Not Quite The Best Of Both Worlds

I love newspapers.  I love blogs.  And I think the news industry should continue to embrace both.  At the same time, newspapers and blogs are different – very different.  And while both add significant value to the world, they should not be mistaken for one another.

That is a short way of saying that I am not impressed by The Printed Blog — a Chicago start-up that plans to reprint blog posts on regular paper, surrounded by local ads, and distribute the publications free in big cities.  The New York Times profiled the idea this morning.

Three quick points:

1) The publisher of The Blog Paper, Joshua Karp, explaines “There were so many techniques that I’ve seen working online that maybe I could apply to the print industry.”  It is true, there are wonderful things happening online – in the news space, as well as elsewhere.  But there is a reason they are happening online, and it has more to do with how people get and share information, and what differs when they do that online compared to other formats, that is important to understand.  Simply because something worked online doesn’t mean that you can transfer it over to the print realm (just as the newspaper industry has learned they can’t take what they have done in print and simply make it available online and succeed in the same ways).

2) “There’s a huge readership that wants the local news, and local businesses tend to increase their advertising in bad times because they have to capture people’s attention.”  Again, I absolutely agree.  But there are two critical things that are being overlooked.  First, what readers expect out of local news is different than what they expect out of blogs.  I have been a strong advocate for more local news, and more local voices, finding their way into newspapers — online and in print — but its not going to work to simply take blog content and present it as reporting.  Is The Blog Paper going to apply editorial judgment, or oversight, to its contributors?  Will the bloggers take it upon themselves to ensure not only comprehensive, but accurate and unbiased coverage of local events?  Second, one of the reasons that advertising works online is because it is immediately actionable — you can relate an opportunity from an advertiser to a piece of relevant content and give a reader/user the chance to get more information or complete a transaction with minimal effort.  In print, the level of effort required to take action is much greater (e.g. you can’t click on a newspaper) and thus the response to the advertising is limited.

3) Mr. Karp expects he can make his business work by combining the best of the print and Web models.  That is absolutely what needs to happen for the news industry to survive — but its not the combination of the tactical or functional elements of both worlds that will create a better news product, its the value of the content and the quality of the overall experience.  For example, one of the benefits of blogs is that you can post comments and engage in discussion — but you can’t do that in newsprint, certainly not in real time.  Part of the challenge for newspapers is that information is now available almost instantly online, so by the time a print edition is released the content is often outdated.  Even if you print twice a day, as The Blog Paper plans, most people will have already know what is happening in the world by the time they pick up a copy.

The Blog Paper has stumbled onto the idea that the public wants more need for editorial voice, and context in the coverage of events in our local communities.  That is true, but there is no single strategy for accomplishing that.  Blogs don’t replace the value of journalism and news coverage, just as local news coverage doesn’t do what blogs do in terms of offering opinion and bias (in the good way).  Rather than print on its own, to be successful, the Blog Paper should do the work of aggregating – and editing, and enhancing – blog commentary around key issues, and align with local newspapers to include that content.  If the newspapers themselves can’t, or won’t, merge the world in the appropriate way, the two operations can align to do it via partnership.  Accompanying local news coverage of issues should be blog commentary that helps to put it into context.  Picking up where the print newspapers fall short – in terms of reach, or timing (e.g. things that happen after the paper goes to print) can be supplemented, in all formats, by the community of bloggers.  When relevant advertising is placed near the content, and across the print and online channels, the reader will have everything they want — and the publishers will make money.

The team at the Blog Paper is smart to try and move the industry in a new direction, and to try and make money by merging the best of the online and traditional content worlds.  But they haven’t quite grasped the complexity of the news experience from the readers’ perspective yet, and their solution is too narrowly focused.  I hope that they succeed, and in doing so show thew newspaper publishers of the world that there are other ways to think about their mission.  And I hope the lessons from the newspaper industry trickle down to their work, so The Blog Paper team can quickly adapt their model to meet the readers’ needs (and not just create a platform for advertisers) in the ways that newspapers do still succeed.

Can’t wait to see how it turns out.