“New York Times Ready to Charge Online Readers,” said NYMag.com’s Daily Intel in a Sunday report.

I’m not sure whether to believe the story or not, but since there’s no definitive word from NYT executives yet, let’s play along and pretend this is an accurate report: NYTimes.com this spring will launch a “metered” web payment system, where readers can sample X number of free articles before being asked to subscribe.

If that’s true and the system is as simple as that — “Dear loyal Times reader: You’ve read 10 articles for free this month; to read more, sign up for a paid subscription” — then it’s a bad decision. TechDirt minced no words with its story: “NY Times Apparently Planning To Commit Suicide Online With Paywall.”

Or go read Jeff Jarvis’ take on his BuzzMachine blog, where he states the obvious problem with the metered approach to web news content:

“They would would end up charging — and, they should fear, sending away — the readers who are worth the most while serving free those who are worth least. … Why charge your best customers? Why single them out? Why risk driving them away? The logic eludes me.”

But we’re talking about the most revered newspaper in the English-speaking world, and it’s not staffed by dummies. I would hope the Times leadership learned from the unsuccessful TimesSelect partial paid-wall experiment. The Times is a general-interest newspaper with a global reach and global influence; it would be foolish to turn away loyal online readers unwilling or unable to pay U.S. prices that aren’t realistic in some economies (e.g., India, the Middle East), not to mention invite other news organizations to take over their mantle as most influential news brand by not locking most of the world out.

I don’t know what decision NYT executives will announce, but if they go the metered paywall route, I can only hope that they get it right. While I continue to think that a voluntary membership model that gets paying members special privileges and commercial offers from advertisers is a better way to go, if metered paywall is the decision, then here’s what it should look like to have a chance of succeeding:

• Allow several free article views per day before a reader hits any kind of paywall. Ten articles per month and then a paywall, as the Financial Times’ website offers, is a non-starter for NYTimes.com and will result in unacceptable advertising losses for NYTimes.com as site traffic drops.
• This makes way more sense than the FT.com model, because for heavy users of NYTimes.com, they will see the paywall or alternative offer every day. FT.com users hit the paywall once per month at 10 articles, then most will not come back. FT.com can afford not to care, because it’s after business people who can afford to pay for FT’s specialized business and financial news coverage. It’s not after a massive audience the way NYTimes.com is (or should be).
• Give the NYTimes.com user who hits the “paywall” after, say, three or four stories in one day several options for continuing to read. Offering only the option of subscribing is, and I can’t think of a better word, dumb.
• What should the options be?
  1. Subscriptions for unfettered access, offered in various terms: monthly, 6-month, annual, lifetime, etc.
  2. A day-pass rate ($1 or $2?) for those wanting more but unwilling to commit to a subscription.
  3. Adjust the day-pass (and subscription rates) based on the country of the reader (determined by IP address). While a day pass to NYTimes.com might cost $1.50 to North American online readers, the price should be, say, the equivalent of 25 cents for readers in India where the standard wage is far less than in the U.S.
  4. Offer an alternative to paying for a day-pass: View a 30-second video commercial, which can’t be skipped or fast-forwarded, for a blockbuster ad or a targeted ad based on what the site knows about the reader. Or, assuming NYTimes.com has good targeting ability (possible with non-paying subscribers because the site makes everyone register), let the user take a market survey for an ad client who’s paying a premium; then give the reader a free day or week-long pass to unlimited articles.
  5. Offer the special membership I mentioned above as an option. This might cost more than a subscription, but would include extra goodies such as free or discount tickets to newsmaker events, and lucrative discount and free-offer deals from participating advertisers (e.g., two-for-one dinner or theater-ticket offers each month). The membership would also include unfettered access to the full website with no reading quotas.
  6. Offer something for those not willing to pay but who still want more. This might be a partial wall, where after viewing three NYT stories on one day, subsequent stories show only the first three or four paragraphs of a story — followed by the list of options above. I’d add even one more in this instance: a micropayment for, say, 25 cents to view the rest of the article (if it’s article No. 4 read by the user that day and they want to view the whole thing).
  7. Allow paying members of voluntary content-donation networks special access. Let’s say that I, a paying member to the Kachingle multi-website donation service, visit NYTimes.com and click its Kachingle medallion, indicating that I support NYTimes.com and some of my $5 a month paid to Kachingle gets proportioned every month to NYTimes.com based on my usage of the site. Perhaps for Kachingle member-supporters of NYTimes.com, the daily free-article limit becomes 10, or 20, rather than three, before the paywall and other options are shown.
  8. Establish some sort of convenient system for libraries and schools, so that users of public computers don’t run into annoying paywall barriers.
  9. Finally, use the paywall strategy for special events or promotions. For instance, right now the NYTimes.com metered wall could be set at three free articles, then the top offer for continued access to more full Times content for the next week is to make a $10 donation to Haiti earthquake relief, or a $5 donation for two days of full access.

