The Art of Link Letters

In which, like nearly everyone else, I point to others and say "Good idea!" or "Bad idea!" or "Good idea but I can do you one better!"

WHO ARE THOSE GUYS?: This chart from the Newspaper Association of America on Web readership is hard for me to interpret -- press putthroughs and copies per household I can do -- but what it appears to show to me is:
1. Two levels of readership, the 58-mil audience and the 62-mil audience. More is more and more is good, but why are there these two discrete levels? Why does the number of page views not fluctuate in a line basically reflecting the audience? There may be easy answers and this is an aggregate, but I know magazines can say exactly what cover sold what issue. Is this political, sports, what? In any event, an uptick in the last three months of 2007 (which might reflect politics and might reflect football) allows crowing about a figure that the year does not show.
2. Second, what I really want to know is, in essence, which are single copy, which are home delivery -- of this unique visits per month, how many are people who come every day and spend time with the paper, as opposed to those coming from other sites once in the month for a particular link? Sure, you can sell an ad with anything, but the latter is not going to produce too much revenue.

The main reason I want to know is that we had a presentation last week on search engine optimization and it indicated the same problem that every piece of Web statistics has: The numbers are squishy, they're not really very good, and no one really knows what they mean other than in the most vague sort of manner. Their main uses seem to be 1) "it's in the millions!" and 2) "it's more than it used to be!" This is not to say that newspaper circulation numbers have ever been exact or particularly truthful.

For example, the canard -- "visits averaging 44 minutes a month," often used to say "this means your typical user visits for 1.5 minutes per day." Well, yeah, except we all know it doesn't really mean that. But what does it mean? Some people are spending two hours a day and most people are spending 30 seconds? What is the mean, not the average? Since the Internet is largely a five-day medium, should we figure it based on Monday-Friday use only? What are the figures for daily users? Most important for the advertisers whom newspapers deal with, how many of these users are local? (What is often repeated is that about half are not, but how is that determined? Seems to me an IP address can be anywhere.)

It's not that any of this is wrong. It's just the uncritical adulation thrown at it, which brings to mind Sam Jaffe saying to Michael Rennie in "The Day the Earth Stood Still": "Such power exists?"

WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT?: A couple of posters here (thanks!) and a number of posters elsewhere keep making the point: The subscription fee just pays for the cost of home delivery and the news is otherwise free (ad-subsidized), so, if the method of delivery changes, why should I pay for the news? To which many journalists have unwisely answered, well, surely people would pay for the wonderfulness we produce.

The Watertown Daily Times operates in an isolated market -- almost an hour north of Syracuse and hours away from anywhere else. Watertown, like most of outstate New York, has had hard times, but the Times as still managed to keep (in 2007 Year Book) a daily circulation near 29,000, down from 37,000 10 years ago -- not as hard a decline as a lot of papers, but still in the 2o-to-25-percentish range.

The Daily Times, being a family owned newspaper and thus having neither stock analysts nor corporate overseers, decided to put the Web content behind a wall. Last week it threw up its hands and dropped the wall. Victory for the Web!

In a way. The Times subscription Web site had 1,000 paid subscribers. Which means 29,000 households took the print paper and 1,000 took the Web site, meaning -- 7,000 of the circulation loss was people who simply had no use for paying for the Watertown Daily Times in any form.

Now, this doesn't show people stopped reading local news. It shows people stopped paying for local news. There are TV stations in Watertown, and then there is NewZjunky. NewZjunky has very little information about itself, but it appears to be a sort of anti-Times... a Drudge for Watertown, with links to public records, TV sites, and obits from every funeral home, along with school closings, etc. In other words, the sort of local-local stuff that is supposed to save the newspaper.

NewZjunky covers traffic crashes. I suspect NewZjunky covers city council meetings. Other than that NewZjunky links to everything EXCEPT the Times: The Syracuse papers, the TV stations, the Fort Drum PAO. Outside the area, NewZjunky links to everything by every other Web site it can find.

What NewZjunky has lots of is local ads. Lots of them. How it does this is beyond me at the moment, since its "Advertizing" link takes one to how to post photos.

My suspicion -- although I welcome more information from NewZjunky him or herself -- is that NewZjunky generates enough money to employ NewZjunky and an ad salesperson.

I wonder how many people the Watertown Daily Times employs to cover the news.

What does this all mean? I don't really know. Here are some thoughts:

1. Almost no one is willing to pay for news on the Web if they can get it free. Almost no one is willing to pay for parking if they can get it free. If you ask them, they will say they want it free. They don't care what your problems are.
2. If you don't post news on the Web, someone else will. If you do, someone else will anyhow. TV stations, local entrepreneurs, L.A. Observed. All you're doing is doing it with a higher cost structure. Unless you get your cost structure down to their level, you can't compete on the Web in the long run. If you get it down to their cost structure...
3. The definition of what free news can be economically supported by itself on the Web is pretty thin. Car crashes, obits, and quick hits. TV should have taught us this, and it's got a legal oligopoly.
4, NewZjunky's audience seems to be mostly satisfied with the "just the facts, ma'm" -- at least for now. There is an audience that wants more.
5. As NewZjunky admits, it was started for people who had moved from Watertown and wanted to keep up with local news back home -- free.
6. Even with NewZjunky, even with local television, even with everything else, 29,000 people/families in Watertown are still paying to have the Watertown Daily Times delivered to their home.

Why? What do they want? How can the newspaper business provide them with a product that meets their needs and supports an actual reporting staff that doesn't simply say, well, here's a news release from Fort Drum, let's run it verbatim? Cause if all they want is "free obits online..." Just online, just free, is not a viable long-term business model for newspapers because without a barrier to competition, you can't afford to do what they do.

More to come...