Internet killed the newsprint star

We live in a digital world, and assuming you’ve not been living on freeze-dried rations in the basement of a survivalist compound since the final days before Y2K, this shouldn’t be news to you. Practically everything a person would want is available online, and has been for at least the past few years. What’s more, people expect certain things — information, in particular — to be available online, and are increasingly frustrated and annoyed when something that “should” be available isn’t.

Which is exactly how I felt yesterday morning when I realized that the Spartanburg Journal isn’t available online. Not a single story is available on the internet, even very old ones. Having worked in the newspaper industry for the better part of the last decade, I was stunned, then somewhat angry, to see that the paper has opted for a print-only model.

Why? Because I like the Spartanburg Journal, and I’d hate to see them go out of business. Unless something drastic changes in their publication structure, I see that happening in two years, if that.

Before I can explain that doomsaying, some of you might need a little context. Print newspapers, particularly chain-owned papers, are dying. Most newspapers are still functioning by the pre-internet model, when people wanted a digest of all the day’s relevant international, national and local news — or at least whatever the editors at that paper felt was relevant on that given day. Papers had been competing against radio and TV for quite some time, but were protected to an extent by the basic function of reading — you get your information at your own pace, can skip over something you find boring, and can reread something if you missed something.

Almost as soon as it became available to the general public, the internet changed that. You could get your international news just as easily from the Los Angeles Times or the Guardian as, say, the Spartanburg Herald-Journal, which was only a few years earlier the only international news game in town. And, what’s more, the news was actually better online than it was in print, because you had online archives, a variety of coverage of the same topic, related stories you could find with just another click and — more recently — things like user comments, tags and ratings. Suddenly, printed newspapers began to seem kind of dull.

The internet also provided tools for smaller operations to compete with the big guys, with a story able to be written, edited, published, commented upon, followed-up and picked-up by other sites (through sites like Digg.com) hours before a similar story in a daily newspaper ever saw print. In fact, most mainstream newspapers have since made efforts to change their publication model to be web-first, just to remain competitive with the “amateur” journalists on who run their own news blogs.

For readers, online content is wonderful. For most smaller newspapers, however, it’s pretty much the kiss of death. After all, most smaller papers are humble affairs, and rely on one of the various wire services, such as the Associated Press, for their national and international content. It’s the exact same content every other paper has, and since most of those papers are online, there’s no reason to bother paying for a copy of the local daily paper. Not surprisingly, people don’t.

The result is that print-based publications are dying — or, more accurately, running out of money. After all, newspapers make their money from selling advertisements (subscriptions and newsstand prices are more a means to offset the cost of distribution), and many advertisers aren’t exactly wowed when they hear that a newspaper’s circulation numbers are dropping. And since costs are going up for newspapers — paper is more expensive, rising gas prices mean rising distribution costs — ad rates have to go up, even while the number of readers is plummeting.

Increased focus on web-advertising has helped (as have things like GoogleAds), but most newspapers are still carrying expenses from their pre-internet business models. There’s the cost of creating and distributing the physical paper, the cost of having layout artists to make the paper look good while still fitting the content to the confines of the page, the cost of paying people to manage the subscriptions — and that’s just scratching the surface.

Not surprisingly, chain-owned daily newspapers have been slashing their budgets and cutting staff for the last three years, just to stay in the black. The general public doesn’t often hear about these cuts, largely because the newspaper industry — ironically — often doesn’t report on it. For most people in mainstream, print-based publishing, these are dark days. (If you’d like to learn more about this trend, NewspaperDeathWatch.com is a good place to start.)

But what does that have to do with the Spartanburg Journal, a paper that isn’t owned by a major chain and isn’t reliant on national news content? Isn’t this post supposed to be about how they’re going to go under if they don’t start putting their content online?

Don’t worry, I’m getting there.

You see, when I said that print was dying, I intentionally overlooked something. On the whole, publications with a print-based readership are dying, but there’s an exception. Locally oriented newspapers — alternative newsweekies and independent daily papers in particular — are doing just fine. The Spartanburg Journal follows the model of an alternative weekly newspaper, and for the time being, that model still works.

After all, there’s still one thing you can’t easily get online — local news. If you want local news, you have to get what you can find. And, in the Spartanburg Journal‘s case, this means they’ve got something of a captive audience, their only competition being the daily paper. If you want good community reporting, you have to go to the Journal.

Or, more accurately, you’ve got to go one of the three related publications produced by Community Journals, LLC. Essentially, the Spartanburg Journal contains much of the same content as the Greenville Journal or the Anderson Journal, although each publication is presented as it’s own stand-alone product.

