OPC member, CUNY Journalism Dean and long-serving journalist Steve Shepard gave everyone at his OPC book night for Deadlines and Disruptions: My Turbulent Path From Print to Digital an education in recent journalism history and a forecast for where journalism is headed. He is not the first to sound the death knell for paper, but he may be the first among his generation to write about the real possibility that the present print-and-deliver model of newspapers will go the way of silent movies, to paraphrase Shepard’s example. He said it would be difficult for him to forsee a time without a Sunday paper, because Sunday papers are advertising-rich, but the daily print editions are migrating to digital platforms.
Shepard outlined the final chapter of his book which gives a case-study of a large metro daily he referred to as The Daily Bugle, a borrowing of the oft-named Marvel comics newspaper. He dissected the business model of newspapers and how they can be supported in the digital age. Newspapers still do the majority of original reporting, he said, but in the past five to six years, they have also lost half of their advertising revenue, or $25 billion dollars. The digital age was originally thought as a rescue for newspapers, but online advertising has turned out to be less lucrative than hoped at less than $1 billion in that same five-to-six year timeframe. Online advertising is successful for other venues like Google, Yahoo! and AOL, but newspapers have yet to see similar returns. Shepard said that the amount Google earns in ad revenue in eight hours is equal to what The Huffington Post will earn all year. If newspapers are to be successful Shepard contends, management must stop chasing pop-up ad dollars and emphasizing page views.
On average, people used to spend forty-five minutes a day reading a newspaper, now a reader spends about three minutes on one website shopping for the article they would like to read. Shepard referred to these readers as “drive-by visitors.” “It’s like buying a single song instead of an entire album,” he said. Instead, the trick is for The Daily Bugle to specialize and focus its coverage to give readers something they can get nowhere else. To cover for world news, “link,” he said, knowing his audience was filled with those rapt for foreign reporting. “Do what you do best and link to the rest,” he said.
Shepard also suggested that offering services for the community like reviews of schools, a crime index, traffic report and community calendar are all ways to attract a loyal readership and targeted advertising. He said it was essential for newspapers like The Daily Bugle to engage with local bloggers and local radio and embrace social media.
Each one of these tools would be good for newspapers to capitalize on, but one audience member expressed concerns about privacy for online readers for the sake of a newspapers’ survival. Shepard acknowleged that privacy could be an issue and said that website browsers like Chrome, Internet Explorer and Firefox and newspaper sites need to make their security settings easier for the common person to adjust to the level of privacy that they prefer.
A final essential ingredient Shepard said to the digital success of newspapers is charging users. “I’m a believer in the metering system,” he said. Metering allows visitors to read a certain amount of content and then it begins to charge, similar to the recent move by The New York Times. “The Times has signed up 500,000 readers for its digital platforms, who on average pay about $200 a year for the service. That’s $100 million in new revenue for a newsroom budget that is $200 million.” Indeed, with numbers like these it might give everyone hope that newspapers are not over, just recalibrating their interface to meet public and financial demands.