Nieman Journalism Lab |
| From Salinas to Burlington: Can an army of paywalls big and small buoy Gannett? Posted: 28 Feb 2012 10:12 AM PST
Gannett is mounting the biggest campaign yet to make readers pay for journalism online. And the newspaper company’s size means its success or failure could ripple throughout the marketplace. By the end of the year Gannett plans to launch digital subscriptions for almost all of its newspapers, a kind of unified paywall that would operate on the web, mobile and tablets and cover 80 of the company’s news sites, with the exception of national flagship USA Today. For newspapers it may signal a turning point, since readers are now looking around the marketplace and finding fewer free papers. That doesn’t mean a change in the amount of free news (aggregation and sharing remain rampant), but it could have an effect on people’s perception, or even willingness, to pay for news. It’s like looking around for cheap gas in your neighborhood: If all the stations list unleaded at $3.85, you’re more likely to believe $3.85 is the going rate for fuel. Until now there has been no paywall rollout of this scale for U.S. newspapers, with most digital subscription plans emerging piecemeal at places like The New York Times, The Baltimore Sun, and The Boston Globe. The Gannett plan reaches readers across 30 states (and Guam!). In other words, the number of paywalls in the United States will jump dramatically, as well as the number of people exposed to them.
Like all paywalls, the success of Gannett’s plan largely hinges on people’s willingness to pay for news online. (That, and how easy it is to pay. More on that in a bit.) The company is betting readers will pony up, projecting at least $100 million from the new subscription program by next year. The paywall should be easily scalable, since Gannett likes to take advantage of consolidating resources within the newspaper group. The paywall mechanics and back end will be the same for all 80 papers, but details about pricing and metered access get decided on the local level. Gannett’s papers run the gamut of small to big, and no two communities are alike when accounting for factors like Internet use and penetration of mobile devices. That’s likely why the company began testing digital subscriptions at select papers in St. Cloud, Minn., Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and Lafayette, Ind., among others. If Gannett has any data about its paywall experiments, it’s keeping it quiet. (The company has, however, been preparing employees to answer questions about the change.) Since the paywall test sites were announced in 2010, no numbers have been released on subscribers or circulation revenues. So what have they learned? Here’s what a Gannett spokesperson told me via email:
Gannett is pushing a total digital transformation, not just a paid content strategy. There will be dozens of tablet and phone apps, which, aside from color schemes and branding, will likely look and work similar across the 80 properties. Again, Gannett’s size is a boon for small and mid-sized papers, as the company can bring them to market faster than the individual papers could have alone. As tablet usage continues to grow, apps or other digital access can incentivize digital subscriptions. There is some evidence that paywalls for small and mid-sized newspapers can succeed, or at least shore up circulation and not be a drag on revenues. At the same time, in some cities a paywall has boosted circulation of the Sunday paper in particular (the “Frank Rich Discount”). Newspapers in Memphis and Minneapolis have seen bumps in the Sunday circulation, but for others that increase has yet to fully materialize. For each community it comes down to how a digital subscription plan is executed, said Ken Doctor, a media analyst and the Lab’s resident expert in Newsonomics. Specifically, he said, it’s a question of how to charge readers, existing versus new, or whether to offer a print discount versus an additional charge for web access.
