Media += Digital

Your newspaper is Seth Godin's Meatball Sundae -- full of valuable stuff, but not a product anyone wants to buy.

I hear the same sentiment from executives all over the media industry, and especially from newspapers. “We deserve to get paid for our content.”

Dear Media Executives: You’re doing it wrong!

The reason so many newspapers are sinking, shrinking, or stinking is that they have totally forgotten what the source of value for their business really is. Somehow they got confused by the 20th century mass production model and deluded themselves into thinking of content as a product that they package and sell.

The business of media has never been about production of anything. Not newspapers. Not radio waves. Not content. The business of media is about connecting people. It’s about building relationships.

Content is just a tool we use to build relationships.

When you treat content as a product, your focus is placed on the transaction, and the relationship gets ignored. A transaction, in isolation, does nothing to establish a relationship, to build trust. That trust, that relationship, is what makes the attention of your readers (or viewers or listeners) so valuable to advertisers. Without it, you are just a commodity, and business will go to the lowest bidder. This is the reason that ads are becoming less effective and CPMs are dropping.

The reason we produce content is to establish that trusting relationship with our community by providing them with something valuable for free. I intentionally use the word “community” and not “audience” here, because audience implies that we talk and they listen. In the 21st century more than ever, the relationship we as media companies have with our community has to go both ways. We must also listen and help others be heard. These activities are essential to establish a trusting relationship.

Many newspaper executives are up in arms about falling subscription revenues, and want to replace that revenue by charging for content online. But they are missing the point. Subscription revenue was never an end in itself, it was a proxy for measuring the value of the relationships we had created. Newspapers don’t necessarily need to replace that revenue, but they do need a new way to measure the value of the relationships they maintain. I don’t think charging for access to web sites serves that goal.

The language we use around advertising is broken as well. We talk about selling inventory and picking up remnants, as if communication were a physical good. But what we are really doing is facilitating conversations between businesses in our community and their (potential) customers. The conversations we enable create value for the whole community, some of which we capture as revenue.

The mass market, mass media mindset has run rampant over our community institutions. Our local media (newspaper, TV, and radio alike), now seem to be more concerned with attracting eyeballs than with helping people. Eyeballs have very little value. People have uncountable value. And when people are being treated as a commodity, they notice. They don’t like it. They take their eyeballs elsewhere.

As media, we talk, we listen, and we facilitate conversations. These three activities taken together are the essence of a media business. Take heed, old media. Talking is not a product, no matter how valuable it is what you are saying. If all your business does is talk, you will fail. If you want to succeed, then establish trust and build relationships in your community.

One business model for online news that has been suggested, tried, and failed, is to make the news free for some short time, and then archive it behind a pay-wall. There is more than one reason why this doesn’t work as a business model, but the most obvious one is an old adage that should have been well known in the newspaper industry: yesterday’s news wraps today’s fish.

It should not come as a surprise that it is hard to find people willing to pay good money for yesterday’s news, especially in the age of 24 hour TV news and instant digital dissemination over the Internet. Old news does have value to historians and researchers, but only after it has faded from the collective memory, decades after the fact.  In the space between breaking news and historical research, the value of that content becomes nearly impossible to extract.

Placing news articles behind the pay-wall also fails for another reason: it breaks the web. Rather, it is counter to the way the web works.

Web pages accumulate links, which are crawled by search engines, raising the relative “value” of that page in search algorithms. The more links you have to your content, the more likely that your content will get significant traffic from search results. Content hidden behind a pay-wall cannot easily accumulate links, and visitors from search engines may find only a barrier page demanding payment rather than the content they were actually searching for. The chance of that visitor reaching for his credit card is much lower than the chance that she will hit the Back button and move on to the next (free) site in the search results.

Certainly there are successful business models where people pay for access to information. Online news archives, however, are more valuable, both to their creators and their consumers, when they are visible to search engines and available at no charge.