Around the Web links about Print product

You can read this on two levels. Scott Hollifield, editor of a small community daily in North Carolina, writes an entertaining column about what happens when his neighbor’s paper ends up on her roof. It’s a fun read as he takes you through what she’ll miss if she never sees that paper – everything from a local crime story to feature pictures of a circus train coming through town to her horoscope to the daily adventures of Snuffy Smith (If you’re under 30, don’t even try to understand who that is). In other words, as he was looking at his neighbor’s paper on the roof, he wasn’t looking at a delivery snafu … he was looking at a slice of community life his neighbor would never experience unless he got his circulation folk to deliver another paper. The column is a fun read, but it reminds us of what we’re all about – we are not just producing a product for profit, we are also chronicling the life of a community. And with every edition, we need to prepare a one-minute elevator speech that goes something like this: “Did you see today’s/yesterday’s paper? Then here’s what you missed: “We told you why our schools are cutting three positions from the teaching faculty, we showed you some great images of Pastor Jackson helping his kids build a snowman, we printed several letters of people sniping at each other about moving the date of the county fair, we provided the only pre-season rundown of the girls’ basketball team written anywhere in the world and we gave you enough ads to save you thousands of dollars. And that’s just for starters….” In other words, what we’re doing matters to the community. And like this editor in North Carolina, we need to tell our readers what they’re missing when they miss the paper.

So let’s assume somebody wants to set up an Internet-only competitor for your newspaper. Something that could deliver the same types of news you do, just online. A competitor for advertising dollars. Someone who would offer the news and photos and videos of your community, and probably at no cost to readers. You know how much it might cost another newspaper to come into town and set up a duplicate version of your operation – but how much would it cost an Internet start-up to come in and do exactly what you do, but do it online? Warren Webster, president of AOL’s Patch, which is doing just that, has a figure: 4.1 percent of what you are spending now, to duplicate everything you’re doing on the Web. Aaaarrrrgh! Check out this article. (And by the way: I talked with an editor at Patch last month, and she said they are already in the initial stages of getting ready to enter the Texas market.)

This isn’t a quick read, but it’s one you should probably make time for. It’s a scholarly study by Scott Maier in the j-school at Oregon, and it compares the content of five prominent Web news sites to a cross-section of U.S. daily newspapers. Here’s a sample of the results from Maier’s conclusions: “In a time of turmoil for the press, this study’s findings offer a refreshingly positive perspective for newspapers—at least from the standpoint of content. Clearly, newspapers provide a product that offers depth and breadth unmatched by their online competition. This is a selling point that has not been made strongly enough by the press. With most major stories authored by named staff, newspapers also boast a high degree of story ownership and transpar¬ency—attributes largely missing from some of the nation’s most prominent online services. In sum, newspapers have good reason to boast that they offer in-depth, independent news unrivaled even in the digital age. The findings also underscore some of the strengths of online news. Read¬ers who now get their news on the computer rather than at their doorstep are not likely to miss out on the big stories of the day. The study showed that both newspapers and online news services shared similar news judgments regarding news topics and story prominence. But reflecting the Internet’s international audience, readers online are likely to get a broader picture of what’s happening around the world than do those who exclusively read newspapers, as well as a slightly heavier dose of analysis and opinion.”

Here's a statistic to share with your advertisers: Newspapers are still the main medium that influences the buying decisions of 59% of adults. That's according to data released by NAA, which contain a wealth of interesting stats about how newspapers readers are affected by advertising. The first link, to MediaPost, has some analysis with the highlights of the data. The second link is to a news release on NAA's site with the numbers.

John Zogby writes in his regular Forbes column about research data that suggest many news consumers trust online over print. Why? Zogby suggests it has to do with the deep-rooted perception bias. It's hard to apply his conclusions to community newspapers, but the survey results are still eye opening.

Editor & Publisher's Fitz & Jen are reporting on a report from Moody’s Investors Service that takes newspapers to task over their cost structures. The report notes that 70 percent of newspaper costs are tied up in printing -- not the best cost structure in the online era.

This writer finally did it -- he gave up his daily newspaper subscription in favor of getting his news online. Even if you don't encounter a lot of folk with this dilemma, what he has done will be more and more common. So take the time to read Mark Glaser's blog post, Kicking Ink: The Struggles of a Print Newspaper Unsubscriber.