Knowledge@Wharton recently painted a gloomy portrait of the newspaper industry’s shrinking readerships and revenues, citing the recent bankruptcies of the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune, amongst others. They cite that newspapers’ main challenge is that people are not willing to pay for news that they can find online. 
Online aggregators like Google News and Alltop are becoming more popular with those who have traditionally purchased newspapers. While I agree with this general trend, I’m let down by the ideas Knowledge@Wharton and Wired outline for newspapers to regain their readership. Things like establishing philanthropy organizations to fund operations and “block-to-block” reporting are not strategies that will create new revenue streams.
Instead, newspapers should be learning about how consumers enjoy these online news sites – then find ways to make that experience more enjoyable – so they can create premium products or services for which people would gladly pay. I’m thinking specifically about my Wall Street Journal experience. In college, I benefited from the WSJ’s strategy of offering students a 70% discount on the newspaper to get these “newbies” trained to read the WSJ every day. In my case it almost worked, but when I graduated, I took a hard look at paying the hundreds of dollars it costs a year to subscribe on a daily basis. Unfortunately, as a new graduate, I thought that the price point was too high for me to afford – especially when most of the front page stories of the New York Times were available online. At the time, I thought to myself, “if only there was a daily option that wasn’t as expensive – I’d gladly pay a bit to get this delivered every morning.” And there, in a nutshell, is the missing revenue stream.
To fill in the gaps to what I’m suggesting, you have to consider websites like netvibes.com (customizable “start page” technology) and salon.com (original content, subscription-based news site) in the same breath. You would also have to conceive of a different type of physical newspaper. Delivering 100-page bricks through the mail every day gets to be expensive, and in this model, unnecessary. A “web-enabled” newspaper would be more trim – maybe 10 pages, max. It would be in full color and magazine-like with images, perhaps, from flickr or similar sites. It would contain my favorite portions of a physical newspaper (for me, it would be in-depth independent reporting, original essays, comic strips and the crossword puzzle), but overall, essentially any content that is more enjoyable to digest while you’re not distracted by incoming emails & IM’s. It would also be personalized to me. It would be customized per my specifications (click on netvibes, if you haven’t already done so). And I would get this newspaper every week. How would you physically do this? Digital Printing. All this technology (customization, interactivity, original reporting & content, and immediate physical printing) exists today – I just haven’t seen any examples of it mashed together. This is what the LA Times & others should embark upon – a reinvention of how people interact with their news by embracing more of the web technologies that are now threatening their survival. Here’s the real question – how much would you pay for a customized version of the WSJ?
