Tom Davidson

Most of what I hate about the newspaper industry was encapsulated in a single session at the American Society of News (not Newspapers! Really!) Editors meeting in D.C. a few days ago. An otherwise smart agenda took the inevitable detour down the rabbit hole with yet another discussion of pay walls.

Walter Hussman, publisher of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in Little Rock, flogged his usual paywall-as-a-defense argument: In a world where online users are worth less than print readers, he seems to say don’t bother with the former. “Why would I want to be platform agnostic when I can get (ad rates of) $40 (per thousand print readers) instead of $4?”

 I was reminded of two recent, similar quotes:

•  An analysis ascribed to Washington Post president Steven Hills in a devastating New Republic piece on the paper’s woes: Post print readers are worth $500 a year in revenue; online readers are worth only $6.
• Rupert Murdoch’s assertion that users will cough up for online content: “When they’ve got nowhere else to go they’ll start paying.”  

Hussman and Hills are both falling for the same “defense first!” mentality that has crippled innovation at newspapers. They’re implicitly assume print readership will stay the same forever (it isn’t ), and that print ad revenues will maintain, too (they aren’t).

Rupert is making an even bigger mistake. He assumes “nowhere else to go,” conveniently forgetting that his media empire was built on expensive printing plants and government broadcast licenses, each of which makes competition economically unfeasible.

Clearly, Rupe hasn’t noticed that those monopolies are gone (or maybe he’s blustering). Local television stations are emerging as real competitors  to newspaper sites in many markets. Some, like Allbritton Communications in Washington, are building separate sites to target niches and general news. And there are plenty of independent  local  sites, with new ones springing up all the time. On their own, they may not seem formidable. But enough of them in a community could ruin a local newspaper publisher’s day. No wonder potential entrepreneurs are licking their chops.

 (The ease of publishing via free services like WordPress  and Blogger are a key reason that “information wants to be free.” More on that, including some semi-geeky economic theory, another day.)

 If competition makes paywalls nothing more than defense (and the numbers sure seem to make that case), then what’s a better answer? What gets at Hussman and Hills’ arguments that print readers are worth more?

Let’s take this out of the emotional world of change for a second, and into the dispassionate world of math. Everyone remember the commutative and associative properties from third grade?

If your print readers are worth 10 times your online users, then work to get 10 times the number of online users. You’ll make the same amount of money. (Actually, you’ll end up with more – production costs are lower on digital platforms. No paper, no trucks.)

Daunting? Sure. Simply regurgitating your print product in digital formats won’t grow your audience ten times. No single product will, either.

But a network of niche products is part of the answer.

So is good app for the iPad (and don’t forget the waves of similar devices that are sure to follow).

It also means forcing the business side of the house to think clearly and execute.  And it means engaging in biz-side thinking ourselves.

If our goal is to grow our audiences again – not merely milk the ones we have – we have to engage consumers. We have to give them what they want, when, where and how they want it.

Yes, it’s not easy. Innovation never is.

But doing nothing – or hiding behind a paywall – merely guarantees a slow, lingering death for newspapers. That’s unfair to shareholders, to employees – and ultimately to the communities we serve.

Much kerfuffle – and more derision than warranted – erupted earlier this week when the New York Observer reported that Newsday has sold only 35 online-access subscriptions since it walled off the site last October.

There was astonishment at the low numbers:

“Michael Amon, a social services reporter, asked for clarification. “I heard you say 35 people,” he said, from Newsday’s auditorium in Melville. “Is that number correct?” [Publisher Terry] Jimenez nodded.

There was hand-wringing: The Observer’s John Koblin archly observed that Newsday.com’s relaunch and redesign last year cost $4 million … to gross $9,000 in revenue.

That analysis is technically correct, and utterly wrong. Ultimately, that’s why neither side in the Great Paywall Religious War should waste any time thinking about it.

Newsday’s pay wall isn’t about making online-subscription revenue. It’s only partially an attempt to protect print circulation. It’s all about protecting one of the most lucrative businesses around – high-speed Internet access.

The paywall rules first: The only people who get unfettered access to newsday.com are Newsday print subscribers (there’s the modest defense for print circ) and/or subscribers to the Optimum Online high-speed Internet service provided by Cablevision, Newsday’s owner.

Let’s do the math that the Observer, the grumblers in the Newsday newsroom, and just about every blogger out there didn’t bother to do. (I was hoping Alan Mutter would do it for me – lord knows he’s great at it – but he was writing about the iPad today.)

First, understand the economics of the cable-television business: Most of the costs are in stringing the wire past your house. (Lump in the copper or fiber itself, the equipment back at the cable headend and the labor to keep it all running.)

Depending on how tightly houses are packed, it all can run from a few hundred to as much as $1,500 “per household passed” in cable slang.

Oh – Cablevision pays that whether you subscribe or not. Every neighborhood they try to serve is a massive sunk cost.

Now let’s look at the revenue side of the cable business: A subscriber in my wife’s ancestral homeland of Massapequa might pay $50 a month for basic cable. But Cablevision has to share that revenue with the programmers – a few pennies per month per subscriber for niche channels like National Geographic, but more than $3 a month for behemoths like ESPN. Basic cable is a nice business, but not an obscene one.

The obscene ones are those the cable companies entered in the last decade: digital telephone service, and high-speed Internet. They had to upgrade their wiring – and for a company like Cablevision, that meant shelling out billions. But once they did, they could offer bundles of service with essentially zero added cost.

Think about that for a second: They already paid for the wires past your house. If they can get you to sign up, they collect $30 to $40 a month for high-speed Internet. Their cost? A few pennies in FCC fees (oh, wait – they add those onto your bill!), a few more pennies to print the bill (oh, wait – they’re bribing you to “go green!”), maybe 40 bucks once for the cable modem (that’s why they give it to you!).

Let’s round it down and say that every Cablevision high-speed customer is worth $400 a year in profit.

That’s a fabulous business. Until, say, Verizon FiOS comes to town with a competitive product.

So the math gets really simple: If FiOs can convince a mere 100,000 people on Long Island to switch, Cablevision loses $40 million a year in profits.

If you’re Cablevision, you use every tool at your disposal to stop that. Even the blunt cudgel of a pay wall at Newsday.

I have no particular love for the spinmeisters at Cablevision, but the math backs up their words: the paywall strategy at Newsday is designed “to provide Cablevision’s high-speed Internet customers with reasons to remain with Cablevision, reasons to return to Cablevision, or reasons to choose Cablevision.”