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Print Subscribers Cry Foul Over WP's Online-Only Story
Hugh Pickens writes "The decision by the Washington Post to publish an article exclusively online has angered many readers who still pay for the print edition of the newspaper and highlighted the thorny issues newspaper editors still face in serving both print and online audiences. The 7,000 word story about the slaying in 2006 of Robert Wone, a young lawyer who was found stabbed to death in a luxurious townhouse in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington where a 'polyamorous family' of three men lived, is the sort of long-form reporting that newspaper editors say still justifies print in the digital age and many editors agree that print is still the place to publish deep investigative reporting, in part to give certain readers a reason to keep paying for news. 'If you're doing long form, you should do it in print,' said newspaper consultant Mark Potts. 'This just felt like a nice two-part series that they didn't have the room to put in the paper, so they just threw it on the Web.' Editors at The Post say they considered publishing the article in print, but they concluded it was too long at a time when the paper, like most others, was in dire financial straits and trying to scale back newsprint costs. 'Newspapers are going broke in part because news can be read, free of charge, on the Internet,' wrote one reader in a letter to the editor. 'As a nearly lifelong reader of The Post, I could not read this article in the paper I pay for and subscribe to; instead I came on it accidentally while scrolling online for business reasons.'"
I stare at Excel just about all damn day.
The last thing that I want to do when I get home is stare at a screen for the 40 minute it takes to read an article that is as long as this one. As a matter of fact, I'd probably print that article out if it weren't in the paper that's delivered to my house.
Say what you will about vinyl, but there is a huge difference in the experience of reading on a computer screen that sits a foot in front of you and a paper you can hold in your lap while kicking back on the couch.
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Why would they put long stories on the web, the sanctuary of the short attention span, and not in print, where people pay to spend a lot of time reading it?
The Wall Street Journal has been doing this for a while now. Lots of newspapers put movies on their websites. I admit I was kind of annoyed by it at first too, but after a while you just deal with it, and get your information where you can. There are still benefits of print.
Qxe4
I hold my computer on my lap as a kick back on the couch - they call them laptops.
I know, but there's something about the feel of a physical paper that's so much more pleasant than a bloody screen. I hate not being able to see the whole page in one view without having to scroll. It's like when I worked in a drawing office as a CAD draughtsman. Sure we'd long ago dispensed with the drawing boards and all the design work was done on screen, but when it came to reviewing drawings and looking for potential problems, checking calculations etc. it was time to run a plot and pore over the thing flat out on the desk. There'll always be a role for paper.
See also, from The Atlantic (which I happen to buy in print form) on why The Economist newspaper is doing so well. The Economist uses long form reporting, doesn't charge for online content (except for the archives) and is still growing strongly.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
"Long-form reporting" and "deep investigative reporting" means "reporting the way it used to be done before we just started ripping the stories off newswire. Since now everyone can read the newswire, once in a while we have to send a reporter to actually do some... [gasp]... reporting."
End anonymous moderation and posting on
Quoth TFA:
In one letter that The Post published after its article ran online, a reader wrote: "Newspapers are going broke in part because news can be read, free of charge, on the Internet. As a nearly lifelong reader of The Post, I could not read this article in the paper I pay for and subscribe to; instead I came on it accidentally while scrolling online for business reasons."
A story about three polyamorous men living together and you found it while surfing the net for "business reasons?" Yeah, right!
Drill baby drill - on Mars
what are you going to do?
Easy: If you're short on space and have to choose between something your readers can read for free online anywhere (newswire, syndicated columns, etc), and something they can only get from you (local news, investigative reporting), go with what makes your paper unique and adds value not available elsewhere.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
there's nothing special about bits of paper when it comes to conveying information.
No, but there is something special about the difference between the people who read the bits of paper and those who don't. The people who read the paper want the news in a longer format that takes more time. They want to read the news enough that they pay for it. When you put something on the web, it's usually accompanied by a place to put comments, many of which will cheapen the experience and provide a very shallow or biased viewpoint on the article. It's like saying that there's nothing special about the china cabinet when it comes to storing priceless antiques: you're correct in one sense, but mistaken in another.
