Is it really worth sending one or two reporters hundreds of miles away for usually two days and one night — on the paper’s dime, mind you — just to write a recap for a game that is over and done with in usually two and a half hours?

I thought the same thing. And although my situation was aided by a decision from the University of Pittsburgh to limit vehicle rentals to only those at least 25 years old, I experimented with a new form of sports coverage this year at the Pitt News.

Recently, for two of the last three Pitt men’s basketball away games (at Seton Hall and at South Florida), I contacted the sports editors at the respective student newspapers. I explained the situation, how it was feasible or cost-effective — not to mention hard to find somebody willing to sacrifice a weekend for one game — for us to send writes to the game. I let them know that we were going to cover the game from Pittsburgh, keeping in mind that we’ll see nothing different on television than if in person at the game, and would appreciate it if they could do us just one favor: get us post-game quotes.

You see, that’s the one problem when you don’t go to an away game, or any game for that matter. You don’t get the press conference experience. You don’t get quotes.

But that wasn’t a problem because the guys at the Setonian and the Oracle were able to forward me quotes from after the game. There was a longer delay than if I had been there in person, but spending an extra hour at the office beats out spending an extra hundred dollars (if not more) to send people to the game. As a side note, photographers from each of the newspapers were also generous enough to forward our photo desk with quite a few photos to choose from for our web and print editions.

For reference, you can check out my recaps, done from Pittsburgh (hence, no dateline) for each of my games here: Seton Hall and South Florida. See? Didn’t miss all that much.

To me, it was a smart decision and cost-effective. No need to throw away money when you don’t need to.

Next Thursday, Pitt heads to Marquette for an evening game against the Golden Eagles. I plan to do the same thing that I did for the Seton Hall and South Florida games with this one.

• Personalized news and why the iPad is no savior (Steve Outing)
• A paywall nobody will notice – because it comes bundled with your satellite TV (Peter Preston, The Guardian)
• The NYT’s Metering Plan Doesn’t Go Far Enough—Here’s The Rest Of The Solution (Ben Elowitz, paidcontent.org)
• Google News to Publishers: Let’s Make Love Not War (Mark Glaser, PBS/MediaShift)
• 3 Ways journalism classes are making education more interactive (10,000 words)
• The Rise of Tablets, and Why You Should Care (Christina Warren, Mashable)

(Twitter blog)
Foursquare, Metro Partnership Shows How Media Can Benefit from Geolocation Apps (Leah Betancourt, Poynter)

(Jennifer Van Grove, Mashable)
]]> http://jayhuerbin.com/2010/01/31/sunday-reads-7/feed/ 0 40.440625 -79.995886 40.440625 -79.995886 jayhuerbin http://jayhuerbin.com/2010/01/25/the-theory-behind-a-paywall-for-a-small-market-local-newspaper/ http://jayhuerbin.com/2010/01/25/the-theory-behind-a-paywall-for-a-small-market-local-newspaper/#comments Mon, 25 Jan 2010 18:29:00 +0000 Jay Huerbin http://jayhuerbin.com/?p=210 ]]> Early in my internship with Serra Media, I’ve  had the opportunity to work with journalists and managers in the new media field. It’s been enjoyable learning about different strategies and reasons behind newspaper’s decisions. This post was written for Serra Media’s blog and focuses on one of the newspaper’s that run a hyperlocal Newsgarden site, the Walla Walla Union-Bulletin.

A little more than a year ago, the main newspaper for the Walla Walla Valley in Washington state, the Union-Bulletin, considered a major change in its website design. A controversial part of that redesign involved creating a paywall — giving full access to stories only if you were a paying subscriber.

But for a small-market newspaper, the decision might be the right one.

“We were looking for a way to increase online revenue and at the same time decrease the drop in circulation,” said Carlos Virgen, the Union-Bulletin’s online services manager. “Our attempts at increasing online revenue solely through advertising have been very slow. And as a small operation, we felt we’d be in a position to switch strategies if we discovered that the payment system wasn’t working.”

The Union-Bulletin, which publishes six days a week and has a circulation around 16,000, doesn’t look like it will change its online revenue strategy any time soon. Virgen said that the paper was in discussions with publishers at Arkansas Democrat Gazette, Lewiston Tribune and the Post Register about implementing a payment plan.

The site’s redesign coincided with implementing a paywall.

“As far as I know, we did not hear any concerns from local business regarding our change in strategy,” Virgen said about business relationships with the paper. “In fact, due to our payment and registration system, we now have some updated demographic information that we can share with advertisers. And the new site layout adds considerable value to some of our ads.”

That’s good news for businesses, but finding an audience that is willing to pay — even at roughly half the price of a print subscription — for online content. Still, the Union-Bulletin hasn’t seen much backfire from the paywall.

“It has affected our traffic less than I expected,” Virgen said. “Compared to the same time last year, we have seen some drop overall, but I think our traffic last year was a bit inflated because of some extreme winter weather that the area experienced.”

Virgen also noted recent success in that the Union-Bulletin has matched year’s traffic over the last few days, something “that bodes well for us.”

And after roughly a year, Virgen, who’s been with the Union-Bulletin since September 2006, said that he “would cautiously say it has been a success.”

“We had an idea on what to expect for online-only and overall registered users based on data from some of the newspapers we consulted with,” he said. “And the negative feedback from the community has been minimal.”

Part of the positive feedback from Union-Bulletin readers comes as a result of the coverage that no other publication is doing in the Valley. Virgen said that the “big newspaper,” the Tri-City Herald, occasionally reports on the Walla Walla community, but the Union-Bulletin
provides daily and more in-depth coverage.