There’s nothing new about this — it’s a variation on the model the Creative Loafing chain has been using for the last two decades — but Community Journals does put a unique twist on their publications. Unlike most alternative newsweeklies, the Journal publications aren’t free. If you want to read their content, you’ve got to pay for a subscription or pay 50 cents at the newsstand. And since they don’t publish their content online, you can’t read it any of it if you don’t pay.

In a way, this is an interesting experiment. People want local and community news, and if they can’t get it for free online, a certain number of those people will be willing to pay 50 cents once a week to get it in print. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that the various Journal publications are actually doing quite well, largely because they’ve developed a readership and are expanding into markets filled with potential readers and advertisers who are desperate for the kind of content they provide.

But that’s also a hint at the big problem, and the reason I suspect that the print-only model will ultimately fail. You see, print-only works very well as long as there’s no competition. Since the only real competition for the Journal are a handful of exceptionally mediocre independent papers and struggling chain-owned daily ones, they’ve found a nice niche for themselves. It’s only when someone else starts offering the same kind of content for free — both in print and online — that the model starts to break down.

Unfortunately, that’s exactly what the Spark‘s ultimate goals are. That’s also, indirectly speaking, the goal of many local bloggers — to have visitors and to be an important voice in the community. It’s also the model the major chains are starting to focus on, retooling themselves as local web-portals rather than simply the local sellers of the AP’s goods. And it’s also very close to the ultimate goals of Google News, Yahoo, MSN and any number of other local news aggregation-ready sites.

Right now, I suspect that there are enough people willing to pay for what the Spartanburg Journal is selling. I can see why, too. By and large, I like the Journal‘s coverage. Their stories are generally better written than their competitors at the various local daily papers, and their print layouts are sharp and pleasing to look at. When it comes to overall mission, the Spark has much in common with Community Journal’s publications, which they eloquently state as: “At The Journal, we believe a newspaper should be an important proponent for the local community it covers.”

But how long will it be before even 50 cents is too much to ask for content people expect to get for free? In a few years, the idea of buying a newspaper at all will seem antiquated — kind of like sending a letter seems since the popularization of e-mail. Today’s newspapers are already starting to feel like expensive printouts of online content, and news — or rather, information — seems like it should be freely available online. There will always be people who prefer print, I suppose, but their numbers are shrinking by the day.

My feeling is that it’s only a matter of time before the Spartanburg Journal starts to feel the impact of this. My instinct is that it’s only a matter of a few years before their revenue starts to decline massively, largely because their former readers are looking elsewhere for information and no longer feel that the cover price is worth it. Their readership will decline, and with it, their circulation numbers. And with that, there will be less advertisers who see the paper as a sound investment — particularly when, say, a free weekly newspaper with a smaller staff and a larger web-presence is offering the same thing (not to mention web-advertising options) for a lower price due to their lesser overhead costs.

Which means that, in order to say competitive, the Journal will have to start publishing online as well. Only they’ll be years behind, and have to completely rework their publication model. In other words, they’ll be looking at the exact same situation the daily papers are, only it’ll be a bit delayed. And, in today’s publishing world, the last place you want to be is a few years behind the curve.

As a reader, I was astounded when I learned that the Spartanburg Journal didn’t publish online. As a member of the news media for most of the last decade (much of that in an administrative role in papers smart enough to look forward to the web, rather than backwards to print), I was stunned that they hadn’t even taken basic steps to make sure their web-presence was highly visible, even if their content wasn’t.

Want to see what I mean? Google “Spartanburg Journal,” and you won’t see anything specifically about the publication anywhere. You’ll see lots about the Spartanburg Herald-Journal, of course (who use a New York Times-developed content management system that essentially assures them high placement on search engines), and something about the Greenville Journal a few results down. If you happen to know that the Greenville and Spartanburg Journals are two branches of the same publication — and how many casual readers would? — you could follow that link and get to the news-free homepage of their publishing group, Community Journals, LLC. And that’s where the trail ends.

In essence, the Spartanburg Journal doesn’t exist online.

Even the Spartan Weekly offers more online content — and that should say something.

So, what’s my point with all this? It’s a warning, but a friendly one. I like the Spartanburg Journal, and even if the Spark is successful beyond my wildest hopes, there’d still be room in this market for both publications to thrive. I’d love to see a day when we compete for readers and I’m able to pit my (still hypothetical) editorial, advertising and distribution teams against theirs. But I can’t do that if they go out of business first, and I’m afraid that’s exactly what’s going to happen.