If nostalgia were a business model, Dean Starkman might be a CEO and his company might make tons of money.
But nostalgia doesn’t work in the news business the way it does for the History Channel. And besides, the good, old days Starkman wants to take newspapers back to never actually existed.
My initial reaction to Starkman’s latest rant for Columbia Journalism Review was that I couldn’t and shouldn’t address it here:
I’m pondering a response to this Dean Starkman paywall valentine, but I can’t find a coherent point in it to address. bit.ly/WHOFBW
— Steve Buttry (@stevebuttry) October 8, 2012
But Steve Myers helped me out:
@stevebuttry This looks like it to me: “I say the free news model is designed to produce volume. Who wants to seriously argue otherwise?”
— Steve Myers (@myersnews) October 8, 2012
I respect Steve a lot and I respected CJR for decades. I learned this biz in the old school when CJR was an important voice in journalism and merited a response. So I took another read. As close as I can tell from a piece that desperately needed the attention of an old-school editor, these are Starkman’s points:
- A newspaper site with a paywall “is incentivized to produce journalism that someone might actually want to pay for.”
- News sites that don’t charge for access become mere whores for page views, with no incentives to provide quality journalism.
- In an earlier post that likened free sites to a “hamster wheel,” Starkman contended (and repeated in this week’s piece) a notion that free sites lower the bar for publication in their hunger for page views: “More content generates more traffic, which hopefully means higher ad rates.”
- Voluminous journalism = bad journalism.
Starkman’s argument is wrong on multiple levels:
- Charging for content didn’t ensure quality in the print heyday. Lots of lousy newspapers charged as much for their subscriptions as good newspapers did.
- Charging for content doesn’t ensure quality online. Starkman admits as much with a gratuitous shot at Gannett, which put paywalls around its sites, which are not all good. But the fact is that all of the news sites with paywalls employ fewer journalists than they used to. They are erecting paywalls in hopes of slowing erosion of their news staffs. I guess Starkman speculates that the paywalls provide an incentive to the journalists that remain. He certainly does not cite any examples of CEOs who beefed up their news staffs in response to this supposed incentive.
- Starkman is absolutely right that attracting lots of traffic matters in the free-access news sites. But he’s wrong if he thinks there’s anything unique about that. I got an email yesterday with detailed analysis of the traffic metrics for a MediaNews Group site with a paywall. (Though Digital First Media CEO John Paton has been critical of paywalls, we have about two dozen sites with paywalls, erected before John took charge). I remember hearing and receiving reports on metrics my whole career. Those metrics used to relate to single-copy sales rather than to particular stories. More than 30 years ago, we did a special street-rack edition of the Des Moines Register with a banner headline to boost single-copy sales. I still remember my story that was on Page One the week the Omaha World-Herald reached its top circulation figure for 1997. (I was pretty sure it was my story that sold all those papers, not the Nebraska Cornhuskers’ “Miracle in Missouri.”) We’ve always cared about views, even when we couldn’t count the views on specific stories. Starkman is naïve if he thinks paywalls will shift the emphasis away from page views. Paywalls drive down your page views, but with fewer views, you absolutely want to be sure that people who are paying are clicking and what they are clicking on.
- “More content” doesn’t mean worse journalism. For instance, in covering events a print-focused newsroom provides a summary story. Digital First newsrooms are increasingly liveblogging events, providing more content and greater depth. If by “more content,” Starkman means more stories, I’m sure that journalism is appreciated by the people in the community whose stories are not getting covered in the paywall newsrooms that supposedly don’t care about volume.
- I discuss quality journalism with my DFM newsroom colleagues way more often than we discuss volume. We care — a lot — about traffic. But we also care — a lot — about quality journalism, and we think quality journalism will result in traffic if we execute it well and promote it effectively. (Starkman’s assumption that quality journalism won’t result in traffic is profoundly insulting to the public.) I’m running a DFM awards program to recognize quality work. The awards don’t distinguish between our sites with paywalls and those without. Because that business decision is irrelevant to the journalists’ commitment to quality.
- As Mathew Ingram pointed out, lots of outstanding journalism is being performed by free sites such as Wired, The Atlantic and Huffington Post.
Myers likened free news sites to TV:
@stevebuttry Remember how newspaper reporters would look down at TV reporters for the stories they’d do? You can draw a connection b/t…(1/2)
— Steve Myers (@myersnews) October 9, 2012
@stevebuttry (2/2) their biz model (ads based on ratings) and the journalism. So a fairQ to ask of CPM-based sites.
— Steve Myers (@myersnews) October 9, 2012
@stevebuttry As for JRC specifics in his post, I haven’t looked at them so I can’t speak to that. I’m talking about click-driven journalism.
— Steve Myers (@myersnews) October 9, 2012
Ivan Lajara and Jeff Jarvis made their own TV comparisons:
@stevebuttry response is, ’60 Minutes’ is free and quality. How? MAGIC!
— Ivan Lajara (@ivanlajara) October 8, 2012
@deanstarkman I say again: is 60 Minutes shite? Quality. Large audience. Advertising. Plenty o’ ego.
