Managing Editor Michaël Jarjour told TechCrunch. It’s backed by The New York Times Co. and German publisher Axel Springer, and features content from an assortment of big-name publishers.
Users pay a few pennies to read an article and have the option of requesting a refund if they don’t like what they see. Refund requests must include a reason, a hitch Blendle adds to prevent abuse. Jarjour said the company employees 15 journalists who comb the Web looking for worthwhile stories that are hidden behind paywalls.
Blendle has elements of Flipboard, Nuzzel and other social news services in the form of human-curated feeds. If users provide access to their social network accounts, Blendle will add durations from friends into the news feed. A new service called Blendle Premium Feed is powered by a combination of algorithmic predictions and recommendations from friends.
So what will people pay to read? Not news, apparently. “We’ve seen that our users don’t like to spend money on the news,” wrote co-founder Alexander Klöpping in a Medium post announcing the company’s entry into the U.S. market. “What our users do like to read is investigative reporting, revelatory background articles, newsworthy analysis and hard-hitting interviews.”
 

Journalism traditionalists who suffer from high blood pressure probably shouldn’t read this piece by Forbes editor Lewis DVorkin. In it, he outlines the role of what he calls “brand journalism” in the evolution of Forbes.com, and even in Forbes magazine. He also scolds journalists for their objections to this increasingly popular concept, saying that their interest in keeping marketing content cordoned off from staff editorial is in part an instinct to minimize competition.

DVorkin has been a vocal critic of those who cling to the traditional Chinese wall principle of strict separation between advertising and editorial. In his view, the new economics of the profession demand radical new ideas, and journalists are standing in the way. “After five years of media turmoil, the profession I love clings to the belief…that the industry’s problems are for other people to solve. And when steps are taken to solve them, my colleagues will put up a fight if they can’t do exactly what they did before,” he wrote a couple of weeks ago in a summary of the changing advertising landscape and Forbes’ adaptation strategy.

Like it or not, DVorkin’s vision of increased integration between marketing and editorial content is gaining favor in traditional publishing circles. The trend is called “brand journalism,” “native advertising” or “content marketing,” but whatever the title, it’s breaking down some traditional walls.

Boston.com, which is the online arm of the Boston Globe, recently launched “Insights,” a sponsored advertising feature that showcases blog posts from advertisers. Boston.com is a little more aggressive about labeling Insights material as advertising than some other brand journalism practitioners, but it’s the same basic idea. The publisher appears to have no problem with participants like Business Intelligence Solutions embedding the banner ad at right on its blog, saying nothing about the sponsorship arrangement.

Some other publishers have all but erased the lines between staff and brand content. BuzzFeed, which is one of the new breed of breathless, celebrity-stuffed news sites for the ADD set, expects to derive nearly all of its revenue from branded content and sponsored posts. So far, things are going pretty well. The site was a magnet for political advertising during the US presidential campaign and is expected to triple revenues this year. Branded features, like this one from JetBlue, look the same as BuzzFeed content and carry only lightweight advertiser labeling. The Atlantic is also in the pool with Quartz, a news site that blends branded and staff-written content more or less seamlessly.

Writing on emedia, Rob O’Regan has a good summary of this trend, which has been fueled by Twitter’s sponsored tweets and Facebook’s sponsored stories. Those companies, which have no preconceptions about ad/edit separation, say these new vehicles are a resounding success. Publishers are taking notice, but a news site is not a social network. News organizations trade on credibility, and “native” ads tread into new territory. Recent research by Mediabrix and Harris Interactive found that  readers often feel confused or misled by branded content.

Compatible Content

The reason all this is happening, of course, is that the traditional print advertising model doesn’t work in the highly targeted online world. Display advertising is the fastest growing category of online advertising, and publishers have always known that display ads surrounded by compatible content perform best. Advertisers have traditionally bought space next to compatible content, but now they want to provide the content, too, because people are rejecting traditional messaging.

Businesses are quickly glomming onto this trend. Cisco relaunched its press room last year as a news stream, hiring laid-off journalists from major business publications to write thoughtful trend pieces. Intel is doing the same thing. Coca-Cola just overhauled its corporate site as a lifestyle news magazine under the “Coca-Cola Journey” brand. Expect many others to follow.

Sponsored content is nothing new. Mobil Oil bought space on The New York Times‘s op-ed page in the 1950s. What’s different today is that a severely weakened mainstream media is willing to be more the creative than ever in placement and labeling – even if that means potentially compromising their own brands.

Is this a horrifying development? The journalism purest in us says yes, but we’re inclined to keep an open mind. Lewis DVorkin has a point when he says journalists live in a bubble.  Social media have shown that good information can come from anywhere, even from people who aren’t journalists. As media organizations have learned to their chagrin in recent years, you can’t shove anything you want down people’s throats when they have infinite choice. The same applies to advertisers.

Regardless of who the author is, anyone who publishes content is at the mercy of readers. Marketers who publish the same dreck on branded media sites that they use to fill their purchased ad units won’t see much return on their investment. If people don’t want the content, it doesn’t matter how much you pay to publish it.

