Slashdot Mirror
How Should News Magazines Make the Jump Online?
uctpjac asks: "A friend of mine, a deputy editor of a 1/2 million plus circulation serious news magazine, is responsible for determining what they should be doing online. They already do the usual - selected free articles, subscriber only articles, archive search, some online-only material that is regularly updated. She asked me to think about what more they should do. My first simple suggestion would be to improve their RSS feeds (longer, better article summaries): I imagine the newsreader is the application through which most of us will be reading bitty things like weblogs and news stories, and competing for attention there needs a nice juicy inducement to click-through. I actually think that a traditional news magazine like this should also be using its reader-community more extensively. Again, Slashdot is my model for this: the readers, as long as their comments are well organized, are often at least as interesting as the writers. Are there any examples of old-fashioned papers/magazines making good reader fora? What else will the magazine be doing online? What should it be doing in 3 years, when we all have our low power, high quality, ePaper editions?"
So what happens with the other 85% of comments?
Goo goo g'joob.
I think they need to think carefully about the ratio between free and paid content. Not knowing what publication this is, it's hard to be specific, but I believe that only the truly authoritative sites can get away with putting most of their content behind a subscription wall. Let's face it, with so much stuff available for free today on the Internet from reputable sources, you have to provide something unique, some extra value-add that makes it worthwhile to subscribe to your content.
The local newspaper in our area, The Record, went to a pure-subscriber model a couple of years ago. You can't get anything for free on their website except for some very basic stuff (weather, community events) and classified ads. Contrast that to The Globe and Mail, which offers much of its daily content for free. Guess which one I look to for online information?
What's worrisome for the subscription-only plays is that it's a serious barrier to entry to attracting a younger readership. Young people don't seem to read offline newspapers much any more. Placing your content behind a firewall means that can't read you online. Which will probably bite you in the long term.
EricThe power of authentic stories
Useful, printable sections and chapters were available free and shipped with every copy of samba.
The result? The printed book leaped off the shelves.
You see, it's a total pain to read a laptop in the bathtub, and if you print a book ar magazine yourself on normal (thick!) paper, it is too big and clumsy to carry.
I don't expect one-page newsletters to survive web publishing. I do expect newspapers, magazines and books to continue to exist until I can get a 300 page ebook 1 inch thick. Which means each page needs to be less than 0.003" thick.
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
My production manager and I were just talking about this today.
What you really need to do is find a way to prove to advertisers that going online will give them the same or more exposure to readers than print ads do. In the print world, nobody really knows how much of an effect an ad has on readers...advertisers just take it on faith that it works. But for some reason, when you try to convince them to buy an online ad, they say "But how will we know if it will reach the readers?" (even though you can give them scads of statistic to show how many readers are seeing the ad).
If you get all your advertisers to "drink the Koolaid" of online ads, you won't have to worry about having a subscription model or restricted content. For some reason, traditional advertisers (not porn) are the slowest to come around to the online distribution model.
Transistors and Beer!!