Even with a subscription you're not paying for the paper. The nominal cost of the subscription or the news stand price covers approximately the cost of the physical paper (roughly; more or less depending on paper size and price). The reporters, staff, printing press, etc., etc., are all paid for by advertising, which is a much larger cost than $1.00 or so per day.
The only difference with the online version is that no one has managed to get the advertising revenue to match costs yet. And in fact, this is becoming more of a problem with the print version, as the ad revenue falls due to falling circulation.
But the point is, even folks who "pay for the paper" aren't doing so; it's a specious argument.
Terrorist, bomb, al Qaeda, nuclear, yellowcake, kill, assassinate. Carnivore is dead... long live Echelon.
... but last week they fired Daniel Froomkin who was one of the more fearless critics of the power that be. He was pretty merciless to the Bush administration across a range of issues including torture. Then to show he is a class act he was starting to be a pretty merciless critic of the Obama administration too. I think he was having some kind of spat with the Post's resident right wingnut ... Krauthammer but I would be interested if anyone knows the dirt on why exactly he was fired. To fire Froomkin and keep Krauthammer has dramatically diminished my opinion of the Post and I am not reading it at all lately.
Even prior to firing Froomkin my impression is the quality of their editorials, and original news reporting in general, has been in steep decline lately.
@de_machina
The article was actually a series of three articles about the bizarre circumstances surrounding the death of a young man in DC, while he was staying over at the house of three gay friends (who were involved in a three-way relationship) in a wealthy section of DC. The three friends reported being asleep and waking up to find their guest murdered (I'm greatly simplifying.) The police think the three gay men were involved in the murder and have concocted a bizarre (not saying wrong or right -- but it is bizarre) story that the guest was accidently killed in sex game run amok, and that the three .
Honestly, the story wasn't very good. There was no lede. There were no breaks in the case reported for the first time by the paper. The main thing it had going for it was group sex. The strong implication of the article was that the police thought these three guys were guilty because they were into kinky group sex and S&M. Then when it came time to actually prove something, there was all-too-common in DC story of police labs losing evidence and screwing up.
I'm sure the Post editors compared this sensationalist story with the Chandry Levy expose they printed maybe a years ago (which I understand actually led to someone being arrested), and found it lacked oomph. There was no there there as an old boss used to say. Combine that with the obvious homophobia of the police detectives initially assigned to the case, and the whole thing was a muddled morass of conflicting information. Clearly the housemates were not entirely forthcoming and that their stories were not entirely consistent, but there was no clear evidence that they committed murder either.
Film at 11.
Don't you mean "Streaming digital video at 11"?
While there are two sides to this, those "stragglers" seem to be the ones footing the bills for the web presence - short of the ads that they are selling on their site, which are unlikely to be bringing in enough cash to buy a icypole during lunch.
Having said that, I doubt there is anywhere in the paper that says that ALL content online will also be in the printed format.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
Today the MainStreamMedia once more reported that: "Don't worry about unemployment, it's a lagging indicator."
2010: Don't worry about all those dead CEOs, lying dead in the streets after being brutally slain, that's just a lagging indicator of the economy.
Long form is way better online these days. I'm working in this field, and I'd expand on your reasons greatly:
That quote -- 'If you're doing long form, you should do it in print' -- is pure, unadulterated dogma, unmoored from any reality. If you're doing long form, you aren't doing it for the dailies or the alternative weeklies anymore, most likely. Some, if not all, of your professional life will be online or bump up against Internet technologies. If you need a printed product, you have options (get your audience to help; print high quality single page magazine-covers-without-the-magazine with story snippets and your URL...), you can do events, but your primary channel of distribution is very likely going to be the Internet.
People who are whining that a story whose primary audience is probably 99% online didn't make it into a format that is hemhoraging money are out of their damn minds, and probably will soon be out of business, too.
Online citizen journalism from the inner city: The View From The Ground