DBH: As a (physically distant) contractor and not an employee of E&P/Nielsen, I probably have a different perspective. I don’t know that the E&P brand will live on necessarily, because there are so many other online venues that do a good job of tracking news-industry news and trends. I say this in part because I really thought the Rocky Mountain News brand would live on in some way in Denver. But while owner Scripps gave the archives to the Denver Public Library, at this point I still don’t think the brand name has been released by the company, even though it supposedly was on the market. (I know because I tried to get it for a higher-ed project.) Guess they’d rather see it die than someone else carry it on and maybe not live up to the quality of the brand when it was alive. That makes me feel less than confident that E&P will live on in some way. (Though I hope it does.)

Roger: A trade magazine model is very different indeed than for a newspaper in the digital age. I did not advise them on their model, and would have wanted to see E&P do things differently than it did (and felt that way for a long time). They *had a pay-wall model*, but it was with older content; you had to be a member to search the archives for my older columns, for example. You also paid if you wanted the monthly print magazine. Had they put their current web news behind a pay-wall, I don’t think it would have worked well because of the competition from other free sources. Nieman Media Lab, for example, does a great job covering the news and media space on the digital side; had E&P locked down its newest coverage, outfits like that would have taken advantage and grabbed a bunch of E&P traffic. Ditto for Poynter.org, which could have stepped in to cover newspapers more broadly and not just focus on digital as with Nieman’s blog. And of course Romenesko had a big impact, I believe; E&P should have hired him long ago when he was shopping his media blog around.

So no, I don’t think they followed my advice. If they had, there would be a strong community on the site and every article would have at least had comment threads; they’d have had more blogs earlier; they’d have created premium web and mobile services that offered better value and a better experience (including perhaps communities limited to paying subscribers) rather than try to charge for content that’s not unique. They’d be the top aggregator/curator of newspaper-industry news.

Personally, I think the deck was simply stacked against E&P. I’m not the first to say that they operated in a troubled industry (magazines) reporting on an industry in serious decline (newspapers). Just as with many newspapers, I don’t get the sense that Nielsen gave them enough resources to develop a forward strategy. (E.g., they were burdened by a corporate CMS that wouldn’t even allow them to have comments on articles! I complained about that for many years and multiple editors before Mitchell.) That’s why I wasn’t surprised at the news of Nielsen’s decision to kill it.

Bruce: Protecting the newspaper is fine by me, as long as you’re also planning and building for the digital future. Your strategy sounds like it could work short-term, but what then when advertiser and audience behavior has flipped in your market? (Admittedly I don’t know much about your specific market.) I advocate for planning and building for the future that we know is coming — some places sooner than others.

As noted on my own blog, E&P could have retreated behind the same pay wall that protects the WSJ — but only by remaining vital. Which, I’m sorry to say, it did not manage to do.

As a friend of mine (an ad director in Texas) noted, he used to be a faithful subscriber to E&P until they provided it for free. How many thousand times did that scenario play out?

Your loyal opposition,

Roger Plothow
Editor and Publisher
Post Register
Idaho Falls, Idaho