The elections are over and the results will be interesting to watch. This will be a very different council then the one we've had for the past few years.
It's been a busy couple of months for me. In addition to running for election, I've been moving into a new home. House hunting took up more time then I figured, and for a while I wasn't sure if I would still be in SMD 2. Still getting settled and I'm still in Lakeview, SMD-2.
I enjoyed my campaign although I didn't have the time to put in the effort needed to win. I enjoyed the forums and meeting voters and my supporters. I will do better if I run again. I learned a lot, especially from the news coverage, write ups and letters. I especially liked that the Standard times called me the eighth council member. Quite a compliment but it got me thinking.
It's common to refer to the press as the fourth branch of government or sometimes the fourth estate. That's because the press has the function and responsibility of keeping the public informed about the what, where, why, how and who of government and politics. It's seen as a watchdog that helps citizens keep their government under control and in check. Among the keys to open, honest, good government are the press functions information, communication, research and reporting. At the local level, that function could be called the eighth council member. I like that because the main reason I attend so many council and other local government meetings is so I can provide information and reporting. Need to do more of that then I have been lately. ConchoInfo and the other bloggers and the posters on facebook and twitter, etc. are truly an eighth council member. Wish I could say the same about our local press.
Right before early voting started the Standard Times changed the rules. With little advanced notice, SAST put up a paywall. All of a sudden content that was freely available was only available to paid subscribers. An active and popular online community of posters was effectively shutdown because even many ink on dead trees subscribers, as my fried Jim Ryan calls them, didn't have their subscription linked to their online presence for one reason or another. The online comments went from hundred each day to single digits in the middle of one of the most important local election campaigns we've ever had. This limited the access local citizens had to election information for a while until the paper move all the campaign coverage back outside the paywall. It also cut off most of the discussion and online feedback we had seen in past elections and were seeing until the paywall was erected. I realize that papers are struggling to stay in business, not to mention make a profit. I know that changes had to be made just to keep the paper in business but I do have to question the timing and wisdom of what I see from my perspective.
If I was a conspiracy buff, I could probably make a compelling case that the timing of the change was partly to influence the election. The papers editorial view point and the regular letters would still be readable but the online discussion and feedback were effectively silenced. I'm sure this change had been planned for months in advance but there is no doubt that this change directly affected the election discussion and had an impact on the outcome. Would online discussions like we had in previous elections have changed the outcomes? Would a greater participation in online discussions have affected voter turnout? Probably yes to both questions but we will never really know.
I also have to wonder about how Scripps determined what to charge for their newspaper subscriptions. I went to the scripps home page and checked the new subscriber rate for almost all the papers they have. At $15.99 for printed and $14.99 for online only, the Standard Times is the most expensive paper to subscribe to in their chain. The next highest one was Memphis, TN Commercial Appeal at $14.99 and $13.99. The rest ranged from $10.99 to $12.99 for the dead tree edition, and charged $9.99 for online only access. San Angelo has one of the lowest per-capita pay rates of any newspaper market, and yet the Standard Times charges one of the highest rates of any paper for online access. I'm afraid they are pricing themselves out of the majority of the local market. This change in subscriber model and recent price hikes could actually hurt their bottom line. I'd be willing to bet that online traffic whether measured by page views or click thru's or what ever measure you choose are down and when the traffic goes down advertiser revenue goes down and advertising dollars are still the dominate way a paper make money.Same thing applies to the printed edition.
At a more fundamental level though, it seems the paper is resigning from participation as part of the eighth council membership in favor of being mostly about marketing and entertainment. Seems to me there were many ways the paper could have derived revenue from online services and still had a free, open forum and information exchange on the political and government issues of today. Until they figure out how to do that ConchoInfo and the rest of the local bloggers and online community will be happy to fill the need for the eighth council member.
Hi Jim,
ReplyDeleteDisclosure - I am Ken Grimm, Director of Digital Media for the San Angelo Standard-Times and gosanangelo.com.
Jim, I count you as a friend and enjoy your insights as you astutely put it "the eight council member." Very apropos.
I have to take exception at some of the assertions you have alluded to in your above article, and would like to take the opportunity to clarify some others.
As to "This limited the access local citizens had to election information for a while until the paper move all the campaign coverage back outside the paywall." Jim, at no time, ever, did any election content require a subscription. Ever. A single story slipped by for a few hours that was not tagged properly, but that's it. All the way to the end of the runoffs, the content of this election was offered freely.
What I will acknowledge is the curation of the stories could have been done better, sooner. "SnS" called us out on that, and he was correct. That was entirely my bad. As soon as he made his case, I realized he was right, and corrected it immediately. This was a placement and visibility issue, not a subscription model issue.
As far as comments and the number of, the volume in relation to the visitors that came to the site was almost negligible. Out of over 395,000 people monthly, less than 400 ever took the time to write a single comment.
