The Kansan City Kansan – the only paper covering Wyandotte County and Kansas City, Kansas – is turning off its presses and going online.
I would say this is a forward-thinking act of innovation, except it comes from link-hating Gatehouse, whose stock is stuck at $0.04 and so it could be an act of desperation; I don’t know which. This is a paper that earlier sold its building, shifted its printing, and cut back from daily to twice-weekly in print. from the Kansas City Star story:
General Manager Drew Savage said in an interview that switching to an online publication would save on overhead and allow for more investment in electronic media. In addition to eliminating the print publication, Savage said the paper would cut some of its staff of eight, but he declined to say how many employees would lose their jobs.Despite those cuts, Savage said the Kansan would continue to thrive. Rather than see the move as the death of a newspaper, Savage touted it as the birth of a new medium.
“We thought maybe this is a trend that could be really viable,” he said. “It’s the wave of the future. … We’ll be launching a different platform. We’ll have a lot more content than we have ever had.” . . . .
After the switch [from daily], the Kansan’s online traffic increased, Savage said. Although he declined to offer circulation numbers for the paper, Savage said readership is about 10 times greater online than it is for the print edition. Those numbers suggest to him that the Kansan’s online advertising rates will probably remain similar to the print publication’s and will allow the publication to explore new online features.
“This is not going to be a newspaper turned into an online product,” he said. “It’s going to have a completely different look.”
Dare I link directly to and quote from the Kansan’s own announcement? Oh, I’ll live dangerously:
Founded on Jan. 31, 1921, by U.S. Sen. Arthur Capper, the Kansan filled a need in a community devoid of a major daily newspaper. The Kansan continued to be the only daily newspaper in Wyandotte County until mid-2008, when its publication schedule was cut back to twice-weekly.
Bit by bit, with bigger and bigger papers, we’ll see more and more of this in 2009.
[...] printing a traditional paper version within the next couple of years. On New Year’s Eve, another paper stopped printing. And, I cannot help but believe that some newspapers are their own worst enemy. Let me [...]
Jeff,
These are dead bodies in dead markets.
Like the papers in Detroit.
So, going on line will no solve their problems.
If you were not able to make money in print, how you are going to survive on line?
If you didn’t get enough readers and advertisers how are you going to get them on line?
Only print newspapers making money, having readers and advertisers, and investing online will survive.
If you were not innovative in print, how I can believe that you will be on line?
These newspaper are not casualties of Internet, but print failures.
These are not the papers of the future.
They are the losers.
So, let’s focus in what The Guardian or The Daily Telegrah do, La Vanguardia or El Mundo do, Politiken or Aftenposten do, O Globo or Zero Hora do, The New York Times or USA Today do, 20 Minutos or Il Corriere della Sera do, Dagens Nyheter or Berlingske Tidende do, La Nación or La Tercera do…
[...] comment to a recent Jeff’s post: These are dead bodies in dead [...]
Juan,
See also my posts about the LA Times lately: It is important to imagine sustainable digital journalistic enterprises.
Second, you list all national brands. The local market is in worse trouble and in some ways is more important to figure out (national brands have more strength).
so I”m not ready to just write-off these local efforts (even if they come from link-hating Gatehouse). We need to see them transform into the new century at last.
I believe that we will see more and more of this. I just do not believe that there is much of a future in hardcopy newspapers. This strategy may actually work in cases like this–where they seem to be the only local news service. I personally think that some of the bigger chains could develop innovative ways of syndicating some online content–where they have several papers in the same general market that could include regional news, while still maintaining a local news capability. It could also include syndicating various kind of generally interesting subject matter that is neither regional nor local on their sites. This could be an economic way of supporting the kind of web content that brings in users without sacrificing local content. Based on personal experience I would say that, with some of these groups, this will happen when pigs start to fly. They just do not seem to realize that the three most important things about a web presence are content, content . . . and content. Maintaining the jobs of a bunch of empty suits is not going to feed the bulldog. They need web-savvy innovators. I think that the time to move in this direction may have already passed, particularly in dense metropolitan areas where there is a lot of competition and other powerful web presences. It may work, however, in areas where the group truly owns the market. I will not hold my breath on this one.
i have to take exception to the commenter above about “detroit being a dead market”- just drove past the monsterous detroit free press/detroit news printing plant in sterling heights, MI. it’s hard to imagine how a huge operation like that can compete/sustain when someone can publish from a laptop/cell phone/blackberry/etc. located in someplace as simple as a panera bread (here!).
anyways, right down the pothole-filled road from the det. free press/news plant sits a similarly monsterous ford factory with nearly 1000 brand new vehicles just sitting there gathering snow.
correlation?
Hardcopy newspapers are doomed, in general. And what most of them are doing about it, and most of the newspaper groups, amount to strategies designed to make the Titanic sink more slowly, having hit the iceberg. There need to be entirely new strategies–particularly strategies that take advantage of the laptops, internet appliances, cell phones, etc. They need to look at a whole new model–and they just don’t begin to get it.
[...] Hier encore, un journal américain annonçait la fermeture de ses rotatives pour passer uniquement à la version online du quotidien. (“The Kansan City Kansan – the only paper covering Wyandotte County and Kansas City, Kansas – is turning off its presses and going online”, explique Jeff Jarvis sur son blog). [...]
[...] Jarvis offers a prediction: Bit by bit, with bigger and bigger papers, we’ll see more and more of this in [...]
[...] più economico modello di business che fa perno sul Web: negli States un numero sempre maggiore di quotidiani locali e di autorevoli fonti di notizie invitano la propria readership a rivolgersi alla rete, rinunciando [...]
[...] Some say these actions foreshadow a wholesale sloughing-off of the newspaper industry’s dead-tree skin. Changing demographics, the Internet, a global recession and crippling debt have conspired to set off a sea change in the way news is delivered. [...]