NEWSPAPERS HAVE 'THE CONTENT CONVERSATION'

By: Wayne Robins Web Sites Discuss Cash For Content


Call it "The Content Conversation."

They're having The Conversation in Portland, Maine, and in
Sacramento, Calif. They're having it in Raleigh, N.C., and St.
Petersburg, Fla., in Boston and in Los Angeles, in New York and
Washington and Chicago, probably in every city and town that has
a newspaper with a Web site.

The Content Conversation has many facets, many layers, many
nuances and variables. But The Conversation, in each of these
places, is about just one thing: charging for content online that
has until now been free. "We are discussing the issue of cash for
content," says Ralph Frattura, new-media manager of The
Sacramento Bee.

"Like everyone else in our business, it seems, we are taking
another look at the revenue model," says Richard Core, editor of
latimes.com.

"We are looking at ways for charging,'' says John J. Jordan III,
content manager for newsobserver.com and triangle.com in Raleigh.

Anyway you slice it, you can't walk out of a supermarket without
paying for a loaf of bread. Now, for the first time since
newspapers gleefully -- and, in retrospect, naively -- bought
into the Internet mantra "Information Wants to Be Free," putting
a price on content is on the table.

There is still more talk than action, for pretty much the same
reason as usual with newspapers and the online economy: No one
really has a business model.

But there is no shortage of ideas, from subscription fees similar
to the print model to enhanced "value added" online packages to
determining specific areas of content that people will be willing
to pay for.

"You will see it going to a subscription model targeting premium
customers paying for premium content, with very good customer
service and a focused product," says Peggy Smyth, a partner in
Andersen (formerly known as Arthur Andersen) and a media industry
consultant. Smyth sees this stage of the online newspaper
business as comparable to that of cable TV 25 years ago. "When
the cable operators came up with premium packages, and content,
and brands," she points out, "people were willing to pay for TV,
which they once got for free."

Money for something

What will people pay for from online news sites? No one claims to
have found the "killer app" that will turn revenue goose eggs
into gold. Here are 10 pay-for-play strategies already operating
or under consideration.

1. Pay or go away. The Wall Street Journal quite
early in the game realized that both its brand and its content
were of sufficient value that it was folly to give it away. An
annual subscription to WSJ.com at present costs $59. Others with
highly specialized, targeted, proprietary content, such as the
entertainment industry trade sites Variety.com and The Hollywood
Reporter.com, give away almost nothing.

So far, the subscription model generally hasn't been adopted by
the digital renditions of daily newspapers. But since April 30,
Post-Bulletin Online (http://www.postbulletin.com),
the site of the Rochester, Minn., Post-Bulletin, has
been charging. "It's been two weeks since we closed off our Web
site," says Jon Losness, general manager and editor of the
Post-Bulletin (circulation 42,614 weekdays, 46,148
weekends). "We have 34 paid online-only subscribers from outside
our circulation area, and we've sold a few newspaper
subscriptions within our region to people who have to subscribe
to get online access."

Losness has received about 330 e-mail messages, around 85% of
which were from people outside the Rochester area, angry about
losing free Web access to the paper. But, he says, "We've had
surprisingly little criticism from area residents who are upset
with the move. My theory is that those folks know our news
content has value."

2. A leaner free online edition. Some papers will simply
provide less free material online, whether holding back longer
investigative pieces or obituaries. Pay-averse Web surfers would
get less for their nil money. "Right now, we have the entire
edition on our [free] Web site," says Content Manager Jordan of
The News & Observer's two sites. "It's quite likely in
coming months it will be trimmed back."

3. Enhanced e-mail specialty news packages. Say you're a
fan of the Boston Red Sox (just don't say it too loud in the
Bronx). Say you want more than The Boston Globe provides
on its sports pages, or via the Globe-partnered
Boston.com, a New York Times Digital site. You can sign up for
@bat, an e-mail newsletter just for Red Sox fans. The @bat
newsletter is free. But suppose you are a really, really, really
diehard Red Sox fan. Then you subscribe to @bat Insider, which
was launched last month with the introductory rate of $9.95 for
the season. (Regular price is $14.95.)

The pay package offers "inside scoop e-mails" written just for
@bat Insider, by the Globe's Dan Shaughnessy and Gordon
Edes, chats, and postgame e-mail messages with detailed game
summaries, as well as screensavers, photo galleries, contests
("enter our Red Sox haiku contest") -- the whole nine innings.

The same concept has been running for nearly two years on the Web
site of The Morning News, based in Springdale, Ark.
(http://www.nwaonline.net).
People who want to know anything and everything about the
University of Arkansas sports teams pay $36.50 a year in
greenbacks for daily e-mail about the Razorbacks.

4. Identify and charge for "Pockets of Passion." You can
charge for content with the right package of offerings and the
obsessions of dedicated enthusiasts. As noted in the April 30
issue of E&P, The New York Times on the Web
(http://www.nytimes.com) is
charging $19.95 a year or $3.95 a month for a deluxe crossword
puzzle package that includes daily and Sunday puzzles, Java
Acrostics, puzzle archives to 1996, and a crossword puzzle forum
hosted by "puzzle masters" Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon.

In a radically different subject area: Jon Ralston, a longtime
reporter for Nevada newspapers, writes a daily e-mail "flash"
newsletter on Las Vegas politics and campaign issues that goes
out to 350 subscribers (at $240 a year) via the Greenspun Media
Group, owners of the Las Vegas Sun and Vegas.com. "It's a
very niche product," says Monica Leyva, Greenspun Media's
database marketing coordinator. "You either need it or you don't.
It markets itself. People find it."

