Yesterday, Aquidneck Island's community newspaper, the Newport Daily News, launched a re-designed Web offering which replicates the look-and-feel of the print product and sets a price point for online access higher than hard-copy home delivery.
I struggled with writing this review. I am not a replacenik or gravedancer, both terms of art in the ongoing discussion about the future of electronic news. I do not believe that citizen journalism is a replacement for all the functions newsrooms perform, nor do I take any enjoyment out of the crash of newspapers. Some great news organizations and some very good people have been hurt, and the public's right to know is not served by less information.
However, there is just nothing right about the new Daily News, either in strategy or in execution. I really, really want this paper to survive, and they seem to be doing their best to cut their own digital throat.
Take the pricing structure. A year of paper home delivery is $145, and a year of electronic access will cost $345, a whopping 2.3 times the hard-copy cost. And, even more puzzling, a year of combined paper and online lists at $245. Yes, you read that right. They are charging you *less* to take the physical paper with your online subscription. Both the raw price point and the bundling are just jaw-droppingly bizarre.
For comparison, The New York Times is $348/year, delivered to Portsmouth, and their Web site is free (not only that, but they have begun exploring their role as a portal and aggregator, displaying content from a variety of sources.) How about a publication that breaks out pricing like the Wall Street Journal? They are $103/year for online, $119/year for print, and $223/year for both. Note that online is cheaper, and combining two things that cost less will cost you...more.
Right there, this relaunch is a bottomless bucket of FAIL. But unfortunately, there's more. The site design itself, done by an outfit called Technavia, offers a slavish recreation of the print product, while adding none of the Web 2.0 amenities you would expect for a superpremium price: No RSS feeds to allow you to read stories in Google or a newsreader application, no rational Web-friendly navigation, no ability to bookmark and share, and the site has lost all capability for interactivity (though they say they are "working" on "comments.") This reminds me of nothing so much as the shovelware sites of the mid-90s, where publishers took whatever they had in print and just dumped it on the Web. We've learned a thing or two since then.
When the book was first invented, printers would pay artists to paint in fancy borders and initial capital letters to replicate the look and feel of hand-copied texts. These "illuminated manuscripts" embody a common mistake made in any new medium as its inventors try to find its unique expression: rear-mirrorism. The first clocks were made to look like sundials, cars were called horseless carriages, radio recapitulated vaudeville. Folks, Web-based news is not a newspaper, and to mindlessly replicate the look and feel of a print product is to ignore Media Ecology 101.
I urge publisher Albert Sherman and his team to please, please, please rethink this approach. And it's not just me, one wacky local data point.
Dave Winer, who invented RSS, and Jay Rosen, one of the leading theorists on digital news, have a weekly podcast that I would strongly recommend the editorial and management of The Newport Daily News have a listen to.
Here's the money quote from last week, with Winer talking about on why he doesn't pay for the WSJ: "I can't point to anything I read." In other words, the inability to share and spread the information, from the perspective of Web 2.0 communities, makes information inherently less useful. Paywalls subtract value from news. And that will translate into users LESS willing to pay, not more.
Winer goes on. "The thing that they used to charge for was not the news, but the fact that it was expensive to distribute. And that's no longer the case. So now they're stuck with the fundamental problem."
And what are the solutions? Well, as the management of the Daily News points out "There is no one model that’s been shown to work," which they use to support their decision to take their own approach. They attempt to reason by analogy from cable television, without noticing this fundamental flaw: cable television brought content viewers could not get over free over-the-air TV.
Jay Rosen puts it this way in the podcast, speaking about newspapers, "New products add new value," he said, "That, they could possibly charge for."
Indeed. Where, in the redesign, is the new value? Where's Twitter? Where's Facebook? Where's the social media integration beyond a stated intention to make "reader comments" available. Where is the mobile strategy? I cannot begin to tell you how unusable this is on an iPhone; on a BlackBerry it would be excruciating.
It doesn't have to be this way. Look at what the Sakonnet Times is exploring with their in-development web presence "MyEastBayRI.com." Leveraging the journalism skills of your staff and the curatorial expertise of your editors while blowing open the doors of the newsroom to bring the public into the conversation is the future. I believe that people will pay to participate, pay for special access, and advertisers will pay to reach active participants and opinion shapers. That's true hybrid vigor, the kind of energy that allows a new form to emerge.
I deeply sympathize with the challenges newspapers are facing, and I understand the difficulty of finding a way forward. But this ain't it.
Resources:
Jay Rosen's PressThink
Dave Winer's Scripting News
Of particular note, "Rebooting the News" podcast #9
Buy Ted Nelson's Literary Machines from Eastgate Systems
