It’s amazing how a little economic crisis can clarify people’s thinking and give all kinds of already prevailing trends a hard nudge forward. Take the newspaper industry, which has been grappling for years with how to deal with declining readership offline and online revenues that stubbornly resist moving towards a level that will float their expensive newsroom operations. While many traditional newspaper publishers are responding with layoffs the venerable Christian Science Monitor is throwing in the daily newspaper towel entirely.
Like satirical newspaper The Onion, the bulk of their efforts will now be focused on the web with a weekly print edition out there (for now) as a mere compendium of the stuff that shows up on their website daily.
This is big news simply for the fact that the CSM is such a storied paper, a national icon that’s been published daily for a century. Does this mean we can expect The New York Times and the Washington Post to follow?
Not quite yet.
The CSM is unusual in several respects, chiefly in its non-profit (as opposed to unprofitable) status and it’s relatively low reliance on advertising to drive revenue offline. Funded primarily by the Christian Science Church it makes $11 million a year from subscriptions versus $1 million from advertising a split that’s exactly opposite most newspaper revenue models. Adding to ad revenue through the website should be fairly easy with that in mind, but will they will still have to cover what is sure to be an accelerated rate of subscription falloffs.
Nevertheless like many newspapers they are operating at a loss. The move to concentrate on the website as a revenue driver is a glimpse of the future for many news organizations.
It’s important to note that the CSM has a national presence but the bulk of daily and weekly papers across the United States serve local communities. While national brands have a leg up on garnering traffic online the increasing prevalence of geo-targeted search results means a growing market in location specific ads, and a growing ability to drive local users to their sites using search.
Tony Soprano’s beloved Newark Star-Ledger, New Jersey’s largest newspaper, is an example of how to transform from the old publishing model to an online local news hub. While leveraging the Star-Ledger brand name for part of their site, they have folded it under the locally branded nj.com umbrella. The site itself is loaded with local search tools, dynamic forums and commenting and real time news and weather feeds.
How soon before Tony is exclusively using his laptop to prop up the front page rather than his, uh, lap top?
Granted it’s a hard leap for many newspapers to make – the Newspaper Association of America estimates that print editions still account for more than 90% of revenue for most papers. I have to wonder though, how much of that is a function of a halfhearted web presence on the part of many local papers? The Star-Ledger and sites like it are showing the way for these local papers – it remains to be seen if the CSR will do the same nationally.
No more printers for me!!