Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Media / News Bites The Tribune's Next Big Idea
Posted by Michael Miner on 09.01.10 at 10:16 AM
If it works it'll be wonderful — a weekly special edition stuffed with premium content, tentatively called Five Star. From what I hear — not that anyone at the Tribune is doing much talking — the idea is to publish on Sunday and offer it to Tribune subscribers for $5, which is $1 less than the cost of the Sunday New York Times.
Five Star is being designed to be the complete antithesis of Red Eye — and the contrast with today's Tribune is also regrettably considerable. The focus will be on local news and cultural affairs, but the reporting and commentary will be long and thoughtful. If it works, everyone else in town might have to raise their game.
But will it work? There are reasons for skepticism — though I'm sure they occurred to Five Star's creators in the Tower long before they occurred to me as I paged through a dummy. Five Star's the subject of my column this week, and you can read it here.
Comments (3)
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And be sure to read gdretzka's comment. Of course, the key question is, what will Michael Eisner think?
Eisner is on record as saying the future of newspapers is online behind some kind of pay wall, not in lavish print form. He should read the recent UK study that found that readers of pay-walled online products are worth only 25 percent as much to advertisers as readers of the print product. So much for that.
But when did evidence and reason ever the dent the mind of a narcissist CEO seized by a crackpot idea? Nonetheless, I commend those at the Tribune who produced this trial run. Clearly, Zell's shock jock scything of the thinkers and believers at the Trib left a few weeds in place. The task now, though, is to fill those brainy pages (if they ever see the light of dawn on suburban doorsteps) with copy worth reading.
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By the way, speaking of print, the following occurs to me: During this whole supposed meltdown of the newspaper industry. one thing has held true. By and large (and certainly with some exceptions) actual print journalists have done their jobs. That is, regardless of what you think of American journalism, these reporters and editors have gone to work every day and -- despite the worst efforts by their corporate masters -- they have managed to turn out a profitable product. Newspapers, for the most part, still make money.
The profits aren't what they once were. But they're there, and they continue to exceed the profits available online, pay wall or not. In other words, print journalists, including (and maybe especially) those legions laid off, have more than earned their keep in their original medium. They have turned out a valuable, viable product and they have turned a profit, day by day -- even with the loss of classified ads, even with the diminished presence and departure of some display advertising, even in the midst of a frigging depression.
If a few of these still functioning print reporters and editors can, with this Tribune Sunday edition, find a way to keep plugging away, it's all to the good.
"Eisner is on record as saying the future of newspapers is online behind some kind of pay wall, not in lavish print form. He should read the recent UK study that found that readers of pay-walled online products are worth only 25 percent as much to advertisers as readers of the print product."
Did he say that he didn't think that there was a significant future for print newspapers (or "lavish print newspapers" or whatever)? I've only seen him quoted as stating the first part of what you said, that there needs to be a pay-wall online. I haven't seen him say anything about print. It seems to me that, quite obviously, an online pay-wall would increase the demand for that publication's printed product. So if you care so much about preserving and possibly even expanding the printed edition then it seems to me that you should think a pay-wall is a good idea. I'm not sure why you seem to think that generating print readers and instituting a pay-wall would go against each other.
"That is, regardless of what you think of American journalism, these reporters and editors have gone to work every day and -- despite the worst efforts by their corporate masters -- they have managed to turn out a profitable product."
I didn't realize that newspaper executives were attempting to cause their product to become unprofitable. That's a new one. You do make a good point though. That is that despite this severe recession and the simultaneous rapid change it technology that has tremendously hurt this business, it is still generally profitable. I think the people who by far most deserve credit for that are the newspaper executives you criticize. By and large, they have been able to rationalize their cost structure while keeping the product compelling enough so as not to drive away scores of readers. These companies are still way to slow to innovate and experiment with new ways of doing business. But, by and large, they have improved with this in the last few years compared to the first decade or so of the internet. The Tribune Company has generally been the most open to new ideas. Its launch of Chicago Now, its apparent realization of the poor value in running generic AP articles that can be found in dozens of other websites, and its strong commitment to and expansion of coverage of important local stories (at least at the Tribune, though I believe the same is true with the company's papers in other cities) are good examples. Ironically, I think the Tribune Company is probably the best run large media organization right now. But unfortunately, it is probably the one most likely to have a shake-up in top management.