In general, I’m against paywalls for general-news websites, for reasons that I and many other digital-media pundits have expressed many times over. But that’s a black-and-white view, and I think there are shades of gray that might work, as I’ve outlined above.

So … Dear Bill Keller and NYT executive team: Please don’t blow it with a restrictive metered paywall that will damage your brand’s influence and bottom line. If you’re dead set on the metered paywall model — and I still have hope that you’re not — then at least implement it intelligently.

I can’t say I’m surprised that Denver-based MediaNews Group (well, technically its holding company, Affiliated Media Inc.) has said that it will file for bankruptcy protection. The Wall Street Journal has a report on the latest newspaper-industry dour development, pointing out that the Hearst Corp. has $400 million in equity and debt tied to MediaNews, “and the investment will be wiped out by the bankruptcy filing, according to people familiar with the matter.”

MediaNews is likely to survive, but not without some unfortunate consequences for its newspapers. From the WSJ article:

“(MediaNews Group CEO Dean) Singleton also said cleaning up the company’s debt load allows him to help lead newspaper-industry consolidation, which some people in the industry say would help publishers stay afloat by creating stronger, more efficiently run groups of papers. Others are less sanguine about the benefits of consolidation.

“People in the industry have pointed to MediaNews’ paper in St. Paul and the Star Tribune in Minneapolis as potential candidates for a combination, as well as to adjacent papers in Southern California published by MediaNews, Tribune Co. and Freedom Communications Inc.”

In other words, yet another newspaper-company bankruptcy means that more muscle will be cut from newsrooms (the fat’s already gone) and communities will be more poorly served in the consolidation that’s necessary for industry survival.

We’ve seen plenty of awful things happen to newsrooms, and now we’re seeing things like copy editors being considered for elimination to save money. (E.g., Star Tribune.)

The newsroom cuts keep coming, and as newspaper companies emerge from bankruptcy owned largely by the banks that held their debt, a return to strong staffing levels and higher quality is unlikely anytime soon. (And why would advertisers return to that?)

So, it looks to me like now is a great time to be in journalism!

I’ve said that a few times recently when speaking to groups of college journalism students, and while I’ve gotten some nods of agreement, I’ve seen more heads shaking and puzzled expressions. But here’s what I mean:

Newspapers across the land are declining in quality, and lacking in coverage of their communities. A retired university journalism department head just today wrote this to me in a private e-mail about his local paper, owned by one of the largest newspaper companies in the U.S.:

“Today’s [newspaper name redacted] is a bulletin board of one-paragraph meeting and event announcements, with canned features from other [corporate parent redacted] papers, local columns by city and county functionaries, booster pieces by c-of-c officials, religious claptrap by evangelists, columns on how and why to clean up your garage, pet care, etc. People who want to announce weddings and funerals are charged by the column inch, and the practice of depth reporting is a distant memory.”

I don’t see a way out of this for local and regional newspapers owned by large media companies. Do you? So newspapers will likely continue to decline, while simultaneously, new digital news entities (for- and non-profit) will continue to increase in quality. After all, the newcomers don’t have massive debt to worry about or expensive presses to maintain; digital publishing is cheap in comparison.

