Week - 10:37 pm on Nov 26, 2004 (gmt 0)

Greetings:

I was deeply involved last year on a web news project with 400 newspapers across the county. I discovered how people read the news on the web.

Here's a number for you: 1.7
That's the average number of page views per user per day on the typical news site. WSJ, Yahoo, CNN, and (especially) NYT will be higher. But, not much. Five page views per user a day is considered wildly wonderful.

What does that mean? People go to the front page, read the headlines, and MAYBE go to one story that interest them.

I am now an editor of a newspaper. We are one of the few papers who do not put much on their web site. And it makes readers angry. They have to buy the newspaper. We will not even run a list of all of the stories we are running. They have to buy the newspaper.

This summer Associated Press launched an effort to develop a news search engine. "We feel news consumers deserve the most current and relevant information they can find online," was what Burl Osborne, chairman of the AP's board of directors, said. But what he meant was "to hell with free."

They put it this way. "We need greater protection from unlicensed use of our members' material online."
The AP is also developing tools that would help its members capture more online traffic and track usage of their content. I think they are wasting their time. Newspapers and AP need to pull their content off line. AP, which is a co-op of newspapers, needs to tell Yahoo to go jump in the lake.

I'm watching with interest the new micropayment systems, such as Peppercoin. But, tell me, with only 1.7 page views per visitor, how are you going to make that pay? Even if you tripled that several times, you'd not have the economic impact of print.

I subscribe to WSJ.com. Have for a couple of years. It costs me about $50 or so a year. I don't get the print version. I used to spend 20 or more with the WSJ print version, often at my desk during coffee. Now, I bet it averages 2 to 3 minutes. And, yeah, I use the filters to track news on what I'm interested in and read those. Those great features? I look at the headlines, but, nah, I don't bother.

There is nowhere near the serendipity of print with online. Print brings you stuff you didn't know you needed to know. Including the ads.

Print isn't going away. In J-school you learn propaganda theory. It a basic rule of communications: People remember the information, but they don't remember the source. It's why ads work as well as they do. ("Chevy is a great car!") Only print provides a serendipity where you can deliver messages in an affordable way.