Columnist says SF Chronicle should exit print
Don Day July 15th, 2007
WHEN, EXACTLY, do you junk something that no longer works? And which major paper should go first—not today, but within the next 18 or 24 months?
San Francisco Chronicle, I’m looking at you.
BusinessWeek columnist Jon Fine says the Chronicle should jump off the deep end after racking up more than $330 million in losses since 2000. Fine makes a compelling case, noting that the paper is in a web-centric town. I’ll add another point: San Francisco is the home of the great plastic shopping bag ban — ditch the printing press, and launch a “news that’s environmentally friendly campaign.” With craigslist stronger in its home town of SF than almost anywhere else, the move makes some sense.
It occurs to me that the idea of a newspaper going online-only seems inevitable. Who will make the plunge first?
8 Comments Add your own
1. discreet_chaos | July 15th, 2007 at 4:27 pm
If a newspaper is online-only: Is it still a newspaper?
2. discreet_chaos | July 15th, 2007 at 5:53 pm
BTW: I wasn’t intentionally being facetious, but it occurs to me that outside of the big chains, a lot of newspapers are majority-owned by families and to shutdown printing, they’d essentially be ending their grandfather’s legacy.
3. adam | July 15th, 2007 at 6:38 pm
It’s a good concept and right now a lot of papers have it backwards the paper itself is incredibly cheap and the website offers nuggets that require a paid subscription to view.
How about giving most of it away online and asking more from the straphangers who rely on the printed form? Printed newspaper is a luxury in the digital age. And if classifieds are dead, might it not makes sense to go after a higher tier of advertisers who have traditionally sought out magazines? After all they might be inclined to seek someone who pays $30 a month and up for a paper.
4. Anonymous | July 15th, 2007 at 7:36 pm
Instead of $30/mo for just the paper, why not get a data plan for your smartphone?
5. tsfc | July 15th, 2007 at 7:53 pm
but, what will all the fine folks in san francisco use to wash their windows?
6. Charles | July 15th, 2007 at 8:57 pm
Isn’t it ironic that in an age that we strive to give the consumer more choices for getting news and information in any way that they want that we wind up talking about shutting down one of those venues?
If a newspaper doesn’t change it’s mission statement to combat the internet, it’ll shut down eventually. But I think that with creativy, you can probably create good enough content on ANY platform, even print. Poll your consumer base. If they want paragraph-long stories, give them paragraph-long stories. If they want a newspaper that they can read for long, in-depth pieces, give them that.
I don’t ever read the paper anymore, but there will ALWAYS be a large chunk of the population who can’t figure out the internet, much in the same way I cannot figure out algebra. You can’t punish THEM, but you need to adapt to expand beyond a small, core audience. (Unless you want hyper-local, like community newspapers. Then more power to you.)
7. David Johnson | July 16th, 2007 at 10:35 am
Don: the answer to your “who will be first” question is in the LR archives: Sweden’s Post-och Inrikes Tidningar, the world’s oldest newspaper, stopped printing and went online-only earlier this year.
www.lostremote.com/2007/02/06/worlds-oldest-newspaper-goes-digital/
and if san francisco is a web-savvy market, it is a backwater in comparison to sweden.
but, the irony of posting this immediately after the “you can’t skip my print ad” post shouldn’t escape anyone.
this is the deal: the economics of the newspaper are still working. they may not be working at the rate of returns and growth that a bubbly stock market may like, but the rate of returns and the gross revenue of the print world are still fat and happy enough to make newspaper ownership very attractive to many. while things are changing, they aren’t changing so fast that we need to stop the presses tomorrow.
the genie is out of the bottle on classifieds, and it won’t be coming back. newspapers held a monopoly on that kind of advertising forever, and were able to charge premium rates to deliver those messages. newspapers now have to figure out new business models to recover that lost revenue. will those be online-only? maybe, maybe not.
what we are hearing, time and again, as we look at niche web sites that are focusing on hyper local is that as soon as they hit a common point in their growth, they use their sites as a springboard to start publishing tabs or giveaways. why? because the local advertisers still see more value in print ads than they do in online. the editors and the readers may be getting the whole online gig, but the advertisers - particularly privately owned small businesses - still get the most customer satisfaction from seeing their display ad on a printed page. maybe it is mental accounting, but it is what it is.
the big puzzle online lies in fragmentation of the audience with infinite choice, and education of the local marketplace to find best fits to market their messages in media that ultimately result in their selling product. national advertising has already undergone their major shift and they have massive marketing mojo who are figuring out their new media mix. the more advertising fragments, the harder it becomes for consumers get informed, which is where opportunities to aggregate fragmented online advertising start to appear.
newspapers have to come to terms that their bread and butter is married to mom-and-pop stores on main street. and it should be noted that the last few years have not been easy on mom-and-pops either in terms of costs of doing business and increased competition in a climate that favors big business over independent business. they have to figure it out together, or they will perish together.
8. Joe Gannon | July 16th, 2007 at 9:25 pm
To answer your question, discreet_choas, if a newspaper is online-only, then it isn’t a newspaper. It’s a website, just like tvstationwebsite.com, radiostationwebsite.com, Yahoo and Google Local, Nimbus, Craigslist, Monster, weather.com, etc. It no longer has print to differentiate itself, and that’s when things will get verrrrrry interesting!
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