In one readership study, it was found that almost 90% of all readers of news sites NEVER read the comments. Out of nearly 3 million page views, only a thousand or two could be traced to comment activity. Almost 85% of comments were written by a handful of very vocal and prolific commenters. It is of those people I heard the loudest complaints, yet only a small subset of the commenting crowd saw any value to keep up their commenting habits.
I have received numerous thanks for getting the commenting "under control." So, entirely depending on your point of view, commenting by a paid subscriber with some skin the game, or a free-for-all with loud, vocal and sometimes very acerbic people with a free forum to be mean is best. We have gone with the former.
As to timing, this was the latest in a long series of delays and set backs from executing the subscription model on a set schedule. We were almost six months from the original date, and were going to go live on April 1 (April Fools Day) - I can't tell you glad I am that didn't happen.
Several papers, including us, noted the inopportune times for a roll out depending on what was going on the community. Basically, there was no good time. SOMETHING was gong to be affected. In San Angelo, the main story was the election. Sorry guy, as much as someone wants to look and see conspiratorial smoke, that's just all there is to that. No conspiracy, no meetings, no anything going on in San Angelo to affect a political outcome. Sorry.
Our CEO, Rich Boehne, puts it like this: "If you are in the restaurant business, and someone comes in your front door, you charge them full price for their meal. However, if they go to the back door and ask for the same thing, and you give it to them for free, how long will you be in business?" Pretty soon, no one goes in the front door and you are out of business.
More than once, I heard "Why in the world do I need to buy the Standard-Times? I can get it online for free!" That makes zero sense to maintain.
ReplyDeleteThe advertiser-subscription model of days of yore is gone. It is no longer viable. Many sister papers are no longer around due to the unwillingness to face this reality.
Advertising as an industry has not figured out how to make the mobile devices as effective an advertising platform as the print product is perceived to be. Users are consuming the content of a news organization at an alarming growing trend and advertising simply cannot keep up in the old business model. A new subscription based model had to be implemented for the business to remain viable. Ad traffic will soon be based not on just traffic, but the effectiveness of serving an audience. The mobile audience is exploding. A subscription-buying audience is a very valuable audience, a demographic that is much more responsive to advertising efforts. The new balance is closer to 50-50 ad/subscription than older models could support in the print world.
To your statement: "Seems to me there were many ways the paper could have derived revenue from online services and still had a free, open forum and information exchange on the political and government issues of today." I'd love to hear about these ways. My door is open to you.
Jim, thank you for taking the time to write, and keep fighting the good fight. I respect and admire you as a person and what you do for our community.
Best regards,
Ken Grimm
Director of Digital Media
gosanangelo.com and the San Angelo Standard-Times
kgrimm@gosanangelo.com
325-650-9204 - personal cell
Welcome to our Blog Ken, Your comments are appreciated.
ReplyDeleteI know that the advertising only model for news is not sustainable in the long run. Some changes have to be made. So let me clarify some of the things. The stories that were directly related to the election are freely available after some confusion, hiccups etc.. There were other stories that were related to campaign issues that were behind the pay wall. The story about more workers heading to the oil field http://www.gosanangelo.com/news/2013/jun/15/more-workers-heading-to-oil-field-trend/
was published behind the paywall on election day. That story is about one of the major issues that both candidates were running on and while not directly an election story it was a story about an election issue. Stories such as the one about major issues like feral cats and most of the Energy Effect series are completely behind the paywall.
Suggestions: Get your subscription prices in line with the rest of the Scripps sites. Why is gosanangelo.com that much higher than most of the rest within scripps and higher than most other leading online news sources. Why not offer a Scripps Pass type of setup where once you are a subscriber to one Scripps source you get more access to the rest of the papers. I frequently follow a story locally and then read one of the other scripps papers such as the reporter news to get a different take on it. Especially on issues like water where San Angelo, Abilene, and Midland are looking at a partnership of some sort. Not going to spend $10 a year for each scripps paper I might want to read occasionally.
Why not have some of the content, such as letters and live coverage free for the first 24 to 48 hours and then get archived behind the paywall. Do it like some of the comic sites do where the last few days are free but anything else you pay for. And get back control of your complete online archives. I would pay to be able to search back through the last hundred years of the Standard Times.
Look at reducing the cost of the online version compared to the print version, and offer specials such as education discounts and an armed forces discount for active duty military personnel. Great way to keep connected to the home town and builds social capital loyalty for the organization.
Last point is something you have little control over. Up until recently I lived in an apartment and I tried several times to get the paper thrown in front of my apartment door instead of my parking space. I now live in a house with only that house at the address and will be trying to get daily ink on dead trees delivery. Wish me luck.
I think it's appropriate to close with this quote from E.W. Scripps, one of the founders of the organization you work for.