So the stakes are higher for marketers, too. The question is how many of them can successfully change their perspective to think like publishers. In our experience, precious few can. The natural instincts of people who have grown up in the traditional marketing world is to sell at every opportunity, not to serve the informational needs of the audience.

This will change over time as a new generation steps in, and publishers will play a key role in effecting that change. They will need to work with their clients to make sure the sponsored content they carry is worthy of their brand. It can be done. Admit it: If you clicked on the JetBlue link above, you scrolled down the entire page. It’s good stuff, even though it’s sponsored.

The silver lining is that if “native advertising” can become a major new revenue source, it can enable publishers to re-invest in quality journalism. In the end, that’s more important than labels or Chinese walls.

Related articles

• Lewis D’Vorkin and j-students lively 90 min conversation about the future of journalism
• Inside Forbes ‘sustainable” model for journalism: It’s 4:30 pm
• Coca-ColaCompany.com Relaunches as Brand Journalism Site
• Inside Forbes: The Birth of Brand Journalism and Why It’s Good for the New Business
• Media Walls Crumble: Brands Benefit

• The newsonomics of native, indigenous, and immigrant content (niemanlab.org)

In places where paywalls are working – and yes, they are working in some places – publishers have abandoned the metaphor of a wall and focused instead on bundled subscriptions that looked a lot like cable television. So writes Poynter’s Rick Edmonds in a summary of a report by the International Newsmedia Marketing Association (INMA) that looks at 15 successful paid subscription models.

No two are exactly alike, and some even challenge credulity, such as the Oklahoman, which charges 20% less for a combined print/digital package than for an online-only plan. That’s right, they pay you to take the newspaper. All the models have one thing in common, though: they’re working. Instead of being positioned as obstacles, they’re marketed as ways to serve  readers’ need flexible consumption via computer, smart phone, tablet or some combination of all three.

The INMA report cautions that hybrid subscriptions aren’t any easy sale. Readers need to have options and explanations laid out clearly, and digital can’t be positioned as an afterthought. However, readers have adopted so-called “digital replica” editions with surprising enthusiasm, indicating a fondness for the look and feel of print even when reading on a screen. The report also indicates optimism that paid subscription models can work when tuned to the needs of the specific audience.

Start by discarding the concept of a wall. Digital subscriptions need to be seen a convenience rather than a barrier. The emergence of multiple digital platforms may be the best thing that has happened to publishers over the last decade. It has given them a way to make simplicity a feature worth paying for, and audiences are proving to like that story.

Andrew Birmingham isn’t quite so optimistic. The CEO of Silicon Gully Investments and a former associate publisher of the Australian Financial Review pens a lengthy piece in the Australian edition of CIO magazine arguing that pay walls are a fundamentally defensive strategy undertaken by panicked publishers whose entire business models are collapsing around them. “The time to implement paywalls was 15 years ago when [editorial content] was worth paying for,” he writes. “The time to invest in editorial was also 15 years ago when [publishers] should have been erecting paywalls.”

Birmingham’s conclusions aren’t particularly novel, but his explanation of the spiraling downward cost of online advertising is worth reading. Advertising networks in general, and Google in particular, come in for particular criticism. Both promised publishers easy money in the late 1990s, when times were good. The consequence, though, has been cannibalization leading to a plunge in advertising prices “from hundreds of dollars per thousand to $1 to $2 dollars per thousand in Australia across general news websites,” Birmingham writes. “In the US, they are now measured in cents per thousand.

Publishers did this to themselves, of course. Few understood the implications of the Internet on their businesses in the early days and most saw online advertising as simply frosting on the cake. Most are making the same mistake with social networks today, choosing to believe that Facebook is simply another publishing medium rather than a reinvention of the way people consume information. It’s good to see some paywall experiments paying dividends, but it’s also hard to believe that publishers will get themselves out of this mess. New entrants will have to figure that one out. In the meantime, playing defense probably makes sense.

Miscellany

Over in the UK, a hyper local startup called the Port Talbot Magnet is trying the direct approach: It’s asking readers to contribute donations to fund its news coverage. Visitors can pledge amounts starting at just £2 to sponsor a court reporter for a day, and PayPal is accepted.

The New York Times released quarterly earnings that indicated that is paywall is working. The report is the first to give some indication of incremental subscriber growth beyond the initial surge of sign-ups that came when the paywall went up in March. It shows that more than a quarter million people are now paying at least the $15 minimum fee. Even better is that traffic to the NYT.com website is actually up 2% from a year ago.

“The Times has created the perfect paywall,” writes Ryan Chitturn on Columbia Journalism Review. “It’s getting tens of millions of dollars from hardcore readers while letting in enough Google traffic and casual readers to continue boosting its online readership and collecting ad revenue off of those eyeballs.”

Chitturn estimates that the Times will take in about $63 million in digital subscriber revenue this year and more than $210 million in total digital revenue. That’s more than it costs to operate the newsroom. Which means that The New York Times could theoretically get out of the print business entirely and still make money.

