Looking More Deeply At The Impact On Websites Of Newspapers Going Web Only

from the still-looks-good-to-me dept

When the Seattle Post-Intelligencer went online only last month, traffic to its website dropped 20%. Some described this as a sign that the concept was a failure, but we found that hard to believe. The company had laid off 80% of its staff, massively cut its costs... and still retained 80% of its traffic? That's fantastic. Yet, people still seem to miss that point. The Wall Street Journal recently looked at a similar story, involving a newspaper in Finland that had gone online only a while back, and saw its traffic decline between 11 and 22% (depending on how you measure traffic) over a period of about five months. But, the WSJ article buries some of the important details: such as the fact that the paper also significantly cut its newsroom when it made the switch and publishes fewer articles. It also brushes over the fact that when the news became more relevant (focusing on the financial crisis) traffic came right back up to old levels.

Yet, the article still frames this as a "surprising" failure?

It's as if people were pulling just the bad news out of incredibly positive news. Both of these stories show that you can massively cut costs without a corresponding drop in readership. And, on top of that, if you actually provide real value to people, then you can grow the traffic as well. That all seems like good news -- except for folks who seemed to think that you could magically keep all the same traffic while doing a tiny percentage of the work.

Filed Under: journalism, newspapers, web only

What Does It Mean For The Christian Science Monitor To Go Web Only?

from the questions,-questions,-questions dept

Early Tuesday, I saw the news that the venerable Christian Science Monitor newspaper was the first major mainstream daily newspaper to decide to shift away from print and focus mainly on the web. For the last few years there's been plenty of talk about how this day would come eventually, but it's still quite a surprise to see it actually happen. While I think it's the right move, I had expected most major newspapers to hang on until the bitter end. I didn't have a chance to write up a post on it immediately, so it gave me more of a chance to think through what this really means. The cost of producing, printing and distributing a physical newspaper each day is quite high. So, removing all of those costs is a big deal. The paper still is planning to do a print version weekly, which will function more as a weekly magazine, allowing the staff to dig deeper into various issues and provide a more complete summary reading for the week. Thus it will still need to do some printing and distribution, but at a vastly reduced rate and scale.

In a lot of ways, this setup probably makes a lot more sense for many people. Newspapers have long since lost their ability to be the source of "breaking news" in print. News breaks online, and by the time it's in the newspaper the next morning, it's old hat. The days of paperboys screaming "Extra! Extra!" are long gone. Still, many may question the timing of the move. Online advertising, while growing rapidly for many, still doesn't make up a huge percentage of revenue for most newspapers. Decreasing the costs significantly means that the revenue doesn't have to match, but there may still be quite a gap there, and I'd imagine some may have been more comfortable waiting for the gap to close before leaping out of the plane without much of a parachute.

However, in taking that plunge, it will force the CSMonitor to really focus in on making its website as good as it can be, both for readers and for advertisers. That sort of hyperfocus could be quite useful, as we've seen too many newspapers find themselves in a struggle for resources and attention between the (dwindling) cash cow print business, and the small, but growing, online markets. No matter what, you can bet that other big (and small) newspapers will be watching the CSM's leap with great interest as they plan their own strategies for a changing media world.

Filed Under: business models, newspapers, print, web only
Companies: christian science monitor