Ryan Sholin — host of this month’s Carnival of Journalism — has a question:
“What are we supposed to tell our newsrooms when they tell us they don’t have time to do anything special for the Web?”
What does special on the web look like?
Not a lot like the product of many local newsrooms. Hardly a surprise that a geography-shattering distribution system isn’t the greatest base on which to provide geographically specific content.
The online newspaper remains the formula for almost everyone. The paper is still the “brand” – for which read the fraying security blanket on which ad sales are predicated.
And you can hear the ad guys — if only we could dump the content, we could be Craigslist!
A lot of media companies have grasped the new question — I’m thinking of the Telegraph Media Group in the UK under Will Lewis.
And that question is — how can you keep running a decent paper of the back of an online operation?
…If you’re running a roadside diner and someone builds a bypass, you can’t sit there complaining that you still brew a great cup of coffee. You probably do. But when archaeologists brush the dust from your skeletal hand still clenched tightly on the pot handle…
I’m not one of the “print is dead” crowd — although many of my colleagues are.
But I’m a firm believer that migrating a paper product to the web requires significant structural shifts to both elements — the paper and the online.
The problem at the moment is that, for most organisations, the revenue is still biased towards the paper product, rather than the web. If you impose too large a structural change on the print element, then you risk killing your revenue and dying before the revenue switches to the web.
Timing is going to be everything over the next decade.
I think magazines are better placed than papers. What bothers me about local papers — especially in the US — is the way some of them (there are notable exceptions) have just dumped themselves online.