M.J. Parker

Newspapers: Find Ways to Create Valuable Content

See... that always-looking-for-som... attitude is part of what got us here in the first place. Always asking more of the starving content producers who are getting laid off in droves before asking more of the business model itself. You have to think: Where is all this "extra" content going to come from?

"Newspapers have *never* been paid directly by readers for the news."

Maybe it's about time they started getting paid. Just like musicians were never paid directly by listeners before, either, now they're in fact _getting paid_, some of them better than they were when toll-takers were king. Nobody's blaming readers for wanting something for free. Those are the times we live in, and that's the bed we made for ourselves when we, too, decided to embrace the mistaken notion that information wants to be free at any cost. But asking newspapers to expand away from what they do best in order to make up for that is exactly what got us here in the first place.

Here's the crux of the matter: More content created solely to prop up the sales/ad reps who are underperforming, giving them something more exciting and glittery to sell against, isn't the answer. Nailing a bingo shack onto the side of the newsroom, putting more care and money into planning events than planning editorial content, all in the name of restoring some of that intangible "goodwill" everyone's talking about these days—those are losing propositions.

The answer is getting people to pay for something they do need and do in fact care about, even if they don't care where they get it from: the goddamned news. As you skirt around saying, no one gives a * about "branding," so lower costs by cutting underperforming ad reps and giving the finger to branding agencies, not losing your core content producers.

Why is all of this so hard to understand?