Does that mean it’s time for everyone to jump into the pool? Bill Mitchell thinks so. Writing on Poynter.org, he tells of moderating a panel at the World Editors Forum in which publishers who had taken the paywall plunge spoke of their initial trepidation and then relief when the steep declines in traffic that they had feared failed to materialize. Traffic to the Berliner Morgenpost has actually doubled since it put up a paywall in late 2009.

Mitchell quotes The New York Times’ Jim Roberts saying the wall has had a morale dividend. “There is more of an investment I feel in the newsroom among our journalists since the introduction of the paywall. They feel a greater stake in the product,” he said.

Perhaps the time is right. The Newspaper Association of America reports that traffic to newspaper websites jumped 20% in September compared to a year ago among the coveted adult demographic. “Average daily visits were up 21%; total pages viewed were up 10%; total minutes spent were up 11 %; and unique visitors were up 9 %,” the NAA reported.

Thus the great paradox continues. Newspapers are more popular than they’ve ever been, but the business model is broken beyond repair. The NAA numbers are encouraging, and perhaps indicates a flight to quality among readers who are fed up with social media noise. For the past five years people have been  publishing all kinds of nonsense online because they could. Now the novelty is wearing off and quality is becoming a differentiation point.

Google’s new Panda search algorithm is supposed to be a game changer in its ability to distinguish quality content from crap. We noted recently that Demand Media, which specializes in crap, has had to remove 300,000 articles from its website because Google won’t pay attention to them anymore. And the world hardly noticed.

The fact that newsrooms turn out a good product has never been debatable, but the idea that people who had been accustomed to getting it for free for 15 years would decide to pay for it is still an open question.

Give credit to the early adopters for fine-tuning the balance of free vs. paid content to achieve some success. The idea is to grant just enough access to entice readers to pay but not enough to give away the farm. The Wall Street Journal lets you read a couple of hundred words gratis but then wants a credit card. Perhaps it and the Times have figured out the formula.

We’ve been skeptical about paywalls for two years, but we’d be the first to cheer their success.  If they enable good journalism to flourish once again, we’re all for it.

Washington Post Co. Holds Out

Apparently the Washington Post Co. isn’t convinced. Publisher Katharine Weymouth was quoted in Politico last week saying that paid subscriptions don’t make sense for the Post at the moment. The newspaper’s philosophy is that its website should be “open to everybody and attract as many people as we can to spend as much time as they can with our journalism, and assume that that will bring them back for more.”

Politico points out that the Post has hardly been a beacon of publishing success lately. It has shed more than 45% of its newsroom staff and it just last month announced plans to close nine of its 11 suburban regional bureaus. The Post Co. does have a couple of things going for it, however, including its profitable Kaplan education division and its phenomenal 30% market penetration. You’d think a market share like that would be an incentive to charge more for the product, but Weymouth seems in no hurry. She isn’t ruling out a paywall but says she’s content to wait and see what works.

“They Won’t Invest in You”

Invantory is developing software tools to help people sell things. It wants to be kind of an alternative to Craigslist, with a mobile twist. The founders thought newspaper publishers would be potential customers, because they already know the classified advertising business and they have a desirable channel. But Invantory gave up on doing business with newspaper publishers. The principal reason: their computer are a mess.

“Newspapers’ online technology platforms [are] not standard,” wrote co-founder Ian Lamont on the Invantory blog. “This means that non-trivial integration work is required for practically any new feature or service, whether created in-house or purchased from a vendor. There are dozens of online content management systems (CMS) in use, most heavily customized.”

In other words, any chance newspaper publishers might have to federate their once-highly profitable classified advertising businesses into a network that could compete with Craigslist is undercut by technology decisions made years ago and incompatibilities perpetuated by customization.

The Invantory co-founders met with Newsosaur Alan Mutter at the New England Newspaper Publishers Association. Mutter, who himself tried to start a business to service newspaper publishers a couple of years ago, told them to forget about pursuing a model based up on serving the dying newspaper industry. “VCs with any experience won’t invest in you,” he said.

Miscellany

The i newspaper celebrated its first anniversary this week, challenging the conventional wisdom that print dailies are dead. The commuter-friendly daily, which delivers news in bite sized nuggets, has succeeded in building a paid circulation of 184,000 during its first year. And it’s reportedly profitable, too.

“Data journalism,” in which reporters mine public information to discover nuggets of news, is an increasingly popular discipline. Editors Weblog has a list of free tools anybody can use to become a data journalist.

The New York Times released quarterly earnings that indicated that is paywall is working. The report is the first to give some indication of incremental subscriber growth beyond the initial surge of sign-ups that came when the paywall went up in March. It shows that more than a quarter million people are now paying at least the $15 minimum fee. Even better is that traffic to the NYT.com website is actually up 2% from a year ago.
“The Times has created the perfect paywall,” writes Ryan Chitturn on Columbia Journalism Review. “It’s getting tens of millions of dollars from hardcore readers while letting in enough Google traffic and casual readers to continue boosting its online readership and collecting ad revenue off of those eyeballs.”
Chitturn estimates that the Times will take in about $63 million in digital subscriber revenue this year and more than $210 million in total digital revenue. That’s more than it costs to operate the newsroom. Which means that The New York Times could theoretically get out of the print business entirely and still make money.