A newspaper fairly and honestly conducted in the interests of the great masses of the public must at all times antagonize the selfish interests of that very class [the advertisers] which furnishes the larger part of a newspaper's income. It must occasionally so antagonize this class as to cause it not only to cease patronage, to a greater or lesser extent, but to make actually offensive warfare against the newspaper. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._W._Scripps )
"Not going to spend $10 a year for each scripps paper I might want to read occasionally."
DeleteI think you meant $10 a month. Plus I, as an out-of-towner, refuse to pay a dead tree rate for a digital subscription.
Right, it should have been month. At $10 a year i might do it. Only have to win a couple scratch offs.
DeleteHi Jim,
ReplyDeleteThe subscription management software is a very early version 1.0.0. The day passes and other necessities are things promised in future versions of the subscription management. Newspapers in Education (NIE) is one of the things we support as a company that the current subscription management software can't handle... much more work is being done to make such access available. Right now, only one log in per address is possible. If a husband and wife, plus child want to share the sign-in, they can, but not as different entities. We have been promised that those features will be arriving. The site directors will continue to bark at management until these things happen, it is a concern you and I jointly share. Legitimate beef.
I'm not sure we ever had control of online archives. The files I'm aware of only go back a dozen years or so, and we have over a quarter million, single, pure text files to manually archive "in our spare time."
I remember some huge company (Google, Microsoft?) at one time was trying to scan and archive all printed material, and the Standard Times was on that list. Not sure what happened, but that fell through. There is no company that is willing to hand scan all the bound archives and the poor quality microfiche archives to make a useable searchable archive for this paper. There will never be a return on investment high enough to make that happen. Even with the archiving we have now, there is only a handful of people that take any time to make use of it. The Tom Green County Library system is the best bet. They microfiche archive every day and have issues going back to day one.
Any breaking news, some opinion pieces and several other news categories are indeed, metered. They are on a time limit of free access before they require a subscription to read. In any case, after two weeks, that content reverts to not requiring a subscription.
Weather, wire stories, syndicated columnists, data, public safety concerns and a host of other news categories are free to the public.
The ONLY content that requires a subscription is the premium local content. Jim, that's fair. You have to have a subscription or buy a newspaper to read it, why should you not do the same online? Also, ANY subscriber to the newspaper has free access to all digital products as part of their newspaper subscription. It only has to be activated for complete access.
A premium story needs to be free because the candidates are talking about it? Should we deliver the paper free that day as well? That's a stretch, Jim.
As to pricing, that is a strategy we choose to do up front. The other properties will be experiencing a price increase in digital soon. In one scenario, a $9.99, then $11.99, then $12.99, then $14.99 structure was looked at to be rolled out over the course of a year. The mindset of the public has this perception: it does not matter WHAT the increase was, IT IS AN INCREASE. To have an increase gradually roll out four times to get to the price point of sustainability, to us, was sheer lunacy. So the other properties get to deal with the fallout from that strategy, we did it all at once.
The ONLY way to reduce the cost of the online version vs. the print version (besides ask why?) is to either increase ad revenue to subsidize the operation or cut services. Getting apps online, all the vendors involved, server space, bandwidth, equipment, personnel and such are not cheap for a commercial website that has the scope of a news site. The mobile platform is a platform of preference and convenience to our community to read NEWS. There is no way to have a "full page" ad on a phone. Print and digital are different animals, and the possible revenue streams are not even in the same universe. Again, consumers consume the news. They do not consume customary ads. The business model MUST reflect this reality.
Pat Flynt is the person to address the carriers issues with. She does a great job on that front.
I have to go work now, Best regards, Ken
Awesome quote.... just wondering if the quote would apply in today's mobile reality (changing one word):
ReplyDelete"A newspaper fairly and honestly conducted in the interests of the great masses of the public must at all times antagonize the selfish interests of that very class [the subscribers] which furnishes the larger part of a newspaper's income. It must occasionally so antagonize this class as to cause it not only to cease patronage, to a greater or lesser extent, but to make actually offensive warfare against the newspaper."
It is, truly, a different world.
-Ken
Ken, I think the key phrase here is "in the interests of the great masses of the public". There is a real danger in corporate dominated news that this doesn't get re-worded into
Delete"A newspaper fairly and honestly conducted in the interests of [profit and corporate survival] must at all times antagonize the selfish interests of that very class [the subscribers, advertiser, etc.] which furnishes the larger part of a newspaper's income. It must occasionally so antagonize this class as to cause it not only to cease patronage, to a greater or lesser extent, but to make actually offensive warfare against the newspaper."
The more things change, the more important it is to focus on the fundamentals that stay the same.
Actually meant to say the danger is that it WILL get re-worded into.
DeleteIt seems very few went from the back door of the Standard Times to the front door:
ReplyDeletehttp://stateofthedivision.blogspot.com/2013/11/scripps-paywall-paltry-digital-only.html