And, of course, many of the new news entities emerging are run by the talented journalists laid off by the once-great newspaper companies. So new news providers’ quality will continue to improve.

The problem for all the new-comers to the (reinvented) news game is the lack of a clear business model to support quality journalism in sufficient quantity. But I’m more confident that they can figure that out than I am in the newspaper industry figuring out the digital business model while also handling the collapse of their legacy business.

“New” news media rises as the old falls. MediaNews Group’s troubles are only the latest to open up more opportunities for the new news eco-system to develop.

It’s an exciting time to be a journalist, if you can stomach the chaotic environment. It’s a lousy time to own an established news media business if you’re still in love with its outdated business model.

My wife, Suzanne, has long had to put up with a husband who’s a new-gadget hound. I’m an early adopter but not a super-early adopter. We’ve had a TiVo DVR for years, but I wasn’t among the very first to purchase one. I waited for the iPhone 3G to come out before catching iPhone fever. (Suzanne has one, too.) She tends to tag along, patient with me when I enthuse about some new gizmo. (Like the Roku box I bought as a family Christmas present. No one else in the family had a clue what it was supposed to do.) Eventually Suzanne sees the wisdom of (most) of my new-gadget purchases.

Since she’s a school librarian and avid reader, I thought that an e-book reader would be a special holiday gift. So I ordered Suzanne a nook from Barnes & Noble, preferring the virtual screen interface to the Amazon Kindle’s many physical buttons.

In observing her use of the nook in the first couple weeks, I’ve come to predict that the nook (and the Kindle) will not win over huge chunks of the population. While the devices and their E Ink screens make for a wonderful reading experience (my opinion) and are easy on the eyes in a way that reading lengthy prose on a backlit screen is not, they’re still not quite ready for truly mass-market success.

Perhaps Apple will debut the Kindle- and nook-killer later this month. I’m looking forward to seeing what Steve Jobs is hiding from public view.

Anyway, here’s a quick run-down of Suzanne’s first couple weeks with the nook (as observed by me):

• Initial enthusiasm and “that’s so cool” reaction
• Love for some features like tap on a word to get a definition; add notes to sections as you’re reading; highlighting key passages; etc.
• Some disillusionment: “You mean you can’t read it in bed in the dark? You have to have a light on to see the screen?”
• After she played around with it a bit, the nook went in a bedside drawer, not seeing much use

The final point needs some explanation, because it’s not a rejection of the product. Rather, Suzanne has a pile of books on her reading and book-club list, waiting to be picked up. What’s the point of spending an extra $10 for a nook e-version? Books on nook will have to come later, when the paid-for or from-the-library printed versions have been read.

One book on her to-read list is already in hand in digital form, purchased from Amazon for reading on her iPhone. She was disappointed that that purchase couldn’t simply be ported to her nook.

More alarming (to me) was an e-mail receipt showing up in my inbox from Amazon.com, showing that Suzanne had ordered a printed book after receiving the nook. It turns out that it was a cookbook, with color photos, and that didn’t seem like the right kind of book to order in digital form for an e-reader than only displays black, grays, and white.

Magazines and newspapers? Nope, she told me; won’t use the nook for that, especially since the monthly subscription prices per publication are ridiculously high, and she can read most of them on the web for free.

I’ll continue to spy on my wife’s nook usage (or lack thereof), and I suspect that I’ll see her make the transition to digital books read on the nook, in time.

Suzanne was, I guessed, the ideal nook/Kindle convert: librarian, book lover, and not a techno-phobe. Alas, it was not love at first sight.

This makes me think that we’re not quite there yet. What will become a mass-market hit, I believe, will be a thin tablet computer that does everything an iPhone with a big color screen could do (i.e., a full-fledged wirelessly connected computer), and is an outstanding form factor for reading books.

The trick will be getting the price down to a few hundred dollars, and that may take a while.