Does that mean it’s time for everyone to jump into the pool? Bill Mitchell thinks so. Writing on Poynter.org, he tells of moderating a panel at the World Editors Forum in which publishers who had taken the paywall plunge spoke of their initial trepidation and then relief when the steep declines in traffic that they had feared failed to materialize. Traffic to the Berliner Morgenpost has actually doubled since it put up a paywall in late 2009.
Mitchell quotes The New York Times’ Jim Roberts saying the wall has had a morale dividend. “There is more of an investment I feel in the newsroom among our journalists since the introduction of the paywall. They feel a greater stake in the product,” he said.
Perhaps the time is right. The Newspaper Association of America reports that traffic to newspaper websites jumped 20% in September compared to a year ago among the coveted adult demographic. “Average daily visits were up 21%; total pages viewed were up 10%; total minutes spent were up 11 %; and unique visitors were up 9 %,” the NAA reported.
Thus the great paradox continues. Newspapers are more popular than they’ve ever been, but the business model is broken beyond repair. The NAA numbers are encouraging, and perhaps indicates a flight to quality among readers who are fed up with social media noise. For the past five years people have been  publishing all kinds of nonsense online because they could. Now the novelty is wearing off and quality is becoming a differentiation point.
Google’s new Panda search algorithm is supposed to be a game changer in its ability to distinguish quality content from crap. We noted recently that Demand Media, which specializes in crap, has had to remove 300,000 articles from its website because Google won’t pay attention to them anymore. And the world hardly noticed.
The fact that newsrooms turn out a good product has never been debatable, but the idea that people who had been accustomed to getting it for free for 15 years would decide to pay for it is still an open question.
Give credit to the early adopters for fine-tuning the balance of free vs. paid content to achieve some success. The idea is to grant just enough access to entice readers to pay but not enough to give away the farm. The Wall Street Journal lets you read a couple of hundred words gratis but then wants a credit card. Perhaps it and the Times have figured out the formula.
We’ve been skeptical about paywalls for two years, but we’d be the first to cheer their success.  If they enable good journalism to flourish once again, we’re all for it.

Washington Post Co. Holds Out

Apparently the Washington Post Co. isn’t convinced. Publisher Katharine Weymouth was quoted in Politico last week saying that paid subscriptions don’t make sense for the Post at the moment. The newspaper’s philosophy is that its website should be “open to everybody and attract as many people as we can to spend as much time as they can with our journalism, and assume that that will bring them back for more.”
Politico points out that the Post has hardly been a beacon of publishing success lately. It has shed more than 45% of its newsroom staff and it just last month announced plans to close nine of its 11 suburban regional bureaus. The Post Co. does have a couple of things going for it, however, including its profitable Kaplan education division and its phenomenal 30% market penetration. You’d think a market share like that would be an incentive to charge more for the product, but Weymouth seems in no hurry. She isn’t ruling out a paywall but says she’s content to wait and see what works.

“They Won’t Invest in You”

Invantory is developing software tools to help people sell things. It wants to be kind of an alternative to Craigslist, with a mobile twist. The founders thought newspaper publishers would be potential customers, because they already know the classified advertising business and they have a desirable channel. But Invantory gave up on doing business with newspaper publishers. The principal reason: their computer are a mess.
“Newspapers’ online technology platforms [are] not standard,” wrote co-founder Ian Lamont on the Invantory blog. “This means that non-trivial integration work is required for practically any new feature or service, whether created in-house or purchased from a vendor. There are dozens of online content management systems (CMS) in use, most heavily customized.”
In other words, any chance newspaper publishers might have to federate their once-highly profitable classified advertising businesses into a network that could compete with Craigslist is undercut by technology decisions made years ago and incompatibilities perpetuated by customization.
The Invantory co-founders met with Newsosaur Alan Mutter at the New England Newspaper Publishers Association. Mutter, who himself tried to start a business to service newspaper publishers a couple of years ago, told them to forget about pursuing a model based up on serving the dying newspaper industry. “VCs with any experience won’t invest in you,” he said.

Miscellany

The i newspaper celebrated its first anniversary this week, challenging the conventional wisdom that print dailies are dead. The commuter-friendly daily, which delivers news in bite sized nuggets, has succeeded in building a paid circulation of 184,000 during its first year. And it’s reportedly profitable, too.

“Data journalism,” in which reporters mine public information to discover nuggets of news, is an increasingly popular discipline. Editors Weblog has a list of free tools anybody can use to become a data journalist.

The Helena (Mont.) Independent Record just introduced a subscription plan for digital customers. Here’s how the paper describes it:

We will not be charging to view the following content online: the front page, classifieds, all advertisements and advertising promotions, special sections, auctions, community calendar or customer service pages.

Webpages that will be charging for viewership – after 15 free views per month – are local, state, national and world news pages; local and regional sports; news accessed by Facebook and Twitter; opinion pages; obituaries; entertainment (except AP wire); health, outdoors, weddings, anniversaries; births, lottery; weather; archives; comments; photo galleries and videos.

A monthly online subscription is $4.99; if you have a print subscription, your online subscription is only $1.99 per month. An annual online subscription is $49.99 per year; or if you have a print subscription, it is only $19.99.

