The Wisconsin State Journal is focusing on a “Print-First Strategy,” holding its investigative and enterprise pieces back from the Internet until paying subscribers have had a chance to read them in the ink-on-paper edition.
Announcing the move, The Inland Press Association calls it “a brand new approach to the Web.” Well, maybe new for the State Journal, but elsewhere, it’s at least a year old.
The Journal Sentinel has dabbled with that tactic from time to time with some of its big investigative work, though not consistently. The Janesville Gazette adopted the policy more than a year ago and continues to adhere to it. Elsewhere around the country, the Indianapolis Star and the Springfield State Journal-Register in Illinois have been among papers moving that way.
On one level, “Print-First” is a logical strategy. As revenues have collapsed across the newspaper industry and the old advertising-based economic model has been hobbled, publications are having to figure out some way to stabilize their fiscal base.
Other approaches — and these aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive — include charging for archives beyond a certain age (typically two weeks) or online access to subscribers only (as Long Island’s Newsday does).
There’s another advantage to holding back exclusive material: Internet readership is way down on the weekends, so blockbusters that break on Sunday can get buried by Monday if they’re online at the same time they reach print. Waiting to post them until more readers are on line to see them keeps them at the top of the heap.
The New York Times is moving toward some kind of pay-for-content model to be launched next year, and the Wall Street Journal is adhering to that approach after initially flirting with free access (something Rupert Murdoch vowed to provide when he bought Dow Jones, only to change his mind after he’d completed the acquisition).
Still another suggested strategy is to provide “basic” content for free and then charge for a richer, “value-added” menu of information. The flip side, pursued by some consumer magazines, is to focus the website on content that supplements the magazine’s features but doesn’t duplicate them.
But exactly what is the best approach remains a mystery, just as much as when Ad Age surveyed the scene some eight months ago.
Conventional wisdom among Internet users is that most pay walls are self-defeating because they keep others from linking to your content and thereby deprive you of eyeballs. Yet there’s no clear evidence that simply indiscriminate eyeballs adds up to revenue for whoever is drawing them in.
The key is to be able to deliver those eyeballs to paying advertisers. Among magazines, the Atlantic has gambled heavily on that strategy, putting all of its content online for nothing and then handsomely paying a cadre of sophisticated bloggers including Andrew Sullivan, Marc Ambinder and Ta-Nehisi Coates to further drive traffic. Advertising is modest, however, and to read the site, one sometimes gets the impression that the strategy involves as much goading people to buy the magazine as a moral obligation.
Business strategies are largely Darwinian: Typically, whatever works lasts, and what doesn’t work drops away. (Of course, because people are stupid, you can’t always count on that.)
So if Print-First works, expect to see it copied widely. If it doesn’t, it will be just one more fad as the news business struggles to find a footing in the new environment.
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