— Jeff Jarvis (@jeffjarvis) October 8, 2012
Another point from Steve:
@stevebuttry I read that post and thought he had a valid point. There’s a serious Q here: How much does the biz model affect the journalism?
— Steve Myers (@myersnews) October 8, 2012
The business model absolutely does affect the journalism. A lot. The old print business model’s decline in advertising caused a drop in newspaper newsrooms of more than 14,000 journalists from 2005 to 2011, according to the annual census of the American Society of News Editors. That has had a huge impact on journalism.
I haven’t seen any reports about newsrooms with paywalls hiring more journalists and paying them more. I hope their paywalls are so successful that they begin hiring more and better journalists. But to this point, Starkman’s notion that paywalls are structured to deliver better journalism is based on wishful thinking, not on any actual facts that he cited.
I believe when Digital First reaches the crossover point, where our growth in digital revenue exceeds our decline in print revenue, I expect that we will grow our newsroom staffs, like growing companies do. The business model that will produce better journalism is the business model that can best afford to hire, retain and reward good journalists.
We’re seeing lots of experimentation in journalism now and in the business models to support it. As far as I can see, everyone involved in the experimentation, whether I agree with their approach or not, is seeking a way to support both quality and quantity in journalism, and all of those approaches will seek to generate traffic as well as revenue. Time will tell which approaches work the best.
I’m pretty confident, though, that the successful approaches won’t be based on wishful thinking or nostalgia.
I will email Starkman, inviting him to respond. If he does, I will add the response here.
Update: Trevor Hughes of Gannett’s newsroom in Fort Carson, Colo., responded:
@stevebuttry respectfully, the @coloradoan has digital subs model, and we’re hiring additional staff. It’s cornerstone of the @jawtry plan.
— Trevor Hughes (@TrevorHughes) October 9, 2012
I asked for details and will add them here as I get them. Of course, Gannett’s newsroom cuts have been severe. So I presume my statement about newsrooms with paywalls being smaller than they used to me will remain true.
Here’s Editor Josh Awtry’s post on his latest hire, an engagement editor.
Update: Paul Bradshaw has an excellent take on this topic as well.
Update: Starkman has replied to me and several others who have discussed his post (it’s comment #13; CJR doesn’t have URLs for each comment). Some excerpts that apply to what I wrote here (with my comments in italics):
This is not about whether good work is done on free sites. It’s not about whether paid sites can be bad. It’s about structure and incentives.
All of you arguing that pay sites don’t “ensure” quality are quite correct. Unfortunately, that’s not the argument I made.
If supposed incentives for quality don’t produce quality, then they don’t work well as incentives, do they?
Steve, I think your post talks past my point, as Steve Myers suggests. Folks can judge for themselves.
Here’s the tweet from Myers that Starkman linked to:
@stevebuttry @deanstarkman Mostly I think Steve is making a case for editorial leadership rather than the influence of the biz model.
— Steve Myers (@myersnews) October 9, 2012
I did make some points about editorial leadership, but I also directly addressed Starkman’s points as I understood them (I noted that the points were not very clear). Several paragraphs directly address business model issues.
For those who want to believe I’m nostalgic for an earlier time or don’t like technology, I’ll quote Jaron Lanier: “…[A]s people become more sophisticated about digital technologies, they understand that criticizing a particular digital design doesn’t make one antitechnological.”
I didn’t say that Starkman was nostalgic for an earlier time. I said he was nostalgic for a time that never existed. I didn’t say that he doesn’t like technology.
I appreciate the response.
The biggest flaw in Starkman’s point is that he expects publishers to behave logically. To me, paywalls only make sense if the publisher truly puts a premium on quality. There’s absolutely no evidence I’ve heard of that anyone is doing that. When revenue drops, the first thing publishers want to do is cut expense budgets, staff and pay. And how high are those with paywalls setting the rates at the moment? Not high at all. If they believed in the “value” of their content, they would run their business – both print and online – as if what they are selling is the content. Paywall advocates say it makes no sense to give your product away, but publishers all but give away their print product for free anyway. A friend of mine gets the Washington Post delivered for 14 cents a day. FOURTEEN CENTS! At least the Post is not among those screaming about giving away the valuable product online for free. If you feel your product is worth something, really CHARGE for it or else shut up about how valuable it is and admit you are in the advertising business and the product you sell is your audience.
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[…] The business model absolutely does affect the journalism. A lot. The old print business model’s decline in advertising caused a drop in newspaper newsrooms of more than 14,000 journalists from 2005 to 2011, according to the annual census of the American Society of News Editors. That has had a huge impact on journalism. I haven’t seen any reports about newsrooms with paywalls hiring more journalists and paying them more. I hope their paywalls are so successful that they begin hiring more and better journalists. But to this point, Starkman’s notion that paywalls are structured to deliver better journalism is based on wishful thinking, not on any actual facts that he cited. […]
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[…] or click-whoring approach, I tried to point out — as Steve Buttry of Digital First Media does in his response to the latest CJR piece — that there are a number of good examples of free or advertising-based journalism that is of […]
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