Got all that? Better keep a pen and paper handy, because once you get to those 15 views, get out the credit card. That is, unless you’re reading the front page or a “special section,” whatever that is. And forget about the kind of free pass from Twitter that The New York Times gives you. Social media referrals count toward the 15-ppm limit.

In Hawaii, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser has joined the paywall parade. Here’s how PaidContent.org described its plan:

Existing print subscribers get free digital access. Non-print subscribers can either sign up for an “all-access” package for $19.95 per month, which includes digital access and a print subscription for one person, or purchase a digital-only subscription—the price of which varies based on location.  Oahu residents pay $9.99 per month or $50 per year; other Hawaii residents pay $4.95 per month or $25 per year, and those outside the state of Hawaii pay $1.95 per month or $10 per year. The site is also offering a $0.99 day pass, primarily aimed at tourists and former tourists who are interested in specific events.

Clear enough? If you really want to know what’s going on in Hawaii, you’re best off moving out of state. God forbid you’re unlucky enough to live in the newspaper’s home city.

One more example, from the Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle:

Digital-only subscribers get unfettered access to our site for $6.95 per month. This subscription fee will include the iPad app as well. Current print subscribers pay a reduced rate of only $2.95 to add these services…Passers-by and casual readers still will have access to breaking news, video, photos and blogs. We also will allow all users access to 25 premium pages monthly as a sample.

With 46% of small newspapers already charging for some online content, and another 39% planning to do so, the online news world will soon be pockmarked with digital toll booths, each charging different fees. Even the major metros can’t agree on a plan. PaidContent.org assembled a comparison chart of what the big papers are doing earlier this year. If you can find any patterns there, let us  know.

We’re not saying variety is a bad thing – lots of businesses compete on price – but when the product is already perceived as a commodity, then confusion tends to drive customers away. Small publishers evidently don’t see it that way, given the large number that are settling in the paywall camp these days. But are they growing their businesses or just trying to protect what’s left of them?

Mathew Ingram said it well in a recent piece in BusinessWeek:

The biggest flaw in a paywall isn’t that the math is questionable, or even that a wall is inherently a backward-facing strategy, aimed at stacking sandbags around a paper’s content…The biggest flaw…is that walling up your content is an invitation to free competitors…to come and take away your readers.

One of the major reasons the newspaper industry is in such dire straits right now is because barrriers to entry have collapsed. Paywalls are an invitation to competitors to take away all but the most loyal (i.e., oldest) readers. AOL’s Patch has recently opened an outpost in our home town, and we admire the work its tiny staff is doing to bring us news from around the corner that our regional daily doesn’t cover. Despite allegations of sweatshop-like working conditions at Patch, we believe AOL will have no trouble finding journalists to staff its local offices. Between Patch, labor-of-love sites like this one and an assortment of listservs and Facebook pages, we’re more aware of what’s going on in our community than we ever were when we subscribed to a daily.

We believe that paywalls can work if they are simple, transparent and perceived by the customer to be reasonably priced. There is room in the market for services that could federate many small publishers under a single subscription plan, and we expect some cohesion to emerge from the current mess.

Ultimately, though, paywalls will only work if the publishers who deploy them can deliver value their readers can’t get anywhere else. Can the newspaper owners holding the sandbags today honestly say they are doing that?

Miscellany

We’ve noted before the irony that editors who are so committed to hacking through everyone else’s hype roll over when the spin doctor is their own employer. The Orange (TX) Leader upholds that proud tradition in an un-bylined story announcing a reduction in its publishing schedule and the end of home delivery by news carriers.

Combining the Saturday and Sunday editions isn’t a cutback in frequency, but a reader service, said publisher Eric Bauer. “It will be available in the Saturday mail, so people will have more time to enjoy it,” he said. And editor Gabriel Pruitt is almost giddy about cutting frequency to thrice-weekly: “I could not be more proud and excited about how we will better serve this community…Readers can expect more in-depth stories, insightful information, photos and videos.”

The words “reduction,” “cutback” or “cost-cutting” don’t appear anywhere in the story. In fact, there’s no indication that the changes are anything but a reader service. We suspect that if the announcement was coming from the local public works department, it would be handled quite differently.

Print stalwarts will be relieved to hear that at least one major professional group is still committed to the supremacy of ink on dead trees: America’s school administrators. A recent survey conducted by The Haselton Group found that administrators prefer print editions of top trade magazines rather than online editions or e-newsletters from the same publications. Administrators get 45% of their industry-related information from printed trade magazines, “far outweighing the combined total of next three greatest sources: blogs, national newspapers and local newspapers.”

Administrators are joined in their loyalty by the many college journalism programs that are still teaching inverted pyramid style and how their students can find their first job on a daily.

The Times of London set up a paywall on July 2 and has lost 66%, 84%, 90% or 93% of its online traffic as a result, according to the rival Guardian. The Guardian apparently can’t figure out which figure to believe, so it lays them all out in a tedious and self-indulgent exercise that is probably of interest only to management at the Guardian.

