How Not to Save the Newspaper Industry

Dan Gillmor has it right.  The solution for the newspaper industry’s woes isn’t to “embargo their news content from the free Internet for a brief period – say 24 hours.” That suggestion comes from Peter Scheer of the California First Amendment Coalition, btw.

Even if the newspaper industry could band together and pull this off, what would it lead to?  It probably results in a boatload of online traffic shifting from the newspaper sites to other news-oriented sites.  If citizen journalism needs a spark or other event to propel it to the next level of success, this might just be it!

The typical consumer is getting more and more comfortable getting their news online.  If you take away one online news resource, they’ll just move on to the next one.  Most people are probably getting their online news via Google anyway and Google is pretty effective at replacing one set of search results with a relevant set from another source.

Looking at it another way, this proposed “content embargo” certainly wouldn’t result in increased newspaper subscriptions.  In fact, I’d cancel mine if my local paper ever adopted a policy like this.

The solution should not involve offering fewer freely-accessible services to the browsing public; it should involve more of these services as well as other premium ones available only to subscribers.  Let’s hope the newspaper industry doesn’t fall into Mr. Scheer’s trap.

Comments

[Cecil Vortex]

I agree -- the embargo is a crazy idea. Always-out-of-date newspaper content on the web wouldn't be worth the click that summons it.
-Cecil