I use this little tale to get my students talking about critical thinking, scientific research, evidence and writing. But it has value beyond the classroom.

One simple parsing of the third umpire’s statement is that naming something helps create the  “isness” of that something. Calling a dandelion a flower is different from calling it a weed,  in terms of our emotional reaction toward it.

Calling the act of charging for the processing of information and data into news a “paywall”
is part of the problem. A wall naturally separates two things. Calling it a wall gives it a  negative spin. Why not call it a portal?

People used AOL for many years as a paid “portal” to both its own content and eventually to
the Internet. That ended after a while not because people refused to pay at all, but because AOL no longer offered content that could not be gotten elsewhere for free.

Despite the many people who say that the toothpaste is out of the tube, that newspapers can’t  go back to a paid web model, I think they can. Maybe. If it is done right and by a lot of papers at the same time.

They may not have a choice.

Sure, they will lose some subscribers, probably a lot of subscribers initially, but if they offer value, people will pay to get it.

People pay today for access for all sorts of cable channels they can’t get for free elsewhere. They pay for cell phones, text messaging, Netflix, and they pay for high speed Internet access, although you can get dial-up for free or virtually so. I bet most people would be willing to pay a few cents per tweet.

The issue is not so much that people WON’T pay, it’s that you have to give them something they want. Then they’ll pay.

I think that’s going to have to be the model moving forward. Give people something they want and ask them to support it by paying. Relying on CPM advertising is no longer a workable model. Corporate sponsorship along the lines of public radio and television stations might help as well.

This is going to be a painful time for newspapers, and the new version won’t look much like the old, but the creative and bold will survive if they can metamorphize from their caterpillar past into their butterfly future.

–

If you need help with your newspaper design, contact me at News Design School.

This post in streaming audio. Right-click to download.

Download audio file (three-umpires.mp3)

I have to say that the essay that lays part of the blame at the late Ed Arnold’s feet by John Walter (http://www.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=160817), former executive editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and a founding editor at USA TODAY, is patently unfair and, I think, wrong.

I knew Ed well for many years, as I was charged with “replacing” him as the design professor when he retired from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1983. (No one could “replace” Ed. I merely followed in his footsteps, which I never, of course, quite filled.) We had regular chats about newspaper design at his beautiful home in the Ginter Park district of Richmond, and I was at many meetings and conferences with him.

Ed may have been involved with introducing a different approach to pages, as Walter lamented, but (a) Ed wasn’t the only person involved in re-thinking newspaper design and (b) Ed’s focus was always in making the newspaper easier to read, not necessarily “prettier.” I can recall numerous blusters at those 12-inch high eggplant photo pages with 10 inches of copy that seemed to win the awards.

I think that when newspaper design really began to get away from its roots was in the early 1980s, with the creation of the Society for News(paper) Design and USA TODAY.

For all the good that SND has accomplished in drawing attention to the fact that news and information is better when one considers its presentation, I think it also has caused damage by seducing newspapers away from their core mission: reporting the news. When newspapers began having art directors and day-long fashion photo shoots of three models, with two photographers, two assistants, the photo editor and maybe an AME for Visuals on site, the core focus – and budget –  was truly lost. But those were the pages that won awards, so that’s the direction newspapers went in.

Today, SND helps papers by providing information about design, but it gives away nearly 1,000 awards (!) each year and relatively few are for effective presentation of the news. None are for inside pages, which constitute most of the pages newsworkers have to lay out. Many look like magazine pages, the good and bad of which is a discussion for another post. But I don’t think they say “News.”

USA TODAY, with all its color and its 8-inch stories, sparked a slew of less talented local newspaper imitators who were trying to create a similar look without considering the losses in journalistic integrity.

I think we should spend more time constructively talking about the problems than pointing fingers at scapegoats. I have been writing about these issues for 20 years, and many newspapers are still hesitant to adopt new technologies and new business models. This is where the problems lie. Work is yet to be done.

Finally, I do agree that much of the blame can be laid at the feet of Gannett and other publicly traded companies that were more focused on making shareholders happy than in doing good journalism. Gannett, in particular, was well-known for overseeing a decline in quality of the “properties,” it took over as it grew into a behemoth newspaper company.

Many newspapers today make a decent profit margin – more than a lot of companies – but because they decided that advertisers and shareholders were more important than readers and because newspapers failed to address the problems brought about by the Internet – which they were aware of — we have ended up where we are today.

Next, I am going to take on the “paywall” issue: should newspapers charge for content?
The discussion in the blogosphere is heated. Here are a few good links worth reading:

http://burden.ca/blog/2009/02/20/paywall-madness-dec-2008-feb-2009
http://ow.ly/1Ah5

Even good newspapers, like the Strib, are in trouble. Businesses also will likely advertise less as consumers tighten their belts and spend less. So: less revenue in the face of increasing costs can mean only one thing: the b-word. We are likely to see more newspapers bite the dust.

What is sad about this is that I was beginning to believe that better newspaper web sites were finally figuring out a business model that would bring enough advertising revenue from the web site to make an honest go of it.

If you want to work on some of this, check out News Design School.

Now I believe that we are in for more bad news from media companies. Even those papers that have embraced the web and created interactive, social-media web sites will have a hard time fighting through this economic rough patch. Still, the papers that are jumping on the web with both feet will be better positioned to survive. Are you one of those?