5. Bonus classifieds from eBay. Earlier this month, the
Minneapolis Star Tribune began a partnership with eBay,
the online auction giant that has squashed previous newspaper
company sites, such as the former Times Mirror Co.'s former
Auction.com. Last week, the St. Petersburg Times became
the second newspaper to connect with eBay in this way. The deal
calls for co-branded online auction pages on eBay and the
newspaper Web sites (startribune.com and TampaBay.com,
respectively), as well as creating local eBay classifieds in the
newspapers' print editions. The auction site pays the papers for
any new eBay users who sign up on the co-branded online pages;
local eBay advertisers also pay the newspaper a fee to appear in
the print classified.

6. Use multimedia to sell. Everyone's talking about
"convergence" -- the place where a newspaper, a Web site, and a
TV station in the same market work together. The Tribune Co. is
starting to make it pay off in its Los Angeles properties, which
include the Los Angeles Times, latimes.com, and KTLA-TV
Channel 5.

One example: Fantasy Baseball. Sign up for the immensely popular
contest on the latimes.com Web site. Check out the sports
announcers, who take part in the same fantasy league on the KTLA
morning news program. "They're competing, having fun, talking
about the games and their trades," says Dave Hiller, president of
Tribune Interactive.

Follow the bouncing ball to the sports pages of the L.A.
Times, where the game is promoted in print. Signing up is
free -- but you pay $9.95 every time you trade a player, and
Tribune shares the revenue with STATS, which administers the
league.

And it's sponsored by the kind of company most e-sites would
trade A-Rod for: Southwest Airlines. "They love the positioning
they get," Hiller says. "It's the furthest thing from a simple
banner. It's fun, interesting, and adjacent to great content in
all the media."

7. Wireless. Just five weeks ago, Belo Interactive
announced a partnership with a company called Strategy.com to
deliver a personalized service called "My News" to users through
not only computers but mobile phones, pagers, and personal
digital assistants. Right now, the product is available free from
the Web sites of Belo's The Dallas Morning News and KVUE
in Austin. But, says Flory Bramnick, vice president of business
development for Belo Interactive, it will start charging in late
summer.

Belo and Strategy.com have already started sharing revenues for
My Traffic, which offers a live traffic map. The map is free on
personal computers, but, as soon as you customize it -- say, to
display your route to work or to get traffic alerts on your
wireless device -- the charge is $5.95 a month. Strategy.com gets
$3.95 of that; Belo keeps the other two bucks.

"We don't have a lot of promotion behind it yet; we have about
160 subscribers after about three weeks," Bramnick says. In the
late summer, Belo Interactive also will join the sports e-mail
newsletter party, with value-added content people will pay for.
"We need to build this market," Bramnick says. "But if people
like what they're getting [for free], they're going to have to
pay for it."

8. Resell content. Raleigh's News & Observer is one
of the top newspapers in its state, located in the so-called
"Research Triangle" and in a hotbed of college basketball. Trying
to take advantage of all this, The News & Observer site
and its affiliated business site (triangle.com) recently
contracted with ScreamingMedia Inc. to resell their content
online. "That product was launched only six weeks ago and we have
yet to receive our first check," says Jordan, the sites' content
manager. "However, we see many possibilities with some of our
unique content."

Similarly, the Tribune Co. made a content agreement with Yahoo!
in February: Nine of the company's newspapers provide local news
and headlines to Yahoo! News (http://news.yahoo.com).

9. Archives. Chances are you're already charging for
archives. But piecemeal sale of individual stories that readers
have to search for still amounts to small change, although sales
of photos helps (and could be more actively promoted). What if
users could view the newspaper as it used to appear -- for
research, educational, or recreational reasons -- instead of just
plain text? Cold North Wind, a company based in Ottawa and in
Framingham, Mass., is digitizing the entire archives of the 200-
year-old New York Post and has teamed up with a company
called microCreditCard to effect online payment.

10. Become an Internet service provider. Sacbee.com asks:
"Has your Internet service provider been around 143 years?" The
answer, of course, is, duh, no. But that's how long The
Sacramento Bee has been publishing. AccessBee, the paper's
ISP wing, has been around about a year, with around 1,700
subscribers, according to Frattura, the paper's new- media
manager. "It's a profitable little business," he reports.

Other newspapers have gone the ISP route: The News &
Observer, for example, operated an ISP in Raleigh for a short
time in the early 1990s. But the hardware and technical backup
necessary to maintain an ISP were distractingly expensive.
AccessBee avoids the overhead and headaches by being a virtual
ISP.

"That means that all of the tech back-end is handled by another
company," says Frattura. "We're just the brand and marketing
piece of the puzzle."

The land of the fee

"Given how the Internet grew, it was not unreasonable that media
companies put their content up for free," Tribune's Hiller says.
"In hindsight, you wish they had not, because everybody made a
misjudgment in teaching people that all this great content was
free."

So what is Tribune doing with its online media? "We're actively
considering options there," Hiller says. "We don't want to be
part of some herd mentality, where everyone goes for the paid-
content model. We're going to take a steely-eyed look at what
works best for consumers and advertisers, which means we will
probably segment what we do. Whether it's newspaper content or
premium content created specially for our customers. ... We'll
spend the next several months looking at it thoughtfully but
aggressively ... and we'll make a decision that can be
implemented sometime next year."



Wayne Robins (wrobins@editorandpublisher.com)
is an associate editor covering new media for E&P.



Copyright 2001, Editor & Publisher.