THOUGHT (aka Centric's Blog)

There’s a great moment in Citizen Kane where Charles Foster Kane’s money manager tells him that he’s blowing too much of his cash on his newspaper empire. Kane replies, “You’re right, I did lose a million dollars last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars next year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I’ll have to close this place in… 60 years.”

I kept thinking about that after reading this article about the return of private newspaper owners. As big media companies are selling off their less profitable limbs, wealty people are buying back their daily rags. This, I think, is a great idea, since nobody knows the local market like the locals. But then I read this and realized how doomed this enterprise is:

[John Brian] Tierney is betting the ranch that he can make the turnaround [of the Philadelphia Inquirer] work, and plans to invest an additional $60 million over the next three years in various improvements including more color printing, online features, marketing programs and implementing more creative ways of selling and printing ads.

Unless Tierney has something really brilliant in mind, he’d better have more money to burn than Charles Foster Kane. Or have the kinds of advertisers that only show up in the backs of alt-weeklies, ’cause newspapers, as much as I love ‘em, are dead in their current form

What’s the problem? Competition for attention, same as always. Or, rather, ways in which to spend that attention.

Here’s my daily routine: I’m up at 6, take a shower, have a quick breakfast, do any morning chores (water the tomatoes, check the tire pressure), then hit the road. It’s forty-five minutes to the office, and I listen to NPR until the signal’s gone. Then I get to work around 8, read some news sites and blogs for an hour, then get to work. I eat lunch at my desk, reading while I scarf down a burrito. Then I’m back in the car at 6 for another forty-five minutes, where I get home, make dinner, hang out with my wife, and collapse into blissful slumber.

Where would a newspaper fit into that? More importantly, how could a newspaper fit into that? What does it have that I don’t get from my blogroll? How can it do its thing while I’m sitting in traffic for an hour and a half each day? It can’t. My attention is elsewhere, and it’s spent in more efficient ways.

This isn’t a question of blog versus journalism (which is can of worms I’m not gonna touch with rented hands), but a question of information delivery. A newspaper, the printed object you buy out of those sturdy corner boxes, is no match for a blogroll of sorted, contextually related data.

However, there is something that a newspaper has that the Internet doesn’t: portability. Toss a paper under your arm, crumple it in your back pocket, spill coffee all over the thing: you can still read it, don’t have to reboot it, won’t have to change the batteries (though the copy you buy will be obsolete in twenty-four hours). If someone steals your paper, it’s a pain, but it’s not as painful as losing your laptop or smart phone.

So, how can papers like the Inky use this to their advantage? Print less.

Imagine this: you’re a Philadelphia commuter. You take the train every day. You get to the station, and there’s a fresh stack of this morning’s Inky, hot off the press. This edition is different from the one you know: it’s thinner, has no color and very few pictures, and, weirdest of all, it’s free. Absolutely free. You grab one just in time to make your train, then you start reading. Every story is short, little more than a summary. But it has a list of keywords at the end with a story slug, something like “city-council-sleeps.” The sports page is nothing more than box scores, and the comics? Forget it.

However, by the time you get to the office, you’ve got four or five of those story slugs running through your head. You fire up your browser and go to Philly.com where you’re greeted with a story index and a search box. You open up a story when you recognize the headline, type in the slug when you don’t. Now, not only do you get the entire story in all its detail, but you get links to related stories from the archives, plus links to blogs and sites that are commenting on this story. And all of this is stuff that you know and trust. Plus, the comics, now blown up in ridiculous detail.

And, yes, there are ads all over the place, but they don’t flash and take up three-quarters of the page. By the time your coffee’s cooled, you’re up to date with Philadelphia, the nation, and the world. Plus, you found out the Flyers stomped the hell out of New York with a series of beautiful power plays that replay in glorious color video.

On the way home, there’s an evening edition, a little slimmer than the morning, but full of stories that you can check out when you get home. There’s also a giant classified section that makes Craigslist look like a yard sale. And all of this costs you nothing but your attention.

So, how about it, Philly? You feel like trying something different? Or do you have money to burn?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 8th, 2006 at 7:10 pm and is filed under Ruminations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.