We're like ostriches

Sitting in his home on a sweltering day, a man is thirsty. Outside on the street corner, one of the neighborhood children has set up a lemonade stand. The little girl, though cute, doesn’t budge when it comes to selling her beverage, and you have to wait until she opens her stand at noon. If you want the lemonade, you’ll get there when the stand is open, take it how it is and will pay the quarter for every glass.

Back at home, inside his refrigerator, the man has a free endless supply of water, milk, juices, pop and liquor. He can pick whatever he wants, doesn’t have to go anywhere to get it and best of all, there is no cost to him.

It might be nice to visit little Suzie on an occasional basis, but really, the logical choice every time would be to sit at home and pick what he wants, when he wants it for free. Why would you pay to get something another person tells you that you need, when they say you need it?

Applying that model to just about anything, it makes perfect sense to go with the cheapest, most convenient means that serves a person. So why do print editions of newspapers feel that they are any different in meeting their readers’ demands? The Internet offers the content people want, when they want it for free, so there’s no need to wait until the newspaper you have a paid subscription to comes out in the morning.

I believe that newspapers, in their traditional form, are indeed dead. That’s not just me repeating what every j-school professor has pounded into my brain over my four years at the university; I fully believed it before even coming to college. If I wanted sports scores or news, I would read national things on either www.espn.com or www.sportsillustrated.com. After those, I would read local copy on the Kansas City Star’s online site. Instead of hiking down my driveway, or driving to a gas station once our paper subscription ran out, I simply sat in my pajamas and enjoyed reading the same thing, for free and in its entirety, on my laptop.

I think that newspapers that take the Los Angeles Times new approach will be the most successful, and possibly the only ones that survive. For people who didn’t read about it, the Times decided that it would become a news Web site that also puts out a daily paper. Even that, I think, will need some tweaking in order to really be successful or even revolutionary.

My ideal news site is one that combines all of the different technologies and offers readers the choice as to which form they would like things in. Offer print stories for people who would like to read things. Give people on the go podcasts so they can listen to the news while driving to work or doing other things. Offer video clips, similar to how Youtube works, for people who would like to watch the news.

In addition to posting the stories in these different formats, give people the ability to instantly comment on stories and read what other people are saying about a given topic or story. Let them do it like a message board, but allow them to upload an audio or video response as well, with the simple guidelines of decency applying.

And in another facet of making the Web site something people are really connected to, allow those comments to be linked to an extensive networking-type page. Making it like a Facebook or Myspace would allow readers interested or intrigued by what another user says continue the discussion, and it could also promote the grouping of people with similar interests. Giving it that social aspect, with a direct forum and easy usability for readers, would create a buzz about whatever news organization would be bold enough to try it.

The complexities of the site could not be maintained by simply offering everything for free. When it comes to a business model, I personally believe www.espn.com is the closest to having things right. They offer basic news for free, but charge a minimal fee for yearly access to the opinion, analysis and commentary pieces on the site. Almost every dedicated sports fan I know feels like they aren’t being overcharged and are getting good information for their money, so they have no problem paying the small amount to get access to all of the stories with the little orange Insider boxes next to them.

By applying this same concept to a newspaper’s Web site, the company could almost instantly stem the bleeding from the continued loss of subscriptions over the past decade. People aren’t stupid — if they don’t have to pay to get something, why would they? To make this aspect of paying a small yearly subscription to have full access to everything on the site, most of the newspapers in the industry would have to get on board with the idea of not giving away all of their content for free. Again, it just makes really simple business sense.

As the networking aspect of the site grows, and information is compiled on what type of stories users are most often reading, the real advertising aspect of this concept could be put into play. Of course, there would be banner ads or sponsored sections of the site, as there are with every other Web site on the Internet, but this is different. By monitoring the groups a person is in, and the types of stories or searches for stories a user does, advertising for that user could be customized to draw in exactly who advertisers are after. There would be no more need for focus groups or anything like that because the advertiser would know they are going directly after a targeted group.

To provide that kind of precise and exact information to an advertiser would bring in huge amounts of advertising dollars for the news organization. According to a story by USA Today about pages like www.espn.com, this technique is already in the experimental stages. The story (which I was able to get for free off of USA Today’s Web site: the story) says that this targeted advertising is the future of the industry.

Of course, to create a site like this would be a huge risk for a news organization. It would require huge amounts of bandwidth, a very large and diverse staff (diverse as in areas of expertise), dedication to stick with the project while the site gets up and running, cooperation with other news outlets and the boldness to continue trying new things as they become a huge part of people’s lives.

But really, I don’t think newspapers have any option except for trying something daring and new. Trying to stick with how things are currently done shows our ignorance or stubbornness because what we are doing now obviously isn’t cutting it for today’s news consumers. New and better technologies constantly pop up and become mainstays in other industries because they are superior to what was previously being offered. For us as journalists to expect anything different in our field, because we work in some believed ivory tower, is laughable.