Tallahassee experiment

The Tallahassee newspaper is trying an experiment that is interesting. They have a big investigative story coming Sunday on a local sheriff, and the reporter working on it has spent several months on the article. But readers of the Tallahassee Democrat's web site, Tallahassee.com,  won't be able to read the full article.  A summary of the story will appear on the web site, but if readers want to see the whole thing, they'll have to buy a paper.

This goes to the heart of an ongoing debate among journalists. In the mid-1990s, newspapers set up web sites and put their stories on them.  For the most part, they were giving away their content for free.  This was back in the good old days. Newspapers were very profitable. Plus, no one really knew whether the Web was going to be a big deal or not. So newspapers hedged their bets by putting their content online, for nothing.

We may not know for some time whether this was a good or bad idea. Intuitively, you might say that you shouldn't give away your product for nothing, that that isn't a brilliant business model.  But newspapers have built a pretty strong online audience by doing that.  The thinking was that we would be able to monetize that online audience by selling online adverising.  And we have. Online advertising has continued to grow. The problem is that it hasn't grown fast enough to offset the declines in traditional print advertising.

But, for all we know,  that may be a transitional problem. Ten years from now, we may be making a majority of our money from online advertising, and we still may be giving away our content for free online.

The fact is that even though our content is online, many people still like to read their newspapers with their corn flakes.  I've eaten breakfast while reading a newspaper and I've eaten breakfast with my laptop perched on the table in front of me, and it's a different experience.  I get a benefit from looking at a newspaper that has been ediited by smart people, who have used their best judgment to rank the stories and choose the right pictures and other elements that package with them.

I also like the daily surprises in the newspaper, stories that I might not seek out online but that I discover when I turn the page. 

It's not a matter of being old-fashioned or new-fangled. A printed newspaper is the result of a lot of decision-making all day long, and whether we think about it or not, the result is an interesting window into how journalists grade the news.

So there is an argument to be made that there's a difference between the newspaper and the exact same content online, and that enough people will continue to value that difference and pay for the printed product.

What Tallahassee is saying is that they don't buy that argument.  They're saying that putting all the content online gives folks significantly less reason to buy the paper, and that they have to do something about it. So what they are doing is to make their web site inferior to the newspaper. 

That's not how the editor of the paper put it.  He said that people don't like to read long investigative stories online. I don't know about that. I look at the traffic numbers all day long, and great stories get a lot of page views if they break news. Long thumb-suckers, not so much. The key is whether you are telling people something that is pretty significant.

(This, incidentally, goes to the heart of another journalistic debate. Short stories versus long stories. Stories that hold to the front versus stories that jump inside the paper.  I have always thought this argument missed the point. People will read a 50-inch story if it knocks their socks off. They will skip a boring 10-inch story.) 

If keeping a big story off the web site once in a while is all Tallahassee does, then this experiment will be more symbolic than real.  They might get a pop in single-copy sales on Sunday, but on Monday, it's back to business as usual. To make this experiment really valid, Tallahassee needs to keep their most valuable content off-line everyday. It may make the folks in the newsroom feel good that a big investigative story isn't being given away for free, but from a business standpoint, it may be just a blip in the Democrats circulation numbers.

But maybe the editor of the Tallahassee paper is just dipping his toe in the water to see what happens, and if he gets good results on Sunday, he will likely push for a more aggressive strategy. I may call down to Tallahassee Monday morning to see how things turned out.

If you're still reading this and you want to see what the Tallahassee editor had to say about all this, go to his blog.