CSotD: A Brief Discursion into Business Matters
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Tom Falco is letting his print subscription to the Miami Herald run out and will subscribe to the digital edition.
He writes:
I don’t remember ever not receiving a daily newspaper delivery, even from when I was a child. But the newspaper is not arriving! I’m paying for it but it doesn’t come. We had a problem last month, it sort of got fixed, but it’s happening again – no newspaper delivery.
I can’t understand how a major metropolitan newspaper can’t get the newspapers out! Where are those newsie kids when you need them?
As it happens, I once switched from print to digital for much the same reason, and the disappearance of those delivery kids was a part of the issue: The paper where I was working became entirely delivered by drivers.
And the driver working my route didn't want to have to drive up my hill in the snow. He thought dumping it at the curb would be sufficient.
The kid who had the route before had not only walked it but put my paper in the door on the porch so it would be dry.
And it didn't smell like it had been locked in a car with a chain smoker. I was only five blocks from the paper. Folks outside town could probably have wrapped a fresh salmon in it and had lox by dinnertime.
Anyway, the digital version was always dry, I didn't have to clear off a table to read it and I didn't end up with a couple of pounds of newspaper to recycle each week.
And let me point out, as Tom does, that an e-edition is a complete replica, not simply the online version of the paper.
I get access to the e-edition of the Denver Post because I freelance for them, and this is Sunday's front page, or, rather, the top part of it. You can display the entire front page but you can only read the headlines in those proportions, so, to actually read something, you zoom in to "width" or closer.
The more important point is that, as you see at the bottom of the page, you are getting the entire thing, not simply a selection of articles. You scroll through just as you would the print paper, and then zoom in on whatever you want to read. (And click on the jumpline to go to the rest of the story.)
Extra benefits are that you can create your own digital clip files, email an article to a friend, go back a few days or a few years to check out something you missed and, if you don't mind auto-translations, read the paper in any of a large number of languages.
And you can zoom in on your comics to read them at an appropriate level of magnification. (Remember comics? This is a blog about comics!)
This isn't intended as an ad for e-editions, though, if you are tired of fishing papers out from under the sofa, you might consider it.
Rather, it's a conversation about the future of newspapers and is yet another episode of my banging my head against the wall, because every paper I know with an e-edition charges roughly the same for it as they do for home delivery.
Despite not having to print it and despite not having to give the delivery person a cut between 25 and 33 percent of the subscription price.
I understand that newspapers are losing money, or, at least, that the Wall Streeters who own them are not getting the dividends they'd like, but it strikes me that their unwillingness to set a bargain price for the digital edition is a prime example of why they are failing.
Granted, they're trying to climb out of a deep hole they dug themselves.
Newspapers were blindsided by Craig's List, but they could have responded in a timely manner if they hadn't sat around conference tables pondering it, and, really, ditto with the entire online experience.
The idea of giving away content for free in the first place was idiotic and the only thing more idiotic is trying to make up for it now by charging too much for access.
This isn't difficult: The cost of producing 100 digital papers is the same as the cost of producing 100,000 digital papers, so set a price that encourages volume, ferchrissake.
And stop trying to save money by cutting back on things people want, which is simply a variation on, "The food here is terrible — and such small portions!"
Because who subscribes to pamphlets?
I do think people should subscribe to their local paper, but they make it hard for me to justify.
I passed over an Edison Lee last week, and I'm know I'm toying with the Prime Directive here, but it's one of my favorite strips, so forgive me.
There's no way one of today's papers would break a window and, in fact, I don't think you could throw it from the sidewalk to the porch unless you put a rock in the plastic bag.
At which point you could break a window, yes.
TThe paper I edited in Maine was tiny, it only came out twice a week and it only covered one rural county.
However, it was a terrific newspaper.
We had no wire service, but we had a platoon of what I called "little old lady columnists" — most of whom were little old ladies — who wrote about what was happening in their towns, including who was home from Iraq and who had a birthday party, but also what was being done to repair the bridge and what the local school board was up to.
Their hyperlocal coverage, augmented by the county-wide work of my staff of one news reporter, one sportswriter and myself, meant that everything in the paper mattered to the people who lived in our circulation area.
If all newspapers were like that, there'd be no crisis in the industry.
How I miss Richard Thompson!
UPDATE: To all of which Charles Peattie adds this.
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