Shots Across The Bow

A Blogger Visits the MSM Part 2: Jack Lail has the Best Job at the KNS

Jack Lail has it, and nobody else knows it.

It has nothing to do with his staff, four very bright, intelligent, and attractive young women.

It has nothing to do with the fact that he gets to play on a computer all day; everybody at the KNS does that.

It has nothing to do with the fact that his cube is tucked back into the corner of the newsroom farthest from Tom Chester’s office.

It has everything to do with the fact that in a time when newspaper staffs and budgets are shrinking faster than the President’s approval ratings, Jack Lail’s staff is growing. That’s a remarkable achievement and a sign of things to come as the internet continues to play a larger role in how people get their news. Not only is online news here to stay, but there’s no doubt in my mind that it will come to dominate the news industry. Like I said in the last installment, web based news has the capacity to combine the immediacy of television with the in depth reporting of a traditional paper, resulting in the ultimate news delivery system.

If they can figure out two tiny, small, hardly worth mentioning, I didn’t really want to bring this up, but I thought you might like to think about it issues. The first and simpler of the two is “How do we package our content appropriately?” The second, trickier one is “How do we get people to pay for something they’re used to getting for free?”

The packaging issue is easy to solve; you take the shotgun approach. You just start throwing things up against the wall and see what sticks. I was over in the multimedia section of the newsroom when Tom Chester came over to talk to Jack Lail. I don’t know what the conversation was supposed to be about, but it quickly evolved into a discussion between Tom and Erin Chapin over how to utilize audio on the website. The following is a paraphrased version of the discussion:

TC: We need audio on the website and we should put it to Thorogood. Everybody likes George Thorogood.
EC: We need to have a reason for audio, other than “We need audio.” That leads to crap.
TC: This is the multimedia section. Audio is part of multimedia. You make it work. Then it won’t be crap.
Jigsha Desai (from her cubicle): At the Washington youth conference most of those surveyed preferred their news in a text format
TC: We need audio.

On the surface, this looked like a confrontation between the old guard and the new, but it really wasn’t. I talked to both of them afterward, and they were really saying the same thing, only coming from different points of reference.

I talked with Erin for awhile about what I saw as the strengths of internet publishing vs paper. I’m not a huge fan of audio and video, although I’m slowly adding some audio posts (I’m not fond of the word “podcast”, liking it only slightly more than “blogger” which to me sounds like a 70’s video game.) It does have a place, but I’m like Erin; the content has to be served by the format. For example, my Voter’s Guide benefited from audio, because I was able to put more expression into my voice than I can capture with a keyboard. This post, however, would be a snoozer in audio. (And probably still is as text. Sigh.) My thought was that the strength of on-line publishing is the freedom it offers. In a print edition, you are limited in space, and many times have to leave things out of the story. You can’t give an in depth treatment to every story; there simply isn’t enough space. This isn’t a problem online. You aren’t limited by advertising or column inches. You can write a story and include all the relevant details, and any background info the reader may need to place the story in context.

When I said this to Erin, she bowed up a bit, and told me that an online edition of the paper should not be a repository for content that wasn’t deemed good enough for print. She told me that there is a rule that every section front must have an on-line component, which she saw as good in theory, but often resulted in mediocre content being published. I was surprised by her reaction since that wasn’t what I was talking about at all. My guess is that when newspapers first started building an on-line presence, the multimedia desk was almost like a ghetto, an Island of Misfit News Stories. Today, and more importantly tomorrow, nothing could be further from the truth. Even the old guard newspaper editors know that the future is on-line, not print.

When I talked to Tom, he made it clear that his goal was to push content into as many formats as possible, in order to see what worked. When he said “We need audio,” he had already taken into account the fact that all stories wouldn’t work in that format, but that by pushing it, they would discover more quickly which stories would work. He relies on his staff to determine how to take advantage of the varying formats to best present the stories, whether by presenting different parts of the story in different formats, or by framing the story to appeal to different demographic groups.

This story does have a happy ending. Just listen to the Big Dog audio reports on the KNS website. George Thorogood plays loud and clear!

The next problem, getting people to pay for what they’re getting for free is going to be a tougher nut to crack. Currently, Newspapers make 75% of their proceeds from advertising. Circulation, the $0.50 a day you pay for the paper, only accounts for 20% of revenue. The final 5% comes from other business, like business printing and other things. Online revenue accounts for about 5% of total revenue. The goal is to ramp that up to 30%. On-line advertising is still struggling to survive, which means that to meet it’s goal, the KNS is going to have to shift it’s revenue model somewhat, and that means, wait for it, subscriptions.

The model is already in place with GoVols Extra, the pay site half of the Sports pages. Most of the content from the print sports pages is available on-line for free, but some of it is only available if you pay for it. GoVols Extra also includes content not found in the print paper, but in many cases, it is information that the sports fan can find elsewhere for free, if he knows where to look. Right now, the pay site is doing okay, but it’s mainly seeing traffic from folks outside the circulation area of the Sentinel, and that’s what creates the problem for the KNS. How will they be able to convince readers of the on-line paper to start to pay for it? There are two possible answers. First, they could stop printing the paper and force people to go online.

That’s not going to happen.

The second option is to provide original on-line content that people can’t get anywhere else.

And that leads us back to Tom Chester’s determination to push content into different media. The only way for the KNS to meet their goals is to create original online content that people will be willing to subscribe to. And that means that Jack Lail, who is in charge of developing the on-line content, has the best job at the KNS. He gets to make the new stuff that people will want to pay for.

Posted by Rich at November 8, 2006 1:11 AM | TrackBack