Trying to create scarcity won’t save newspapers
Peter Scheer’s “idea” to embargo free newspaper content on the web for 24 hours is being universally rejected by observers today. Scheer is a San Francisco lawyer and journalist and executive director of the California First Amendment Coalition. That’s THE First Amendment all right. In a nutshell, Scheer suggests that all newspapers get together (outside anti-trust laws, of course) and agree not to run any free content online until 24 hours have passed.
Imagine the major Web portals — Yahoo, Google, AOL and MSN — with nothing to offer in the category of news except out of date articles from “mainstream” media and blogosphere musings on yesterday’s news. Digital fish wrap. And the portals know from unhappy experience (most recently in the case of Yahoo) just how difficult it is to create original and timely news content themselves.
He is attempting to create an artificial scarcity for content and thereby establish its real value. It doesn’t sit well with media observers.
Uh, counselor, you assume that you can still control the news. You can’t. That’s the whole point of the internet. Others can easily step into whatever void there is and report what you don’t report; you’re only opening the door for them. Oh, but they don’t have what the papers have? Look again: It’s worth cataloguing just how much in a paper is commodity news that is known elsewhere. So you would make papers staler in a world that demands freshness. You would tell you customers — your former readers — to continue living by your schedule instead of theirs. You would drive the last nail into papers’ coffins.
Interesting idea, but it will never work, of course. How about this instead: stop trying to copy newspapers to the web and start developing new information-related, niche businesses online.
Every now and then, you read a piece where you have to stop, take a breath and then go back and make sure you actually just read that…The assumption that embargoing information (good luck doing that, by the way) will somehow inflate the value of newspapers is achingly flawed but no doubt is a concept supported in many corporate board rooms.
An editor at The Washington Post once asked me how the Web site could drive readers to pick up and read the Sunday newspaper. I politely responded that that’s the wrong direction.
Scheer’s 1996-like proposal is just that, headed in the wrong direction. And, the idea that a First Amendment attorney would propose restrictions on the release of information? Wow.
I don’t have much good to say about this “idea” either, because it completely misses what’s really taking place online. I agree that newspapers (and other local media) will NEVER replace the money they’re losing in the Media 1.0 space with web revenues, because every strategy they’re employing is an act of defending turf from an enormous business disruption.
Salvation for local media, as I will preach ’til my dying day, lies WITHIN the disruption, and that takes an entirely different set of eyes to see.
In Texas, we’d call Scheer’s idea “dumber than a bucket of hair.”
This entry was posted on Monday, November 13th, 2006 at 3:52 pm and is filed under Newspapers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
