Denver Post focuses on wrong problems

How is that a newspaper can be right even when it's so absurdly wrong? Well, being the Denver Post usually helps.

The Post has begun cracking down on online news outlets that cite, source and link excerpts to their stories online. Places like ColoradoPols.com, which is one of the more responsible sites out there when it comes to acknowledging the true source of news. But the Post decided that ColoradoPols was a threat and sent it a cease and desist letter.

Now, it's good that the Post and newspapers everywhere are waking up to the problem they've created for themselves: giving the print newspaper away online for free is making the print product increasingly irrelevant and is undercutting the advertising strategy that has supported newspapers for decades. But it has also helped cultivate a blog culture that aggregates news and, frankly, sometimes makes it better. If I want news about Colorado politics — not policy — I will go to ColoradoPols because the discussion that goes on there is far more intelligent, honest and insightful than anything I can find on the Post website. But I'll still read a Post article I find linked on ColoradoPols, despite the absurd statistics its lawyers presented suggesting I, and others like me, don't.

The Post threatening organizations that make news interesting is not as good a strategy as actually making its own news more interesting.

Jason Bane from ColoradoPols made one significant error in his disclosure about the Post letter. Rather than keeping the argument to a reasonably understood fact — a small website like ColoradoPols linking to the Post does not hurt the larger entity significantly — he waded into the argument that the Post is hurting itself by trying to put a paywall around its news. He writes, "The market determines the clearing price of a product, not the owners of that product." That's more or less true. The Denver Post, despite giving its news away free online to the tune of 10 million to 20 million page views a month, still sells 12 million newspapers a month. Sells. Which goes back to my fundamental gripe with this notion that news is free online. Those 10-20 million page views at DenverPost.com are not free news, but subsidized news. Without the paid print subscriptions, the revenue that comes from them and the associated advertising, there would be almost nothing to read online at DenverPost.com.

Bane admits that he doesn't have a business model. That's fine when you're doing 660,000 page views a month. But the Post — and all newspapers, for that matter — are producing news for a diverse audience. The trend is clearly going toward niche news coverage like ColoradoPols, but no niche news organization in Colorado produces anywhere near the traffic and readership as the Post. The largest news audience is still the news audience that wants diverse news coverage the way a newspaper offers it. That audience is shrinking, but not as fast as those advocating for free news think.

Now, enough of defending the Post. The whole exercise makes me a little queasy. It would be easier to defend a newspaper if it recognized its real problems. ColoradoPols is not a problem for the Post. The Post is a problem for the Post.

Forget for now the issue of relevancy that I discussed some time back, and focus just on the problems of the website: A Field of Dreams business model (if you build it, the revenue will come); a home page overloaded with so many headlines, video players, photo galleries, ads, polls, partner feeds, Twitter feeds and blog feeds to the point that it is unnavigable and slow to load; a long-standing arrogance that has only gotten worse as the only newspaper in town, bloggers who don't know how to blog, web editors who are planning online news coverage as if it's 2004 . . . those are some of the Post's real problems.

The answer for newspapers is fairly simple, but it takes some time to implement and newspapers have little history of being patient when it comes to business models.

Two products: Print. Online.

You cannot give away for free online what you ask others to pay for. Yet, you cannot throw up a paywall around everything online or people will stop coming to your website altogether, you'll lose more revenue than you'll gain and you'll slowly slip into irrelevancy. So:

• Put the print newspaper's archives online behind a paywall. Readers who have a print subscription get online access as part of the subscription. If readers want just digital access, they can purchase it for half of the print subscription price.
• Bulk up the free online product. Breaking news, updates, blogs, all-day chats, conversations, aggressively moderated comment threads, a simplified home page and a social media strategy operated by someone who actually understands Twitter.

 

The free online product would be a separate product from the print product. It would produced by a separate staff. Sure, occasionally the print stars — like former Rocky stalwarts Lynn Bartels or Dave Krieger or Jeff Legwold — would make an appearance on the free site to do a chat or report breaking news, but for the most part they remain separate entities. A staff of 10-20 — talented, mostly young, journalists who understand how online news works, such as knowing how to use a site like ColoradoPols to their advantage rather than sending lawyerly letters — could produce enough of the right kind of breaking news, weather updates, sports scores and rumors, to have a solid online news product. The simplicity of its mission would make reading it easier because a reader wouldn't have to wade through 200 headlines on the front page to find something they didn't see in the paper that morning. And this product's traffic and readership, because of the name-brand recogition from the print product, would still dwarf any local online niche news product out there.

DenverPost.com's page views would take a hit. Online ad revenue would also fall by more than online subcriptions would rise at least in the short term. In the long run, however, each product would become economically viable itself. The era of subsidized news would end and you would have a high-quality product for those who want to pay for it and a stripped-down version for people who don't feel in-depth news is valuable enough to pay a premium.

The market does set the price. But if that price doesn't support the product, it's going to go away. (Just like the beloved Commodore 64s of my youth.) And as much bitterness as I sometimes feel about the arrogant, monolithic, idea-free Post being the last actual newspaper standing, it's still better than the Denver Daily News.