“New paywall costs the Times 66% of its internet readership” says the July 18 headline, which then helpfully points out in the subhead that that means that 33% of the audience is still there. Two days later, though, the very same Guardian trumpets, “Times loses almost 90% of online readership,” a decline it characterizes as “massive.” We marvel at what a difference two days can make.

The Guardian then presents a convoluted analysis of comparative data that suggests that the Times’ website traffic has fallen anywhere from 84% or 93% since it began charging £2 a week for online access. The paper also presents various scenarios for calculating the Times’ share of overall traffic to UK newspaper sites and debates what the impact on the paper’s bottom line will be.

The nut graph, however, makes it clear that this is a non-story: “The figures are…unlikely to surprise some executives at the Times: the Sunday Times‘s editor, John Witherow, predicted in May that ‘perhaps more than 90%’ of pre-registration readers were likely to be lost once the registration-only service was implemented.”

So what is the story here? The Times got exactly what it was expecting. Its financial people have presumably run the numbers and decided that they’re ready to take the traffic hit. In fact, the Guardian even quotes Rupert Murdoch saying that paywalls could generate “significant revenues” for his newspapers.

Let’s give the Times credit for setting up a real paywall. Even Google can’t penetrate this sucker. Clicking through to any section or story from the home page is pointless without a credit card in hand. Murdoch is putting his money where his mouth is. He has pledged to take all his newspapers to a paid-access model, and the Times’ experiment is bold, regardless of the outcome. Unlike subscribers to the Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times, the readers of the London Times have no compelling financial interest in the content. In the crowded UK news market, they also have plenty of alternatives from which to choose. If the Times can make its paywall work, it will give a lift to the rest of this beleaguered industry. Although probably not to the Guardian.

Publishers who cheered The New York Times decision last week to build up a wall in front of its content should be considerably less cheery about the news emanating from Newsday. The Long Island daily has admitted that it has signed up just 35 paying subscribers since it put most of its content behind a pay wall in October. At $260 per subscriber per year, that amounts to just $9,000 in annualized revenue for a relaunch that reportedly cost $4 million.

There’s more to the story, of course. The total audience of potential online subscribers to Newsday is pretty small, given that the service is free to subscribers to Optimum Cable, which is owned by Cablevision. Cablevision bought Newsday for $650 million in May, 2008 after a bidding war. Newsday said Optimum Cable cover 75% of Long Island, meaning that just about everyone who would want to read Newsday online can already read it. The company also said  its goal was never to amass a huge audience but rather to increase engagement and improve advertiser value by focusing on local residents.

Still, you have to wonder about the wisdom of the paywall strategy, given the sacrifices  made to implement it. Editors Weblog says traffic to the site is down by a third since October. However, PaidContent.org says the drop off is only on the order of 10%. Either way, Newsday has traded off a lot of eyeballs for a small number of credit card numbers and unless its advertising rates have increased proportionately, the paywall is probably a net loser at this point.

Newsday is sticking by its guns and saying that the slow ramp up is neither surprising nor a problem. “Given the number of households in our market that have access to Newsday‘s web site as a result of other subscriptions, it is no surprise that a relatively modest number have chosen the pay option,” the company said in a statement that called into question why such a strategy was desirable in the first place.

Give Newsday credit for being a pioneer, though. The industry has been buzzing about paywalls for the last year and the company at least had the cojones to do something.  You do have to wonder about the timing, though. Publisher Terry Jimenez reportedly told the staff last week that Newsday lost $7 million in the first three quarters of last year. It’s now embroiled in a labor dispute with unions that are refusing to accept a 10% pay cut. under the circumstances, this seems like an odd time to make a bet-the-business decision.

iPad is Here. You Can Breathe Again

Our reaction to Apple’s iPad announcement yesterday was summed up in our tweet: “It’s a big iPod Touch? Really? That’s it??”

For a product that was generating over 200 tweets per minute in the hours leading up to the launch event, the reality of the iPad underwhelmed us. Perhaps we’ve just learned to expect bigger things from Apple (although the iPad certainly is bigger than the iPhone – by several inches).

The commentators we read see more potential, however. Nicholas Carr, who’s been documenting the shift of data and applications from the desktop to the cloud, sees the iPad as a potential paradigm shift. In Carr’s view, this product completes the transformation of the end-user device from personal computer to window on the Internet. Unlike a laptop, the iPad relies upon software delivered over the Internet for most of its functionality. The large screen and persistent connection could change user behavior, he observes. People will get into the habit of expecting words, images and sound to be delivered whenever they need it in a slim device that fits in a briefcase, although not a purse.

Ken Doctor evaluates the pluses and minuses of yesterday’s announcement. The good news for publishers is that readers will finally carry around a device that delivers an experience similar to what they have traditionally received from a magazine or tabloid newspaper. That can’t be bad for publishers who are accustomed to working in that format. Doctor also sees the iPad as a “magnet for marketing dollars” from companies that can finally deliver a television-like experience to a handheld device. The tablet may also rejuvenate long-form reading, which has suffered as continually distracted readers have learned to consume information in sips rather than draughts.