The ultimate tablet, I think, would be that large, thin iPhone/iTouch device with a stunning color, backlit touch-screen. And it would have a switch to turn the screen into a paper-like E Ink experience with no backlight, for comfortable book and other long-form reading.

Alas, unless Mr. Jobs has some magic up his sleeve, that may be a pipe dream.

Strike those last two paragraphs in my original of this blog item. It seems that a single screen that can be both back-lit color and E-Ink quality reflective display for reading in light is possible; indeed, it exists. Pixel Qi showed off such technology at the Consumer Electronics Show last week. Here’s a Gizmodo report on this amazing development.

And then there’s Mirasol displays, which could be the technology that moves media tablets where they need to go. Exciting stuff!

Today I received an e-mail promotion from an electronics e-retailer that I’d purchased from before. The after-holidays sales promotion looked interesting, so I clicked the ad to go to the site. I spent very little time there, didn’t see any deals I couldn’t live without, and clicked away.

About an hour later, in comes another e-mail from this company, this one with a note, “Thanks for visiting our site!”, and an e-mail coupon for a free $100 dining-out card if I make a purchase of at least $200.

This isn’t a new technique among digital-savvy retailers, but it’s the first one like this that I recall receiving.

Have any news websites tried this approach? (I’ve yet to see it.) It’s a great idea.

For example, tie automated e-mail promotions to when a (known) visitor views a car-review page. Build in some intelligence: If the site visitor reads a review about pick-up trucks or high-mileage hybrids, send a discount offer from a (client) local dealer, or maybe eBay Motors, specific to trucks or hybrids, respectively. Did the user visit the sports section and read three or more articles? E-mail him a discount coupon from a client sporting goods store.

This is a simple, potentially effective technique. But of course you need to know who your visitor is. That’s simple enough if you require your users to register on your site, or you know who they are because they log into your site via Facebook Connect or some other third-party connection.

And you need their permission, which you can get during the registration process (if your site has one), or by asking for permission to send them discounts in the future if they click their assent in a pop-up box.

Yet another possibility is if your news site has a premium membership program (a la Times+). Make receiving these targeted, contextual discount offers a benefit for being a paying news-website member. Of course, members don’t have to receive them and can decide for themselves whether it’s a useful benefit or feels more like annoying spam.

Finally, think beyond e-mail, of course. At sign-up for this service, offer options: Receive the discount offers via mobile phone, Facebook mail, Twitter DM (direct message), e-mail, etc.

If any news organizations have tried this, and I’m just not aware of it, please let me know in the comments area below — and tell us how it’s worked out.

Throughout much of my nearly 15-year gig as a freelance columnist for Editor & Publisher Online, I’ve cringed at its website. Now that E&P is shutting down (though with some hope of a last-minute save) and my “Stop The Presses!” column has ended its run, I’m free to stop the self-censorship.

Actually, I don’t really need to say that much, since (now former) E&P editor Greg Mitchell acknowledged the obvious in an interview published yesterday:

“At E&P, overly frugal ownership forced the publication to scrape by with an antiquated Web site — even though E&P advocated since the mid-1990s that newspapers and magazines embrace the Internet, or else suffer the consequences.

“‘For four years we were pushing our owners to update our site, and we couldn’t do it,’ Mitchell said. ‘As a result, we have this dinosaur of a Web site. It hasn’t been updated in five years; we can’t do video, you can’t leave comments.’”

Thank you, Greg!

For me, not a month has gone by over the last, oh, 5 years or more that, following publication of my monthly column, I didn’t get reader e-mails complaining about not being able to leave a public comment responding to what I’d written. I often resorted to using this, my personal blog, as the place for E&P readers to leave feedback or have a public discussion.

The worst were my (many) columns advocating that news websites be more interactive and participatory. Readers couldn’t resist the opportunity to point out the irony, though of course they had to do it either in a “letter to the editor” sent to EditorandPublisher.com, or to my personal e-mail address (or sometimes with a phone call).

That said, that’s a hit only on E&P’s penny-pinching overlords, not the E&P staff. My column tenure lasted through several editors before Mitchell, and each faced the same problem. Whenever I repeated my request that comments be added to my column, I got the same frustrated response: We want to do it but we can’t get corporate to allow it!

