Newspapers struggle to get revenues these days, especially online. I empathize with their situation, and know that there are real jobs at stake and lifestyles to preserve. But it seems that some online publications confuse that situation with a license to screw over the user experience, and don’t understand that it hurts them and it hurts their advertisers (who probably don’t even know how their message is being delivered, since it’s obscured through mass purchases and deals with agencies who might be mis-guided in their attempts to get attention for their clients).

This morning I was reading about the “Lessons from eastern Euprope’s flat tax“, a fascinating topic that I’m very interested in generally (i.e. flat tax, and overall simplification of tax systems to increase fairness, reduce work and friction and minimize fraud) – however, as I open the website, the whole window suddenly grays out – I wonder if my computer is going to sleep – and then, after some pause, a slow animation opens a black box in the middle of the screen – what the hell is going on? – and then, after some more waiting, a video starts playing. It’s a Siemens ad. Fortunately I am given the option of closing the window (otherwise I would have just closed the browser tab immediately), but it’s already wasted more of my time than I had budgeted to actually read the article! And to make matters even worse, the publication has split the article into two webpages, and the ad shows again (with all the slow motion animation) on the second page!

I know all you die hard capitalists are now shouting: but this is free content, and it’s their website, and they can do whatever they want to generate some income. Absolutely right! But I don’t think globalpost (I’m writing their name is it appears on their homepage) realizes that they’re not increasing their revenue.

Let’s look at how I (and a lot of people I know) read news today. I find content by subscribing to various feeds from sources that I trust. One of this source is Hacker News which is basically an aggregation of various news from the web, probably a bit geekier than the average CNN or NYT feeds, but still great stuff. I skim the headlines of the feed in Google Reader and when something interesting grabs my attention, I click to read it. Sometimes the stories are interesting, sometimes not, and sometimes the experience of the website is good and sometimes (like with globalpost) it’s poor.

And here’s the challenge for new organizations. If I like what I read, I will share it with my friends. And occasionally, I like an article so much, or I see the news site bring interesting content often enough, that I actually add their feed directly to my subscriptions, but there’s a certain bar to be met in order to get there. A website which throws unnecessary obstacles in my way is not going on that list. News publications have to understand this (just like the rest of the media industry): if you screw your customers, they won’t stay as your customers – it’s that simple.

Back to the original problem, how can news organizations survive today. I think there are a few ways, all hard to master, but that’s life:

• Get people to pay for your content. Very few news organizations have this luxury, the most notable one being Wall Street Journal. They have great content, are a prestigious company with a long history of quality reporting, but their revenue is also driven by unusual factors, such as the fact that companies often pay the premium for their employees. There’s only room for very few in this category, so don’t expect to copy this model easily.
• Bring businesses and an audience together, and charge the business. The old golden goose for newspapers. Just get circulation up and then tell companies that you have an audience willing to listen and charge for delivering a message. Simple? Not any more. It’s not just newspapers being delivered by paper to people’s houses anymore, or even people going to your website. I might see the headline in my feed reader and decide not to look at your content at all if I don’t find it interesting. There’s also advertising fatigue (like I described above) where consumers are fed up with non-contextual ads being thrown at them all the time – people learn to ignore or skip ads through any means necessary (how many of you have a Tivo for that purpose alone?). Advertising can work, but for every dollar in revenue you need more readers by every day that goes by. And the more blend your news content, or the more aggressively you push advertising, the less likely you are to succeed.
  There’s room for a few very large, high quality publications (think New York Times-like quality and size), and probably a whole slew of niche or niche-local publications (think valleywag, TechCrunch or similarly obscure or specialized publications).
• Innovate. If you can’t succeed in either of the above two categories (and this applies to the vast majority of old publications imho), there’s only one solution: innovate. Unfortunately most publications today are not trying that, but instead they whine about how technology is killing them and how they desperately need to be in either of those two categories and should get help or protection from the government to make sure that’s possible. It’s time to put your thinking cap on (and keep in mind that this is a tremendous opportunity for new entrants, since there is disruption going on) and look for new ways to connect interesting stuff (call it news, blogs, tweets, whatever) with interested people (call it subscribers, customers, friends, readers, whatever). With all the new technology and new ways of communicating, there’s probably room for several new models that can be successful in delivering people what they’re looking for, and still generate good revenue.

News publications, embrace things like social sharing, crowd sourcing, machine learning to improve personal relevancy and the fact that information overflow is just getting worse, and news organizations should be about that. If a company could deliver me the front page every morning of stuff that matters to me, I’d be ecstatic and use if every morning. Until then, I’ll stick to my ritual of scanning hundreds of headlines in Reader and try to do this manually.

Oh, and also continue to avoid publications like globalpost who don’t seem to get their customers.

- Gummi

PS. unfortunately I’ve probably increased the impression rate of that Siemens ad, but it’s hopefully short term gains at the cost of long term gains for globalpost and their advertisers.

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