OC Register publisher reveals his three-pronged strategy
It involves publishing free community newspapers, expanding Web offerings and putting out a smaller Register print paper. “The Register has to become a 21st century business,” Terry Horne says in his first interview since being named Orange County Register publisher last September. “We can’t have the same model that worked 10 years ago.”

How to free journalism from an advertising dependency
“Modern computing offers unparalleled capacities to track and calculate,” writes Edward Wasserman. “Imagine a vast menu of news and commentary offered to you ad-free for pennies per item, the charges micro-billed, added up and presented like a utility bill at month’s end. The money that journalism providers got would depend on their audience. Plus, if you uploaded comment or video in response, to the degree it was downloaded by others you’d get credited for it — compensated like any other provider.”

Carolyn Kay
MakeThemAccountable.com

“This has been in works for a while as an alternative to the Yahoo newspaper consortium, as well as the Google-newspapers ad effort, and now it is finally launching: Tribune, Gannett, Hearst and the New York Times Company are forming a joint new company called quadrantONE, and transferring some of their open online inventory to the firm to sell… The four companies are also investing in the new company.”

It seems to me that smaller newspapers ought to be looking for a strategic partnership with Google, which has said over and over again that it doesn’t want to be a content provider. Today’s local newspapers could work with Google to develop a platform for hyper-local content and ads where they share the revenue.

Carolyn Kay
MakeThemAccountable.com

There may be a chance for a subscription model for part of the funding, but it would have to be a subscription for many outlets, similar to cable television and monthly fees for downloading music and/or movies. People don’t want to have to have individual subscriptions for 20 to 30 different outlets.

Some creative thinking would be needed to figure out what should be the premium content that people would want to pay for, since so much is already available for free, but right now little thought if any is going into this.

Carolyn Kay
MakeThemAccountable.com

There’s lots of marketing money in local markets that is not going to newspapers. Asking whether it’s advertising or some other form of service is less important, I think, than getting newspapers to discover the numbers of small businesses that today simply aren’t on the account list, and then discover what those businesses need to succeed.

In most cases there’s not even a conversation with potential and non-customers.

When presented with a new product idea — say, for instance, search engine optimized profiles (as sales consultant Mike Blinder is advocating) — the ad force tends to peddle the product to the same comfortable set of clients.

That’s not going to solve the underlying economic problem, which I think is as much about the narrowing ad customer base of daily newspapers as it is about the broadening choices available to readers.

There might be a way to do some funding through subscriptions, but only if one subscription covers content from many sources, as does a cable TV subscription or a monthly subscription to a music website. Because so much is free right now, those participating would have to be clever about how they rewarded those who subscribe vs. those who don’t, but isn’t it worth considering?

I get booed and hissed at every time I mention this, but we won’t know whether it might be viable unless we give it serious thought and maybe even some kind of trial run.

Carolyn Kay
MakeThemAccountable.com

It’s good to see you more open-minded in this post than you usually are concerning the potential for revenue models other than advertising to fund news/content. “I’ve long thought that subscription models won’t work. Prove me wrong.” is much better than some of your past pronouncements stating that content already is free and that, effectively, the horse is already out of the barn.

“Prove me wrong.” So then, what would you count as proof? How about the many content websites that have been successful pursuing the paid subscription model? At SubHub we have a list of more than 200 such sites. I am happy to send you the list.

Many of these are niche sites that were not started by major news publishers. But nevertheless many were started by journalists outside the traditional media framework. Some were started by individuals with no prior journalism background. They are doing exactly what you advocate, Jeff. Citizen journalism. And making money at it.

There is no reason why a major newspaper cannot start a microsite targeted at a well-defined niche, and featuring content valuable enough to pay for. The reason some of the big newspaper sites have not succeeded at the subscription game is that the content they’ve offered is too generalized and commoditized on the web. It was not unique, actionable and valuable enough. But these individual failures of execution do not disprove the model — as the many other success stories demonstrate.

Your seemingly strident past rejection of the subscription model, based on the anecdotal evidence of a few aborted projects (and some successes unfairly categorized as failures, such as WSJ.com and its $50 million in annual subscription revenues), has long been dismaying. It is good to see you now allowing for the possibility that you could be proven wrong. Shall I email you that list?

Best wishes,
Evan Rudowski

Howard Stern
WCBS all news
WINS all news
Don Imus
WABC all hate

Most of the people who said “Time” was very important to them used a clock radio alarm to wake up. If they’ve got a clock, why is time very important to them? Because it was a question on the survey.

In short I’m saying the newspaper audience won’t know what they want until you give it to them, not the other way around.

1. Subscription will not work
2. The current situation seems unsustainable especially if CPM’s drop

So new models need to be conjured up from somewhere. Where exactly? Everyone wants to know that…