For me, the ultimate irony — and there’s a lesson here, I think — is that when I switched this blog to the popular Wordpress open-source content management system (CMS) years ago, my personal website was in many ways more sophisticated and flexible than E&P’s! If I wanted a new feature, I just found a free Wordpress plug-in and added new functionality in a few minutes. E&P’s poor editors had to beg corporate IT for any new features to be added, which either took weeks or months, or never happened (like adding user comments).

Open-source platforms like Wordpress, Drupal, and others are now remarkably advanced. You have to wonder why companies like E&P owner Nielsen (and VNU before that) would cripple themselves using a proprietary CMS.

OK, I’ve got that off my chest. I’ll end with high praise for the editorial work of E&P’s staff over the years. E&P was around for 125 years, and deservedly so. I’m proud to have been associated with the E&P brand, and leave with great respect for everyone in the now-shuttered New York City office.

You can still find them on the new (temporary?) blog, E&P In Exile.

Oh, and feel free to leave a comment below.

After writing a column for Editor & Publisher Online for so long (it was my “Stop The Presses!” column that served as the website’s main original content at the very beginning), it feels weird to have the final one published.

But it’s online, “Goodbye, for Now: Looking Foward.” (My editors rejected my apparently too-controversial suggested headline: “Stop a Lot of the Presses! (Farewell, E&P).”

There’s no place for online discussion of the column on the E&P site, so I hope anyone with an opinion on it will use the Comments area below this blog item to react to what I’ve written.

I chose to go out with a two-part list.

• One is 20/20 hindsight fantasy: what the last 15 years should have looked like if only the newspaper industry’s leaders (and employees and outside analysists and pundits) had reacted to (and more effectively lobbied industry leaders on how to respond to) disruptive change properly.

• The other is prediction: based on the reality of what did happen over that time and the decisions made, what can the newspaper industry expect next and what will the news eco-system look like.

I’ll continue writing on the future of news — and yes, expressing my opinions — on this blog. You’ll also start to see me writing on a blog associated with my newest project, set to launch in January 2010: the Digital Media Test Kitchen at the University of Colorado at Boulder. More on that very soon.

To any and everyone who spent any time reading “Stop The Presses!” over the years, thank you for spending some of your valuable time pondering my words. To everyone I’ve interviewed, thank you for sharing your ideas and opinions — and educating me on what’s to become of media in the digital era. And to my editors at E&P (present and past), thanks for allowing me this venue, and for your support over the years. Good luck!

I seem to be one of the few media writers who believes that there’s potential for newspapers to earn a decent revenue stream from donations by loyal website users (and even drive-by’s who want to reward journalistic excellence). It’s not that I think it’s going to save lots of newsroom jobs, but done right, asking readers to support the cost of professional journalists covering their communities could become one of multiple revenue streams that keeps newsrooms alive.

The Miami Herald has begun asking its users for donations to support its news operation, though it’s so subtle that I doubt many people visiting its website will even notice. Perhaps this is just dipping a toe in the water to see what happens, and a better-thought-out or alternative model will come later.

I couldn’t spot any call for voluntary donations on the site’s homepage, but at the end of each article is this small graphic, at right, which reads, “Support ongoing news coverage on Miamiherald.com – Click here.” That click will lead you to a donation page, which includes this:

There’s also a form with lots of fields to fill out, and you can pay whatever amount you want with a credit card.

Ugh. Talk about how not to do this. It’ll likely fail miserably unless the Herald changes its approach to asking for donations. Then Herald executives can dismiss the whole notion of asking for money as pointless.

