How To Save Newspapers: Read EVERYTHING Local
First off, I can’t promise you this plan will save print. Nothing will.
Paper costs too much. Nicholas Carlson make the point at Blodget’s blog.
But who cares about print? When we gnash our teeth about the death of newspapers, what we’re concerned about is how to keep local reporters working in our communities credibly covering what is happening around us.
The trendy response is that papers (like the NYT) should charge money again for online subscriptions, or rely on micro-payments. This of course goes against Kevin Kelly’s more and more for free. Kelly is smarter, and in this case he’s also correct.
Frankly though, I don’t care about the NYT like Brill does. I want to read thousands of articles a month. And I’m worried about the thousands of local papers, so instead I figured out a way to keep them around.
In order to save papers we’re going to need some readily available ingredients:
- Google is going to have to have their feet held to the fire. This shouldn’t be a problem since their CEO, Eric Schmidt, struck a match and has taken off his socks.
- The Associated Press is going to have to forget about it’s online syndication model. (In fact, online syndication revenue for the newswires needs to be dead.) But changing how AP works, to save the 1,500 U.S. daily newspapers that own it, is no big deal.
With these two puzzle pieces, the day is saved. Here’s the plan:
- Google will license all US newswires with AP’s explicit support (they’ll help cajole the other newswires), and will alter Google News to display only the headlines, not the abstracts. They will do this for a song, but they will have NO rights to publish any of the articles.
- Current syndication contracts will be abandoned by newspapers.
- Readers and bloggers will now have via Google News ALL the headlines and a “proxied local link” to all the stories.
- Here’s the rub. Every single paper in America at their website will have (granted to them via Google’s master license) every single article carried on the wires.
A localization proxy server will ensure that every link you click at Google News, or from your favorite blogger… you’ll read the article at your local paper’s web site. Newspaper sites themselves will enforce this “read local” policy by automatically re-directing non-local IPs back to the proxy.
That’s the plan, all news traffic stays local. This has many strong economic advantages:
- Local advertisers can easily compete with national advertisers, without much thinking, and they can be sure that they are only buying eyeballs in their town.
- Local reporters and editors handling local politics, sports, and schools, and slice of life, will have a revenue stream that can support them. Mitch Ratcliffe has done some good napkin math on this, my idea significantly augments it. In my plan, the average reader will now spend tens of hours a month at their local paper’s web site, the entire web will continually lead them back to their local paper.
- This aids in local community outreach, because local stories get displayed right next to national stories. That school budget story has a much better chance of everyone in town reading it.
The goal of “Read Local” is not brute legislation, it is libertarian paternalism. Just a gentle nudge. Using default settings at Google News (just like turning off Safe Search in Google Images), NYC readers can pick the Post, or the Times, or the Sun, or maybe the paper of their hometown in Ohio. Each online paper will still have its own editorial approach, its own lay out, its own front page… and most importantly be able to choose its own ad network (sorry Google).
Ultimately, this system can nudge people to read local and keep all news ad revenue at home, which is the best chance local papers have of surviving.
The NYT and WSJ are special cases, they (like other papers) would have to decide if they wanted to hoard their exclusive content and make readers come to them, or instead become the default paper of their core audience, and have a copy of everything else to offer.
