I've heard it thousands of times: "The big mistake newspapers made was not charging for access from the beginning."
But it's not true that newspapers didn't charge for access right from the beginning.
Let's roll back the clock about 15 years. Here are some of the newspapers that were pursuing the paid-access model:
- Atlanta Journal-Constitution
- Los Angeles Times
- Providence Journal
- Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
- Newsday
- Minneapolis Star Tribune
- Washington Post
- New Haven Register
- St. Louis Post-Dispatch
- Palm Beach Post
- San Jose Mercury News
- Chicago Tribune
- New York Times
- Detroit Free Press
All told, in 1995, Editor and Publisher reported there were 45 newspapers on paid platforms.
Is that a surprise?
Typically the newspaper would join with a partner that provided publishing technology and commercial services including the paid-access infrastructure and customer support, and additional content.
There were three basic models. AOL partners such as the Mercury News and the New York Times were bundled into the core AOL service at one common rate. Prodigy partners such as the AJC and the Los Angeles Times tacked a $5 monthly newspaper access surcharge onto the basic Prodigy bill. Ziff-Davis (later, AT&T) Interchange partners such as the Washington Post and the Star Tribune marketed their services directly, under their own brands, and bundled Interchange core services as a bonus (sort of a flip of the AOL model).
All of these services were demolished by the free and open model of the Internet shortly after the Mosaic web browser became available and local flat-rate Internet service providers popped up all over the country. It didn't take long -- a matter of months, really.
Many of the newspapers that I named tried to hold onto the paid content model while building Web-facing portals for classified advertising.
The stampede of users away from walled gardens and into the open range of the Internet brought to an end the era of paid online content that began with the invention of Teletext long before Bill Gates and Paul Allen even thought of creating a software company.
By the way, in 1993 you could buy a piece of software for that would assemble a personalized, printable "newspaper" for $80. Another not-so-new idea.
Comments
Print-your-own newspaper
Charging for online content
Washed away in the flood
I think it's fair to say the baby was washed away in the flood and never really had a chance to grow up.
But it wasn't just a technology issue -- the stunning growth of the open Internet's user base changed all the economic calculations. Suddenly there was an advertising opportunity that eclipsed anything we could have hoped for with our paid-access sites, where we counted our successes by the hundreds instead of the hundreds of thousands.
In Minneapolis, where I was editor, we had the technical stuff licked and were trying to figure out what kind of content would get people to sign up for a subscription. We had great online forums, community groups publishing their own subsites, and some very rudimentary databases (not much you could do with Interchange's document-centric, flat-database architecture).
And while we were trying to do that, the Twin Cities went from zero to over 120 Internet service providers offering access to the general public. The online audience exploded, but not on our turf.
We put the classifieds on the Web, then a "Digital Daily Digest" with lots of pointers to the paid service. (Interchange could be accessed over the Internet with its proprietary software, and also provided access to the Internet for our subscribers, via Netscape.)
It didn't help. Our business projections required hockey-stick growth curves, and it just wasn't happening. It was clear the paid model wasn't going to work long before AT&T announced it was throwing in the towel on Interchange.
I was asked to speak about Star Tribune Online in Berlin in December 1995, because Europe Online had announced it was going to launch on the Interchange platform as well.
When I arrived in Berlin, I announced we were moving it all to the Web. I followed Neil Budde onstage. Neil demonstrated the Wall Street Journal's proprietary online application -- which he was pronouncing dead, as the WSJ moved to the Web. The Europe Online consortium (Bertelsman and Burda) was falling apart and had pulled out of the Interchange plan, in favor of the Web.
Out of all of us, the one entity that was able to migrate its paid strategy to the Web was the Wall Street Journal. There are a lot of reasons for that, but one that's commonly overlooked is that WSJ had the resources to simultaneously create the necessary publishing system and commercial charging infrastructure -- a huge project. Most of the rest of us were lucky to get beyond cutting and pasting newspaper stories into Navipress.
History lessons
Print your own paper
I didn't mean to ignore Michele's question. The terrain has shifted, no doubt. But I don't think people who love the newspaper reading experience are going to be happy with a few sheets of printout. And the ones who can't figure out how to use a computer are not going to do much better with a printer, which is one of the most demonic devices ever invented.
Reading lessons
More on Media Economics!
Why stop there?
Meow
An end to magical thinking
the early days
cue cat
Yup
I did shoot that picture yesterday, with my Blackberry, of the Cue Cat I keep on my desk.
The true lesson of the cue cat
Paging Clayton Christensen
Wow. That is just an awesome illustration of everything Innosight has to say about innovation.
Old times
IBM
The black holes of content management
The Strib was converting to FutureTense when I headed south. Another dead end. Over the years much energy and capital has disappeared into the black hole of vendor-driven content management systems.
Only paper I know that actually implemented Lotus Notes / Domino as a Web-facing system is the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. I think they're still on it. There may have been others.
The real train wreck, though, is inside the newsroom, where most of the CMS vendors are utterly clueless about the Web. Tagging? Geocoding? Continuous updating? Forget it. Oh, but we'd also like to have complete and total control of your website so it never becomes anything more than an online edition of the newspaper. Ecch.
We're about to put a new workflow CMS in place in a couple of our newsrooms, feeding sane structured data to Drupal in real time. Ironically, the solution we're trying -- NewsEngin -- originated as a Lotus Notes project, years ago. There's no Notes left in it now, though. Pure PHP/MySQL/Ajax, hosted in the Amazon EC2 cloud. Quite a leap.
Cyberbury