First, here’s what’s wrong with how MiamiHerald.com is asking for reader support now:

1. Only alert is at the end of an article, and the graphic is small and competes against a bunch of other surrounding links and graphics. Eyetracking and other newspaper website readership studies demonstrate that few people reading a news website make it to the end of an article, especially a long one. And from my experience five years ago doing a website eyetracking study at the Poynter Institute, I can tell you that most people who reach the end of a story will not move their eyes below the last paragraph.
2. This approach is really unsophisticated. How about instead tracking frequent readers, and presenting them with a donation pitch after they’ve read a number of articles? And put it in front of their eyes, like between the headline and the first paragraph of, say, the 10th story they’ve read on your site.
3. The only payment option is by credit card! Not even Paypal? That’s dumb.
4. The rule on the web, if you want people to do something specific, is to make it easy. Heard of Amazon One-Click? People who can be convinced to donate something to the website should be able to do it easily, in as few clicks as possible.
5. I question the approach of an open donation amount. Better results will come by offering different specific donation levels. Or offer something back in the form of packages, with better goodies going with higher-priced donation selections. Listen to any NPR outlet’s pledge drive and learn form the experts.

I’ve written quite a bit in the last year about creative approaches to getting online users to support news websites and blogs. The “tip jar” approach begun by the Herald is pretty much the least creative option, and one that’s been rejected by entrepreneurs I’ve met this year who are trying to crack the code on online-content user financial support.

No one knows yet what will work. My gut tells me that a network approach, where web users can set aside money and easily give it to sites and blogs that they like the most with a simple click, will yield better results than every newspaper website separately begging for donations. Kachingle is one such experiment. (Disclaimer.)

It should be mentioned that a Kachingle competitor with a model which had similarities, Contenture, has gone out of business. A notice on its site says:

“Thank you to everyone who believed in our service by installing it on their site or signing up for a paid account. Unfortunately, we were unable to get any big publishers to use the service, which was going to be the key to our success. Without any large publishers, the economics just don’t work.”

Well, that’s interesting. Rather than try something innovative that just might work, big publishers like the Herald would rather try a lame donation experiment that is so unsophisticated that it’s certain to fail. WTF?

(Note: I’m writing this late at night, and haven’t spoken to or e-mailed anyone at MiamiHerald.com, so I don’t know their side of the story. They’re welcome to respond below in the comments, or contact me. If I can fit it my day on Wednesday, I’ll reach out to them to get a reaction and any information about their plans that I’m not aware of.)

The Guardian has introduced a new iPhone app, and its model is one I’ve endorsed in the past:

• iPhone app provides a much better experience than the mobile website
• Mobile version of Guardian website remains free
• iPhone app costs to download ($3.99 US, £2.39 UK)
• iPhone app content is free (beyond buying the app), but option is left open for charging for some content and/or services down the road from within the app

I bought the app this morning and I’m impressed, mostly. Best part for me is the ability to personalize the sections I want to see and prioritize them. There’s audio, but no video yet. Photo galleries are nice. Ditto for off-line reading.

I’m perplexed that some newspaper companies that have developed mobile apps still give them away free. Seems like a no-brainer to me to charge a fee to purchase the app, on the grounds of giving the mobile user a better viewing experience than the normal mobile site. As long as a more bare-bones free mobile site is available, consumers can’t really complain if you ask for a few bucks for your app.

As I’ve written in the past, I think it’s psychologically easier to get online users to pay for an app (which they get to keep and use over and over) rather than pay for news (which they can get in many other places online or on their phones for free).

The Guardian starts with the iPhone app (which seems the typical pattern these days), and then will create matching apps for other platforms: Android, RIM, Symbian, and Microsoft.

(Disclaimer: I worked as a contract or freelance columnist for Editor & Publisher Online from 1995 till this week, covering for the site and sometimes E&P magazine the intersection of newspapers and the digital revolution. I do not have inside information about why Nielsen Co. shuttered E&P, and the words below are strictly my opinion.)

The demise of Editor & Publisher (the now-monthly magazine and companion website) can be quickly understood from the following three links:

1. John Temple: Rest in peace, E&P: Killed by an aggregator
   

   “It’s easy to underestimate the power of aggregation. But the truth, in my view, is that Romenesko replaced Editor & Publisher long ago as the place where journalists turned to find out what was going on in their world. It’s not limited by one medium or industry. It’s timely. And it’s deep. The magazine couldn’t compete. And it’s not just Romenesko. There are many sites and blogs to turn to today to learn what’s going on in journalism. Which is why E&P couldn’t survive as a viable business.”