Doctor worries, however, that media companies were not a bigger part of the launch. Apple seemed to play it safe, touting the iPad as a work machine but imbuing it with a clumsy virtual keyboard and incorporating features that will obviously be appealing to gamers. The company claims to have more than 140,000 applications in its iTunes store. Publishers who are accustomed to having the biggest brand in their markets are going to get lost in there unless Apple pulls them out of the muck and gives them some visibility. At least at this point, that isn’t happening.

David Coursey looks at the iPad from more of a technologist’s perspective with Six Reasons You Want an iPad, Six Reasons You Don’t. He notes, “Apple wants you to pay $829 for the 64GB device, plus monthly wireless fees for AT&T’s 3G. The first year total: $1,189.” Of course, the iPhone was also vastly overpriced when first announced.

Meanwhile, Amazon last week revised its royalty policy for self-published authors and small presses. Amazon could be ready to make a play for the loyalty of publishers who were shut out of the Apple party. Its licensing terms need to be friendlier, but it’s already showing a willingness to make those changes.

By the way, Ken Doctor’s new book, Newsonomics: Twelve New Trends That Will Shape the News You Get, will be available next week. We just received our review copy in the mail and while we haven’t had a chance to pore through it yet, we’re confident will contribute important new insights on the transformation of news from print to digital format.

Miscellany

Publishers that seemed to be ready for the toe tag at this time last year are staging some remarkable comebacks. Following hot on the heels of MediaNews Group Inc.’s announcement last week that it will enter a controlled bankruptcy and quickly reemerge in better condition, McClatchy said it has reached a debt restructuring deal with its creditors that will give it more time to get its debts under control. The owner of the Miami Herald, Sacramento Bee,  Kansas City Star and 27 other dailies has shifted its obligations to extend its repayment deadlines for a couple of years and says that 90% of its creditors have agreed to the plan. Year-over-year revenue is still falling at an alarming rate of 20%, but McClatchy said the rate of decline has slowed and it is getting its expenses under control. Its stock closed at $5.60 yesterday, up 1,600% from its 2009 low of 35 cents. Don’t you wish you could turn back the clock?

The good news in McClatchy’s shrinking revenue is that the percentage coming from online sources has grown. CEO Gary Pruitt told an investor conference call yesterday that online advertising now makes up 16% of the company’s total revenues. Perhaps more importantly, Pruitt said that 44% of digital revenue is online-only, meaning that the company is having success seeking out new advertisers and not simply selling discounted Web packages to print customers. He also said the company is ready to experiment with a pay wall, but is looking to the New York Times example for guidance.

Young people are reading newspapers online less than they used to. That’s the finding of an IBM survey of 3,327 people internationally (900 of them in the United States) as reported on Poynter last week. The good news is that people over 55 are increasing their consumption of online news, but that statistic disguises a more ominous trend. Overall consumption of online sources is up for the population as a whole, which presumably means fewer people are getting their news in print. Poynter’s Dorian Benkoil says the trend suggests that news organizations may have less time than they think to shift their strategies to a digital-first approach. separately, new research from Nielsen shows that consumers spent an average of five hours and 35 minutes on social networking sites in December, 2009, an increase of 82% from December 2008. Facebook is now second only to the telephone in the medium people use most often to reach out to friends and family, and it isn’t behind by much. The problem that creates for news organizations is that they can’t control what happens on Facebook but clearly must adopt strategies to deliver more information that way.

The New York Times is building a paywall despite the 2005-2007 disaster that was TimesSelect. On Wednesday, the Times announced the decision to start charging for access beyond a specified number of articles beginning in 2011. Details, including the fee and the access threshold, weren’t revealed. The Times is leaving itself plenty of leeway to modify or even call off the program, knowing that the eyes of a $35 billion industry are upon it. “We can’t get this halfway right or three-quarters of the way right. We have to get this really, really right,” said Times Co. publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr.

The Times is stepping with characteristic caution into territory that its own coverage acknowledged has both “tempted and terrified” publishers. The most well-read newspaper in America is under pressure to set a precedent that others can follow while at the same time preserving its dominance and an online revenue stream that is a growing part of its business.

A Q&A on the Times‘ website sounds almost apologetic in tone. It points out that readers will continue to have full access to Times content from search engines but will not be able to click through to other stories on the website without paying a fee. Readers will be entitled to access a certain number of articles each month at no charge, but the limit was not specified. The decision to announce the paywall a year before implementation gives the Times some breathing room to assess reaction and set thresholds that readers can live with. The article in the Times notes that most readers still arrive at NYTimes.com via search engine, meaning that their experience will be undisturbed. The piece also notes that reader reaction on the Times’ website has been modestly favorable toward the move.

Even if the Times‘ paywall experience is successful, there’s no guarantee that other newspapers will be able to duplicate it. The newspaper enjoys a cachet that few other titles can duplicate and it’s likely that some readers will support the initiative in the name of keeping the hallowed title afloat. The same can probably not be said for the Chicago Tribune.

The New York Post reports that New York Times Co. minority owner Carlos Slim is a big fan of paid content and has been  pushing Times Co. executives behind the scenes to take the plunge. TimesSelect was an early stab at paid content that floundered when columnists complained that their visibility plummeted when a price was put on their work.

