Council Update, And A Brave New(s) World For The P-T

Each week I sit down to give a small glimpse into the goings on at the Ocean Boulevard Hall of Justice and the nigh-Superfriends that run the show there. 
   
For example, I could tell you that last night the City Council failed to come to agreement on a motion that would have cut back the time at which construction could performed within the city. Despite the idea that residents of the city may be just slightly irritated by the current rules that allow piledrivers or jackhammers to start at 7 a.m. and run until 7 p.m., the Council could not agree to a new resident-friendly time frame of 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., mainly due to the worries by the construction industry that it may hurt their industry. I guess since construction workers are starting on the jobsite at 7 a.m. and not at home like many of us to hear the equipment rattle us from our sleep, it would seem they are the least likely to be impacted by these regulations. Perhaps the City Council could allow construction to start at 5 a.m. if construction workers live nearby—just to be fair.  
  
Now, I could also tell you that the Council adopted a resolution stating that the city would face “severe fiscal hardship” if the state follows through on a plan to essentially take back $2 billion in property taxes from cities statewide—a move that would cost the city $10 million. Odd that a City Council that hems and haws about making the painful cuts necessary to offset a $43 million city deficit can get so irate about the state actually making painful financial decisions.
  
Or I could tell you how the City Council approved just over $2 million in federal stimulus money to finally address the flooding issue on the Westside (as well as a few bucks for the Skate Park on 14th Street). Not a moment too soon, either. The flooding has only been going on for more than a decade.
 
So, all of these things I could report, but instead I am going to riff on a non-City Hall related topic near and dear to my heart–namely the newspaper industry. In the interest of full disclosure, my day job involves working for the Newspaper Guild representing workers at the Press-Telegram. Also, most of the newsroom staff at the P-T are good friends (in addition to many journalists from other news outlets around town).
  
The reason I bring this topic up is because you and I are witnessing a truly epochal event in the newspaper and news gathering industry.
  
It will effect each and every news outlet in town, and to some degree has already impacted most.
  
The news industry, especially the print side, is in what can only be described as a freefall. The industry just posted its worst ad sales quarter since records were first collected in 1950. In the past four years, the newspaper industry has lost 40 percent of its ad revenue, according to the Newspaper Association of America.
  
Newspapers live by ad sales and ad sales just ain’t there. There is serious talk in the industry that the entire ad-supported business model of newspapers, one that has existed for more than 100 years, is simply no longer viable in the age of the Internet.
  
So, now the focus is on how to migrate newspapers to the Internet and make it pay. The problem is, transferring the same business model over to the Internet doesn’t really work because ads on the Internet don’t pay squat compared to print ads. You see, it’s all about eyeballs, so they say in the biz, and the most common measurement is in thousands of viewers. A print ad in the newspaper could run an advertiser anywhere from $25 to $50 per thousand viewers. By comparison, a similar ad on the Internet can generate as little as $0.40 in revenue per thousand viewers. The result is that websites just don’t make the money on advertising that most people think they do, unless you have the traffic of a Google and then the $0.40 adds up. But local sites simply don’t have this luxury.
  
The only option is to charge for the online content, something the news industry could have done a decade ago, but chose not to thinking they would make the money back on ads that were going for $5 to $10 per thousand views back then.
  
Well, here is the bad news—I predict by this time next year, the majority of major newspaper sites will be charging fees to access their websites. Local papers will follow soon after. In fact, as lbpost.com reported yesterday, it may be sooner than that for the MediaNews Group-owned Long Beach Press-Telegram.  
  
MediaNews overlord Dean Singleton has made no bones about what he wants to do with the online component of the P-T—which he and his company own along with about 54 other papers.
  
Singleton, the slash-and-burn robber baron who happens to be the Denver-based MediaNews Group CEO as well as the current president of the Associated Press, announced on May 12 that in the near future his papers, including the P-T, “will begin to move away from putting all of our newspaper content online for free.”
  
Breaking with his normally interview-unfriendly character, Singleton has since given a handful of interviews to different outlets. In each he has preached the same exact message to his papers’ online readers, “if you want access to all online content, you are going to have to register, and/or pay.”
  
One thing that is clear from Singleton’s comments over the past month or so is that MediaNews doesn’t exactly know what the final process will be for its online readers. As recently as last week, Singleton said that the details of the online transformation of his papers’ online sites have not been fully figured out.
  
Singleton has made clear, however, that less local news will be available on the website to non-paying viewers and most of this local newsroom-generated content will be featured exclusively in the printed versions of the paper.
  
So what will be available on the MediaNews websites like the P-T? According to Singleton, more user-generated content (translate as content generated by the reader) and content from sources such as the Associated Press.
  
You see, Singleton doesn’t really believe in the viability of online news sites. He told the Denver-based news site Westword on May 18 that what MediaNews needs to do “is to continue having a very vibrant free site that’s full of user-generated copy and information about where to eat and shows that are available and other things. But we need it not to include all of our locally produced news. And that’s kind of where we’re trying to go.”
  
And again on May 31, Singleton told the Neiman Lab, “We will be moving away from giving away most of our content online. We will be redoing our online to appeal certainly to a younger audience than the print does, but we’ll have less and less newspaper-generated content and more and more information listings and user-generated content.”
  
So, bottom line: The Press-Telegram, most likely by the end of the year according to Singleton, will begin charging for some online content and will begin moving most local news exclusively to the print version of the paper.
  
It should be noted that however MediaNews ultimately decides to make the reader pay for the online site, either through subscription, by the article, or maybe by the word, the whole issue is rapidly becoming irrelevant.
  
The days of free news on the Internet are slowly coming to an end. Just like free music on the Internet died with file-sharing sites like Napster and was reborn as a pay model with outlets like iTunes, the news industry is finally realizing–albeit a decade late–that it cost money to generate the news and giving it away for free is simply not viable. All that remains is to convince the public.
  
But there is good news in this, too. If the news sites can make this work, and they will eventually, it will mean some financial stability for the papers. This could lead to reinvestment in the decimated ranks of local paper newsrooms. Not much, but certainly better than the bare bones operations most are running now.
  
In addition, this transformation will also benefit sites like LBPOST in one of two ways. If a site like LBPOST decides to stay free, it can charge more for advertising because it will have more eyes on its pages. Or a site like LBPOST could decide to adopt the pay model also, without the fear of losing its core audience because everyone else is charging as well. [Ed. note: The lbpost.com does not plan on charging for content in the forseeable future.]
  
Let hope that in all these scenarios, the additional revenues will translate into additional feet on the ground and hands on keyboards. After all, content doesn’t write itself. And the more people in the newsrooms, the more stories we can all find on things like construction times, state grabs for city money, and the elimination of flooding problems on the Westside.