   The former editor and publisher of the defunct Rocky Mountain News hits the nail on the head. E&P still operated like a traditional trade-magazine publisher, just using a different medium (the web) for daily coverage and cutting back on print (from weekly down to monthly in its later years). To this day, it was weak on user participation and aggregation from other sources, even though its traditional news coverage was strong and well respected. E&P probably should have hired Jim Romenesko years ago rather than let the Poynter Institute lure him.

2. Steven Berlin Johnson: “Old Growth Media and the Future of News“
   This is a transcript of a speech presented in early 2009. It’s long, but it is the best description I know of about why traditional trade publishers are doomed unless they properly adapt to the new digital media environment. Johnson uses the example of the old Macintosh magazines, pre-web, and how they were marginalized by the growth of Mac insider websites, e-newsletters, and blogs over the years.

   What started out in technology journalism, Johnson explains, eventually will spread to many other sectors of news. It already has in some areas such as sports and politics. For industry news, the same dynamic will strike in niche after niche. Johnson’s message also points to the importance in the business press of aggregation and curation.

3. A tweet by Vin Crosbie yesterday
   

   “Root of E&P mag’s death was Steve Outing’s start of Online-News listserv in ‘93, creating ability to report industry news faster than print.”

   News media consultant and now university educator Crosbie is referring to an e-mail discussion list that I started either at the end of 1993 or early in 1994. Online-News and its companion discussion list Online-Newspapers grew to be significant and lively gathering places of news professionals and innovators looking to leverage the Internet to bring news into the online age. The information shared by a large group of passionate and knowledgeable news innovators was often the kind of stuff not found in traditional media trade publications.

   Crosbie is perhaps stretching things to directly link E&P’s demise in 2009 to the start of an industry listserv in 1994, but his point is valid.

Tags: E&P, editor & publisher, john temple, steven johnson, vin crosbie

Writing a column (“Stop The Presses!“) for Editor & Publisher Online, where I’ve covered the intersection (perhaps I should call it a collision) of the Internet and newspapers since 1995, is the longest-running professional gig I’ve ever had. The only things in my life that have lasted longer are my marriage (21 years) and being a parent (17 years).

So it’s with sadness that I learned this morning that the Nielsen Co. is shutting down E&P after being unable to sell it along with its other publications. E&P’s roots go back to 1884 and it long was considered “the bible of the newspaper industry.” I can’t say that I’m surprised; indeed, the only surprise was that the magazine and website lasted this long, as did my monthly column. (Many other E&P columns by non-staff members were cut earlier on for budgetary reasons.)

If you’re expecting details from me, I don’t have many, since I am not nor ever have I been an E&P or Nielsen employee; my column has always been a freelance or contract arrangement, one of many things that I do around the digital-news space. So based here in Boulder, Colorado, I’ve seldom known the “inside dope” about what was happening in the New York office, and didn’t know in advance that this was coming. (Indeed, just yesterday I’d been faxed my contract to sign for next year, so my editors at E&P didn’t know, either. That’s one item to delete from my to-do list for today.)

I can tell you that things are up in the air in terms of what happens to the “Editor & Publisher” brand, but that its staff will be out of their offices by the end of the year. (“Happy Holidays, E&P gang! -Love, Nielsen Co.”)

I kept writing my E&P column for so long, I guess, because I came out of the newspaper business (from 1978 to 1993 I worked mostly at newspapers in Colorado and California) and maintained an affinity for newspapers and the brand of journalism they produce. In late 1993 when the Internet came onto the scene (that’s when the first web browser was introduced to the world), I viewed it as transformational — and expected that it could transform the newspaper industry; and with my prior experience and enthusiasm for the new online world I surmised that I might be able to help, by closing watching new online trends that could affect newspapers and identifying new technologies and trends that could be leveraged by newspapers.