For other publishers the decision is simple: Increase subscription prices across the board and promote the value of bundled access to mobile, tablet and desktop. Taking all of that into consideration, and Gannett’s $100 million calculation, doesn’t seem impossible. “What Gannett is saying is, ‘We think we can bump revenues by 10 percent from essentially being flat’,” Doctor said. Hitting that target is easy when you factor in the conversion of existing print subscribers to digital subscribers. The challenge for most local and regional papers with paywalls is bringing in new readers, who are getting their news elsewhere. And most people signing up for digital subscriptions are older readers, he said. “I haven’t heard of any regional paper that produces substantial digital only customer numbers and revenue numbers,” Doctor said. These are problems that point to whether paywalls can have long term success for locally focused journalism. Since each site has the ability to determine the pricing for its subscription plan, there will undoubtedly be tension between what individual markets will bare and what the mothership needs to improve its bottom line. For Gannett, one paper’s success with digital subscriptions can be another paper’s failure. The fate of Gannett’s plan rests in whether the Sioux Falls Argus Leaders of the world offset the likes of The Indianapolis Star or Cincinnati Enquirer. Image by Darwin Bell used under a Creative Commons license |
| Miller-McCune embraces its West Coast roots and goes mainstream, relaunching as Pacific Standard Posted: 28 Feb 2012 08:00 AM PST
Miller-McCune enjoys a rare place in American journalism. The bimonthly magazine prints long, research-focused pieces about science and policy. Because it’s so well-funded, it has been able to focus on its journalism for the last four years without bringing in much revenue. But even a news outlet with unlimited room to experiment needs to find its footing — and a sustainable path — sometime. So Miller-McCune is trying to appeal to an audience beyond its wonky base and compete with the likes of The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The Economist. Over the last year the magazine has begun charging for subscriptions and has made two high-profile hires. The magazine is revamping its ad strategy and, in a nod to its Santa Barbara, Calif., roots, relaunching in April under a new name, Pacific Standard. P. Steven Ainsley — the former Boston Globe publisher who negotiated the paper’s very future in 2009 — is the magazine’s new president and publisher. This is his second stint in Santa Barbara; he published the News-Press in the ’90s, until the New York Times Co. sold it in 2000. “Many of the magazines that tackle the weightier issues of the day are embedded in the East Coast of the United States,” said Ainsley, who is from New York. “If you look at all the major societal shifts over the last hundred years in this country, they really are born out of the West Coast of the United States and move east. That ranges from the environmental movement to the small-government movement to urban planning,” he told me.
And, he said, “the next century, or at least the next several decades for the world, is going to be very focused on the Pacific Rim. I guess that was the firing call for us.” The stories will not be solely about the West but from the West, wrote editor Maria Streshinsky in announcing the name last week. “It’s an ideas magazine…looking at people who are on the ground level of problems,” Streshinsky told me. She hopes for 20 to 30 percent of the content in each magazine to be written by people doing research and solving problems. “There’s so many academic journals out there, and inside those journals is some pretty interesting information that just doesn’t get transmitted out to the popular conversation,” she said.
The March-April cover story examines the hypothesis that some exposure to radiation may actually be good for some people. Stories in the January-February issue cover medical marijuana in California, the effects of a bad economy on marriage, and the challenges of designing a humanlike robot. Miller-McCune serves the vision of its namesake, Sara Miller McCune, who reportedly committed about $2.2 million for five years to launch the magazine in 2007. Back in 1965, with her husband George McCune, 24-year-old Sara Miller McCune sold her air conditioner and used the money to create SAGE Publications, which would become one of the largest academic publishers in the world. Its little green books were distributed widely at low cost and became best-sellers. Today SAGE publishes more than 800 titles per year. Sara Miller McCune, 71, remains its chairwoman. She founded the nonprofit Miller-McCune Center for Research, Media and Public Policy to finance the magazine, which is for-profit. The magazine’s total average circulation is about 100,000, of which 85 to 90 percent is paid, Ainsley said. The magazine was distributed free until a year ago, when it absorbed subscribers to the defunct U.S. News & World Report and began charging $14.95 a year. Pacific Standard’s target reader is highly educated and earns more than $100,000 a year, Ainsley said. Until now, the magazine had sold advertising primarily to academic and nonprofit organizations, which he admits “never really panned out.” Now a full-time ad salesperson will go after “thought-leader advertising,” that is, ads for international travel, auto, and finance targeting CEOs, college presidents, and people in government. The magazine has a business plan to be self-sustainable “several years out,” Ainsley said, but will rely on funding from the McCune Center “for the foreseeable future.” Maria Streshinsky, the editor, was hired away from The Atlantic, where she was managing editor for four years. She is originally from Berkeley, and Miller-McCune wanted a West Coaster to design what would become Pacific Standard. “One of the things that’s been lovely for me as I’ve come home to California is remembering — after being in Washington for six years, which is a fanatically interesting place with people doing great, great work — but I feel that there’s an openness and a hopefulness in the West,” she said. Later, having struggled to describe what it is about the West, Streshinsky emailed me this excerpt from Robert Warren Penn’s All the King’s Men:
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