“We definitely feel that there is no one reporting on the Walla Walla Valley as well or as comprehensively as we are,” Virgen said. “Whereas the Tri-City Herald often files stories based on press releases or on U-B stories, we actually have reporters out in the community, which I think makes a big difference in the minds of our readers. So, we felt that the community greatly values our journalism and would find the nominal fee acceptable.”

But with the increasing presence of citizen journalism and new media strategies such as blogs, Twitter and Facebook, the Union-Bulletin is monitoring and working to improve its online reporting. It recently launched Serra Media’s Newsgarden platform as another weapon in the fight for audience.

“I am aware that there is more coverage of the community outside of what we do,” Virgen said. “More so than when I first started, so it is definitely something I keep my on.”

The Union-Bulletin still offers free content on their website like blogs, video and special features. For more information on the newspaper’s relaunch, visit the Union-Bulletin’s website.

And, now, Conde Nast, the company that owns GQ, released numbers on the first couple months of the experiment. For the December issue, the first month of the app, GQ sold 6,614 copies and roughly 12,000 copies of the January issue. After Apple’s 30 percent fee for selling an app, that comes out to be about $39,000 for the first two issues.

Yeah, not a lot, especially when GQ has more than 227,000 newsstand and 685,000 paid subscriptions.

Still, Conde Nast and other agencies see these numbers as an encouraging sell to the mobile reader. And with Apple’s tablet set to launch, well, any day now, I wouldn’t be surprised to see GQ’s numbers jump even more in February and for more magazine publications to start making the switch.

With recent reports surfacing that the New York Times would experiment with an online paywall, the Times announced today that it will start to charge readers for online content. This pretty much sums up the news:

Starting in early 2011, visitors to NYTimes.com will get a certain number of articles free every month before being asked to pay a flat fee for unlimited access. Subscribers to the newspaper’s print edition will receive full access to the site.

Times executives said that while a pay plan will be implemented, they haven’t determined the exact cost or how many free articles will be available per month, saying that the number could change depending on reader demand and the economy. Executives also said that this decision is not to combat the current economic struggle with businesses and ads, but to develop a new long-term revenue source.

The New York Times experimented with an online paywall earlier, with TimesSelect in 2005, which gave paying subscribers access to different articles, stories and opinions online. But in September 2007, the NYT decided to end TimesSelect because those pieces began circulating on blogs and other third-party sites.

The Times will join the Wall Street Journal as two of the most powerful national magazines to implement some sort of paywall. The WSJ charges all readers for unlimited access to their site.

The news and upcoming announcements, as well as the new paywall, will undoubtedly be watched by many publishers, journalists and new media specialists. In the past year — even the past six months — newspapers and other publications have struggled with ad revenue online. I’ve said this before, but it’s going to take something drastic to happen before the problem would even get closed to being solved.

And, now, I think we’re getting there. The New York Times is again going to charge for online content. That’s something that could have a ripple effect throughout online newspapers. And the Times’ new metered paywall is just what they need to do. As the article says, “[m]ost readers who go to the Times site, as with other news sites, are incidental visitors, arriving no more than once in a while through searches and links, and many of them would be unaffected by the new system.”

As both a journalism student and the sports editor at my university’s student newspaper, I take the future of journalism very seriously. After all, my life after graduation depends on it.

This is why I found a column about the future of newspapers, specifically the sports section, so interesting. In a Poynter column, Jason Fry, a freelance reporter and journalism consultant in New York, suggested that like newspapers, traveling to games and game recaps are a dying breed in the sports section.

And he’s right. In a world driven by user content, what the user — or reader — wants, the user gets. It’s not always necessary for a game recap to show up in the paper the morning or day after a game. Readers can get that information instantly from a box score or, perhaps more importantly, from watching highlights and press conferences online immediately after the game.

So why waste money on sending a reporter to a game? That’s a good question and I found myself in a similar situation last year. In January, myself, another writer and a photographer traveled roughly five hours from Pittsburgh to Louisville to watch the top-ranked Pittsburgh Panthers take on the No. 20 Louisville Cardinals in a Big East basketball matchup. We rented a car, drove out that Saturday for the game, stayed in a hotel that night and drove back the next day — all, including food, on my newspaper’s dime.

I was hoping that my game recap would be online that night, but it never made it there. Instead it ran in our paper on Monday — a two days after the game. (The paper is published in print Monday through Friday during the school year). Anybody who was a fan already knew the score (Pitt was upset by the way) and what it meant in terms of standings and rankings later in the season.

My story? It meant nothing. Nobody cared. It was old news. And like print newspapers before, news needs to be instant. Otherwise, somebody will beat you to it — and so many people did in my case. Worst of all, my paper wasted money on sending three people to a game that was old news by the time anybody saw it.

But this was actually a turning point at my school’s newspaper. Over the next month, the sports section started using Twitter, live blogs, daily blogs and instant online coverage — even if there wasn’t a paper running the next day — to get sports news out there as soon as possible. We’ve continued to expand and learn like other newspapers around us, making smarter decisions as we go along.

Essentially, we’ve realized that we don’t just make a print newspaper that just happens to have a website. We are a news organization and need to use every possible outlet to get our news to our readers, our users.

We’re learning, as should every other journalist, because we’re all students of the new media world. Those who feel they are content with the way things are will soon be gone. It’s those who have the ambition and desire to learn the changes that will survive. And maybe, then, they can save or more efficiently spend money.

This semester, I’ll be working with a company called Serra Media. It’s based in the Northwest, but I am able to work from Pittsburgh. For 12-15 hours a week, I’ll be community managing different hyperlocal news sites, or Newsgardens, like My Renton or The Olympian. I’ll also write two blog posts per week on the future of journalism, essentially the whole reason why I made this blog in the first place. I’ll cross-post by blog entries.

I’m excited that I found an internship that really interests me and hope that it can lead to some good connections and relationships for later on in life.