Ah, if I’d only known then. … If only I’d realized that the newspaper culture was too mired in the muck of its own long history, and that its leaders would, for the most part, resist-resist-resist the rapid changes required by the evolving digital culture to do what needed to be done to survive. I might have taken the new route rather than trying to repave the old one with new materials, transforming a sleepy two-lane into a sleek new super-highway.

That’s not meant as a criticism of the digital-media folks that have toiled in the newspaper industry this last decade and a half, with the same mission as I had. Those fine and smart people on the inside, and people like me on the outside offering advice and ideas for surviving the digital revolution, generally saw the direction things should go. Alas, so often it was the top leaders who held back the digital pioneers and their crazy ideas for fear of hurting the cash cow that was the printed newspaper.

Indeed, that attitude still holds true at the top of many companies, it seems. A profound moment of disappointment — when I think my mind finally lost the last tiny shread of hope for the newspaper industry — was this summer, when during a reinveinting-news conference I had a few minutes for a private conversation with the CEO of one of the largest U.S. newspaper companies. He told me that his firm’s intention of putting up pay-walls at most of its newspaper websites was meant primarily as a strategy to drive more print revenues. He said he didn’t expect to earn much from the web side with the pay-wall strategy.

That same company (I’ll be polite and refrain from naming it) early this year had me do a small consulting job, to do some research on social-media directors at other news companies and determine if it was worth it for the company to create such a position at the corporate level. I came back with estimates of how other news companies had fared with a person in that position, including estimates of increased website traffic and additional revenues from increased social-media activity and initiatives. I also made the case that ignoring social media would be a huge mistake, because it is a huge part of the future of news.

You guessed it. I later heard from the interactive-division VP who hired me that it was decided (above his level) that the social-media position would not be created, because management couldn’t see enough of a ROI in the short term, and of course money was tight for creating new positions. I just shook my head in disbelief. But, again, I wasn’t surprised.

Writing my E&P column for so long, I’ve received plenty of accolades for identifying breaking trends and alerting newspaper digital managers of technologies that they should deploy and business models they should investigate. I’ve also gotten plenty of criticisms from journalists and publishers who I describe as “old school,” who thought that my ideas would hurt the industry by hurting print revenues.

I’ve also been asked, a lot lately, why I continue to “preach to people who obviously won’t listen to what you have to say?” That’s crossed my mind for quite a while, and in that respect it’s a bit of a relief to stop writing a column that’s targeted to newspaper leaders to offer them ideas for evolving into digital creatures. This “opportunity” of losing my column aimed at a newspaper-industry audience will allow me to write more broadly about the future of news and journalism, and the new news eco-system that is evolving to fill in the gaps left by dwindling old news media.

As many others have said, journalism isn’t in danger of extinction, but newspaper print editions are. That the industry could lose its dominant and oldest trade journal is another signal itself of many more newspapers’ demise or slide into irrelevancy.

I’ll keep covering the news industry and news digital trends in this blog. But you’ll see less of me cheerleading a newspaper industry that seems bent on self-destruction. If every newspaper would take digital opportunities as seriously as does the New York Times, which has a large technology staff to go along with its still-large editorial staff, then there’d be hope. But it’s the rare few newspapers in larger markets that will survive long term because they will adapt and innovate sufficiently, like the NYT. (Small-town papers have much more of a cushion against extinction.)

Finally, lest I appear to put all the blame on newspaper industry CEOs for their myopic vision, I feel that I let the newspaper industry down, as did E&P. I and they were not strident enough with our criticisms, apparently, or strong enough with our arguments, to convince newspapers’ top leaders that they needed to get on the digital path more quickly and more solidly. I end my E&P column thinking that I could and should have done more. But at the same time, I thoroughly enjoyed the many people I met in the newspaper industry, many of them innovators and visionaries.

I’ll be continuing to guide the news industry with my latest project, which is founding the Digital Media Test Kitchen at the University of Colorado in Boulder. I don’t even have a finished website to point you to yet, but we’ll debut soon.