Newspapers have to be in that digital space too. So we developed robust websites, delved into social media, added video and in general invested a lot of time and money. Now comes the part which never made sense to me: Giving away all of these great new digital products to anyone who drops by. We won’t charge a single penny, or even ask for their names and addresses so that we can ask them for their business.
So, where’s the incentive to become a customer, and not just a consumer? Hearkening back to the saloon example, we were giving away both the ham sandwiches and the beer.
In defense of the news industry’s deep thinkers, there was a strategy: Give your news away and everyone will look at your website. You’ll have an audience so vast, so irresistible, that advertisers will line up to sponsor it.
The industry tried that for several years, and now we know that isn’t going to happen. Audiences fractured. Social media sites emerged. Facebook and Google captured nearly 60 percent of all online advertising, and nearly all of the advertising growth. And online shopping, aka Amazon, really hurt many of those advertisers.
So now it’s Plan B: asking people to subscribe to our products. If you visited us online recently, you’ve noticed we have closed the intentionally leaky holes on our site. We’re asking Facebook users to pay. And our new smartphone app, while free to download, requires a subscription to see more than a few stories.
Because we know that Aunt Polly from Pittsburgh might hit our site just once to find photos of the Evergreen High School play, we still give away a limited number of free articles, and reset the free button every 30 days.
While I was writing the section above, it made me wonder just how much work it takes to produce our news report. So I pulled out our 2018 budget. This year we will devote approximately 83,000 staff hours to telling Clark County’s stories. That is just in the newsroom; I am not calculating the total labor to actually get a finished product to your doorstep or onto your phone.
Predictably, we’ve had some backlash from the free-lunch crowd. That’s not surprising. What surprised me is that our digital subscriptions are up 27 percent since we changed our policy. So we owe a big thank you to our new customers, and this promise: We’ll invest your subscription dollars in reporting local news.
