Well-Run News Sites Can Drive Readers Back to Print Product
By
Tania Valdemoro
Cauthorn delivers the keynote speech of the seminar. |
Bob Cauthorn, the charismatic former vice president of digital media at the San Francisco Chronicle, goes against the grain of newspaper naysayers who have been predicting the demise of old-fashioned journalism. In fact, he says, the future of journalism in America has never been brighter.
“Every meaningful development in newspapers happened between 1895 and 1922,” he told a group of journalists attending a Western Knight Center seminar on the business of online journalism. And now that digital journalism is poised to compete with print distribution both economically and journalistically, journalists are getting a golden opportunity “to reinvent what journalism is all about,” Cauthorn said.
Cauthorn predicted the coming of the age of online journalism, and recommended that media corporations look to their online departments to help them recover from years of lost readership and revenues.
“Newspaper ad revenues are flat, and online is growing at astonishing rates,” he told the attendees. “Within the next few years, some papers’ online units will report greater revenues than their circulation revenues. Actually, it will happen this year. I know the papers, and I can’t reveal them now. But it will happen this year.”
And for Cauthorn, it couldn’t happen soon enough. He thinks the core values of the newspaper—the traditional role it played in defending and informing the public—have been lost in circulation battles and other gimmicks to sell news. In the process, the very essence of most newspapers has been tarnished, if not completely stamped out.
“Newspapers are losing their soul, and it’s the online teams that are the hope of the future,” he said.
Cauthorn said that the industry is entering an era of post mass media—television and radio no longer have that role, he said, and newspapers won’t be able to wear that mantle for much longer. And what are the up-and-comers that might eventually take over? How about Yahoo and Google, Cauthorn suggested.
The problem for newspapers is that they have been giving away their product for so long they have devalued the readers’ sense of what it’s worth. Trying to charge for online news when you are giving away expensive print copies is a hopeless and ill-conceived strategy, he said.
“They keep coming up with ways to give away the newspaper and call it circulation,” Cauthorn said. “But if you think we’re going to make money by selling access to general news online, then you’re smoking more crack than the people of San Francisco.”
Cauthorn’s analysis and predictions regarding the growing role of online journalism comes from having done it. Literally. He took over the online unit of the San Francisco Chronicle in 2000 and made it profitable within two years—at a time when most newspapers saw the money from their digital units in a one-way flow chart going out the door.
When he started, 66 percent of the Chronicle’s readers were online customers only. When he quit the company in April, research showed that 77,000 online readers had gone back to reading the print newspaper as well.
And that, more than anything else, is Cauthorn’s message: Online units can drive readers back to the newspaper. Online units can help the print newspaper better serve readers by reporting back what stories get attention and how readers really use the news.
Newspapers have not done enough to court readers, he warned. If you read the papers from each of the major cities in the US, they all look alike, Cauthorn said, and they all play the same stories on the front page. Where the papers have failed readers, and where digital editions have made huge inroads, is in the selection and presentation of stories.
More than ever, he said, the newspaper industry needs more research and development.
“It’s a shame to note this statistic, but the dairy industry spends more on R&D for yogurt than the newspaper industry spends on itself,” he said. “We know everything there is to know about yogurt,” he said, but we don’t know enough about how people read the news.
“Readers today are opportunistic, not ritualistic,” he said. They want to be surprised, and not told what they should think is important. For example, when the Columbia shuttle exploded over Texas, most newspapers and their Web sites ran full pages of stories about it.
When Cauthorn noticed traffic numbers were dropping at SFGate.com, he realized that readers were growing tired of the story, so they shuffled their front page and began offering stories other than the shuttle explosion. And it worked.
“The 25-year-olds weren’t that interested in it,” he said. “For them, it was like seven people dying in a Cessna crash. It just wasn’t a big deal.”
The trick, he said, is to mix things up. Readers want features, in addition to breaking news, and they like to do things other than read stories. “Occupy them with other things,” Cauthorn said, noting that a good reader will spend 25 to 30 minutes on a site, “so make the most of it. If you want to move people back to the newspaper, you have to earn their attention.”
Other facts Cauthorn noted that support the public’s acceptance of online media:
- 68 percent of America is online.
- 90 percent of 16-to-24-year-olds are online—a higher number than America’s literacy rate. “We have more people online than people who can actually read.”
- 37 percent of Americans now have broadband connections.
- The Internet penetration rate is so high now that there’s “no longer a distinction between those who use online as a general medium and the general population. The only determining factor anymore is income levels.”
- A recent UCLA study on fragmentation found that in 1965, one could reach 80 percent of 18-to-24-year-olds in the U.S. with three 60-second TV spots. In 2002, to reach that same targeted audience, one would have to buy 117 primetime spots.
Readers are moving to the Internet, and now the industry itself needs to better appreciate the value newspapers’ online departments.
“No newspaper in America is Net-aware,” Cauthorn said. “And you know why? 'Cause no newspaper company has been smart enough to take online people and make them publishers.” |
