Peter Kafka

The Wall Street Journal’s Peter Kafka reports that the Hearst news organization, which is about to sell its digital magazines via Amazon’s new tablet, is now selling more than 300,000 paid digital downloads per month.

So what does that mean? Because digital numbers aren’t uniformly reported yet, it’s a little hard to figure how that compares to the rest of the industry. Read more on this from the WSJ’s All Things Digital blog here.

Also, you can follow Peter Kafka on Facebook here.

But one thing that is clear is that the future of digital journalism isn’t necessarily only going to mean news for free. People are willing to pay for their news – particularly those who understand that a quality news product takes labor to produce, even in digital form.

Essentially, the paywall model can work. Whether it can become a burgeoning revenue stream that can subsidize a print business model is another matter.

But what Hearst likely is discovering is that by offering digital subscriptions, they can open up the markets outside their papers’ geographic circulation areas. Can’t afford to pay print delivery drivers to sit on the Tappan Zee Bridge all day? Don’t bother. Market your online product over the river and bank on slow growth.

This is a clear sign for newspaper publishers who haven’t accepted the unpleasant reality that it might someday be too expensive to print news on paper and then drive it out to tens of thousands of doorsteps every day. There’s a light at the end of the tunnel…

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Below is video of a Q&A conducted with Oz Griebel. Lt. Gov. Michael Fedele had confirmed for Thursday’s debate but was unable to attend.

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Photographicus Rex, circa 1978

The JI’s website has come a long way since we began charging for full access to our website. It wasn’t an easy choice. We have since had more than a year to develop and digest data resulting from that decision.

Since the switch, there has been a lot of good news. While we did lose some of our daily pageviews and visitors, we have recovered all of the latter and about half of the former.  That’s right – we’re back to pre-paywall levels in terms of the number of people who visit the site each day, and we’re almost halfway back to pre-paywall levels in terms of the number of pages those people see.

Further, we learned some interesting things that we never could have learned had we not built the wall. First, a lot of people who like the JI don’t live in JI-land, which includes 17 towns in north-central Connecticut. In fact, many of our new online subscribers and occasional, 24-hour micro-payment readers live elsewhere in Connecticut or out-of-state. Essentially, we found a new revenue stream. That’s rare in the newspaper industry, particularly in a down economic cycle.

We occasionally get telephone calls from other newspapers exploring similar decisions and we’re generally happy to share our experience.

The paywall has worked for us so far, but circumstances are different for every news organization. Some papers have no competition, or they cover smaller circulation areas, or they have yet to lose any paid circulation to their free online news product. It doesn’t seem like there’s a blanket rule in the industry that suggests every paper needs a paywall. Occasionally, though, the writing is on the wall.

We watched with some amusement the coverage of Newsday’s decision to add the paywall a few months after we’d done so. Newsday’s effort was panned after three months for selling only 35 subscriptions. But what was missing from that headline was a key bit of analysis that could be found further down in the story:

“Anyone who has a newspaper subscription is allowed free access; anyone who has Optimum Cable, which is owned by the Dolans and Cablevision, also gets it free. Newsday representatives claim that 75 percent of Long Island either has a subscription or Optimum Cable.”

So access to Newsday’s website wasn’t really being denied to many people at all. The subscription to the paper essentially became an added value to Optimum Cable subscribers who likely pay a monthly fee for service that’s roughly comparable to a full-year’s subscription to Newsday. They’re paying through the nose for cable, so much so that it’s likely a great added selling point for OptimumCable’s overall cable package.

Here at the JI we don’t have a corporate parent that also owns a cable TV company, but Newsday’s is a natural partnership. In decades past – during the heyday of newspapers – print was THE source of information about the world, and people paid for access. That monopoly was eroded by radio and later television. Then it was the explosion of cable television. After that came the Internet and even satellite radio (for which people pay to access). The marketplace is crowded and print is, unfortunately, the slowest and among the most expensive means to deliver information.

Print remains the main source of detailed reporting for now. It’s still the only major source of local news, although a host of new online competitors have begun to enter the marketplace. However, by all accounts, those online-only organizations are still struggling to monetize their products.

But for consumers, that willingness to pay for information through an annual newspaper subscription was switched over to a cable television service fee. But a full year of cable TV may cost more than 10-times as much as an annual newspaper subscription. Consumers are much more willing to pay for video news and entertainment than they are for print news and entertainment. They are willing to pay to watch, rather than read. Folks tend to suggest that “TV news is free,” but in truth many local TV news stories are first developed by local newspapers and then backtracked or otherwise duplicated by TV and radio. Radio personalities continually use content that originated in a daily newspaper, often without a hint of attribution.

Because of this constant theft on the air, I’ve always thought that newspapers needed the protection of a legal organization similar to ASCAP – the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. ASCAP is often called the “music mafia” because the group’s lawyers tend to make a living by hounding local restaurants for annual fees if they offer live music in their bar or dining room. We need ASCAP to be the “news mafia” to protect our original reporting from the kind of casual theft you hear on the air in your car every morning on your way to work.

In any case, we have modified the JI’s website on the fly and will continue to do so, including possible changes to the paywall. One change we’ve already made has been to offer three paragraphs of every story for free, rather than instantly prompting readers with the subscriber login screen. People can now sample all of our stories and see more of our advertisers’ messages. It’s a middle ground that we’re testing.

Meanwhile, while the future is uncertain for a lot of industries, ours feels like it’s becoming more certain, but in the wrong direction. Not too long ago the publisher of the New York Times suggested – casually and in the same conversation about the paper’s plans to adopt a “metered paywall” – that the paper will eventually stop producing a printed product. That wouldn’t be a terribly remarkable thing for a publisher to say, except that it was the publisher of the New York Times.

What’s coming out in this trial is certain to dominate any discussion about the death penalty in our state.

While I personally oppose the death penalty in principal — I don’t think the state should be in the business of killing people for any reason — based on the testimony so far it’s hard to imagine how the crimes of Hayes and Komisarjevsky wouldn’t meet the law’s requirements for execution. This was a heinous crime, and I think it’s going to silence for a while any discussion of repealing the death penalty.

Malloy joined Mike, Dave, and Brian at MDB Studios in Avon on Monday for a special edition of Sunday Morning Coffee. Listen to the hour-long interview and check back Sunday as the guys deconstruct their interview. Check out photos from the studio here.