The problem with paywalls is that they cannibalize Web traffic that could otherwise be monetized with advertising. ClickZ reports that Forrester Research analyst James McQuivey predicts that ad revenues for NYTimes.com will drop by up to 50% after the paywall is erected. It also notes that Newsday saw website traffic drop 21% in the month after it built a limited paywall last fall. The trick is to find the right balance and The New York Times, with its history of online innovation, is the best candidate to reach a happy medium.

The Times is diversifying its revenue through a novel partnership with four institutions of higher learning that deliver Times expertise as online courses. This spring, the Times will start awarding certificates to paying students. For example, Ball State University just launched a six-week course on video storytelling that bestows certificates in “emerging media journalism” co-validated by the Times and Ball State. We love this idea. While tuition will never be a major revenue stream for the old Gray Lady, it is at least a diversification out of the declining advertising business. And with more citizens wanting to learn the craft of storytelling, perhaps a course with Times reporters and editors is something they’d be willing to pay for.

Internet Out of the Courtroom

Print journalists can take some heart – while new-media advocates roll their eyes – at two court decisions last week that limit the dissemination of trial coverage over the Internet. First, the U.S. Supreme Court overrode a trial judge’s decision and blocked video coverage of a federal trial about the constitutionality of California’s law banning gay marriage. Then a Florida judge ruled later in the week that a Florida Times-Union reporter couldn’t live blog a capital murder trial.

The California case is important because it involves a highly polarized issue that has implications in other states. A 5-4 conservative majority ruled that the judge in the case had erred by initially allowing video of the trial to be streamed to other courtrooms even though that practice is usually denied in federal cases. However, the justices did not address the bigger constitutional question of whether live video is permissible in legal proceedings.

In the Florida case, the judge banned a reporter from live blogging because he said the noise was distracting. A second reporter who was texting notes from the courtroom on a cell phone was also told to cut it out. However, a third reporter who was writing notes on paper was not disciplined. The tweeting journalist had drawn a more than 1,300 followers on Twitter for her coverage of the trial.

The cases illustrate the discomfort that new media is creating in the trial courts. The capability of anyone to relate the events of a trial would seem to comply with the founding fathers’ desire for legal transparency, but the fact that those narratives can now be communicated worldwide makes some jurists nervous. Both of these issues are likely to need a Supreme Court resolution.

Miscellany

When Nielsen orphaned Editor & Publisher in a sale of several of its titles to e5 Global Media last month, the staff at the venerable newspaper industry trade publication held out for a rescue. It came. Duncan McIntosh Co., an Irvine, Calif.-based publisher of trade magazines that ironically include FishRap News (which has nothing to do with newspapers), has picked up E&P and will continue more or less uninterrupted publication. “We’re all very excited around here about the news,” said staffer Mark Fitzgerald, who gains a promotion to editor in the process. Monthly print publication will resume next month and entries on the magazine’s two blogs – Fitz & Jen Give You the Business and the E&P Pub – have already resumed. Hooray.

The parent company of MediaNews Group, Inc. will file for bankruptcy, the 13^th such filing by a U.S. newspaper publisher in the last 13 months. But it doesn’t look like MediaNews plans to stay in Chapter 11 for long. It has a debt restructuring plan in place that will cut its debt from about $930 million to $165 million and swap senior debtors’ paper for stock. The 116 creditors will have a majority of stock but not voting control. The Hearst Corp. and the family of MediaNews co-founder Richard Scudder are reportedly giving up interests in the company. Hearst took a $300 million stake in MediaNews in 2006 and that investment is now effectively worthless.  MediaNews said newspaper operations, employees and suppliers wouldn’t be affected and that the debt restructuring plan would enable the company to quickly emerge in better financial condition.

Dan Bloom has come up with a new word for newspapers. He calls them “snailpapers.” Only the longtime newspaperman insists this is a term of endearment, not derision. He thinks maybe if newspapers poked more fun at themselves instead of getting all righteously indignant about new media, they would generate more sympathy. More on his blog.

The Greenwood Lake (N.Y.) News is shutting down after 46 years, idling a small staff. The weekly had been honored for  editorial quality by the New York Press Association.

Dramatic Effect

We get some unusual requests at the Death Watch and always try to be helpful, but we were stumped by this inquiry from Amy Wimmer Schwarb, a 15-year journalism veteran:

“What’s more old-school than the print-on-paper newspaper we both love?” she writes. “The theater, of course. I’ve been working on and off for the past 18 months on a script that I’m about to start submitting to play competitions around the country. The title is ‘Dash Thirty Dash: An Allegory for the End Times.’ The piece celebrates the fun and beauty of the business and documents the suicide of newspapers.

“My concern about submitting this play through traditional channels is that I want it to be seen NOW, and sometimes, such channels have long lag times. Through your online travels and contacts, do you have any suggestions for how I might distribute this work? In my dreams, it will be performed in small independent theaters around the country.”

We couldn’t help, but perhaps you can. Post any ideas below as comments, or e-mail us using the contact box on the right and we’ll put you in touch with Amy directly.