According to an article in the New York Times, the Lancaster Newspapers will be in the vanguard of regional newspapers charging for online access.
The Times reports,
“’We’re starting small, so if this really turns people off, we’re not playing with a huge chunk of our readership,’ said Ernest J. Schreiber, editor of the Lancaster paper’s Web site, LancasterOnline.com. The site has been using and adapting the Press+ software for a while. He said it would go into effect in a month or two'”.
“’We have news that no one else has, like these obituaries,’ Mr. Schreiber said. ‘We would eventually take other sections of our online content into the system. I’m thinking local sports, perhaps’.”
“Mr. Schreiber said he and his colleagues in Lancaster have no fear of playing guinea pig. If charging online turns out to be a mistake, the paper will just move on to the next experiment. The Times concludes the article with Schreiber saying “Given the industry’s troubles, ‘doing nothing is not an option,” he said. “The sooner we can do it, the sooner we can find something that works.’”
Certain national and international newspapers such as the Financial Times of London and the Wall Street Journal believe it possible to charge visitors for access due to the unique value of their financial coverage. What the Lancaster Newspapers will be testing is whether unique news concerning local events also can be monetarized.
Newspapers such as the LA Times and the Washington Post have had to drastically reduce their scope of news coverage as a result of reduction in advertising, increased costs, and, in some cases, drop in circulation. Almost all newspapers have found their profits dwindling and their very future existence brought into question.
One of the first things to suffer has been investigatory reporting, one of the sinews of a free society. Also without streams of revenue from the consumer, newspapers become altogether dependent upon the whims and good will of advertisers, which is also not in the public interest.
NewsLanc wishes the Lancaster Newspapers good fortune with the experiment. An economically healthy, vigorous press earning revenue from subscribers as well as advertisers is in the best interest of the citizenry.
Obituaries aren’t news; they’re advertising. That’s paid content.
If I was over at WGAL, I’d be celebrating this move – and trying to figure out a way to put obituaries on the WGAL website, free to the funeral home, free to the reader, and some nice advertising from funeral homes, churches, and flower shops on the pages. They’re getting a little funeral home and flower shop advertising on their broadcast, and none from local churches, and this would be a way for them to enhance their revenue stream.
Come to think of it, perhaps NewsLanc might like to expand their news coverage to more “hard news” like this, to balance out the opinions. It wouldn’t be hard to set up an application where funeral homes could enter obituaries into a password-protected page, so that it’s relatively painless for everyone.
Mr. Schreiber should have been left go when the newspaper had a chance. His failure as a newspaper visionary was evident immediately upon his ascension to the editorship of the New Era.
That the paper would put this establishment-genuflecting, intellectual light-weight in charge of their
online operation demonstrates just how much the dinosaurs in charge at LNP are victims of truism, “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king”
I can hear them now, “That youngster Ernie really knows alot about the ‘intger’ net, let’s put him in charge of that!”