Whenever I visit my wife in Northern Virginia and I read her copy of the Washington Post, I find myself reading stories I know I would have passed over in my local paper, The Florida Times-Union. Why is that? The question has been bugging me since Christmas.

I think what is happening is that the Post has such an aura (of…what?) around it that it just automatically makes everything seem interesting. Although, I think it is not so much that I think what is in the Post is more interesting, but that I make the opposite assumption about the T-U.

The T-U does not have the same staff as the Post, my thinking goes, so the coverage and the story are not going to be as good. Or maybe it’s the headlines. I am going to really watch myself read this week to try to see if I can understand what’s going on.

I do think that, based on my initial observations, cutting staff and thereby cutting the quality of the product, is not the way to go. You can only cut so much before you not only make decision not to read, you make the decision not to buy.

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.

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At least in my case.

I spent most of the summer reading the Washington Post, so when I came home, the thought of paying money to read my local daily again was a bit painful. I mean, how could it possibly match up? I decided to subscribe to the Wall Street Journal instead.

Then I got a call from a telemarketer with some deals on subscriptions to the local paper, and I was tempted, although before I left town for the summer, the paper was delivered late more often than not. I said I’d think about it; not getting the paper on time irritated me constantly.  The telemarketer said he’d call back the next day.

He didn’t. I called the paper’s customer service folks twice and they said they didn’t have anything to do with outside telemarketers. The woman I talked to couldn’t understand what I meant when I pointed out that they were, in fact, being represented by this company and they should be concerned about the lack of followup. She merely repeated her assertion. She also wouldn’t give me the deal the telemarketer offered.

I hung up and called the paper and said I would like to speak to someone in circulation, and they connected me right back to the same woman in customer service. Frustrated, I looked up the circulation manager on the paper’s web site and dialed him directly. His assistant answered and most graciously apologized for all the hassles and took my information for my subscription.

Two hours later I received a phone call from some anonymous voice at the newspaper asking if I REALLY would like to start getting the paper (what? a new subscriber?). They asked how I intended to pay for it, and I had to explain that I had just given the director’s assistant all my info. They said they would check with her.

As soon as I hung up, the phone rang and it’s the telemarketing firm again, asking if I would like to subscribe to the paper. Were I a cartoon, steam would have started pouring from my ears. GADS! I won’t even go into the several phone calls needed to get my WSJ subscription started.

All in all, it took five days, 6 or 7 people and multiple phone calls just to get two papers plopped near my door. The next day I awoke a bit earlier than usual, eager to start the day with a cup of coffee and the newspaper.

No paper. Delivery guy was late. Again.

Couple of random thoughts.

The tabloid format still carries enough negative weight that smaller-size newspapers are now referred to as compacts.  I guess that makes the Tryon (NC) Daily Bulletin — an 8 1/2 by 11 and the self-proclaimed World’s Smallest Daily — a sub-compact.  I wonder if the shrinkage will continue and we’ll end up with a pocket-sized smart paper.

It struck me as I was grocery shopping the other day that newspapers and food companies are doing the same thing: shrinking the content as a way to cut costs. Food packages are shrinking while costs increase. Newspapers are shrinking staff and format, forcing stories to be shorter to avoid having a page be nothing but gray body type. I don’t think either move is a good one.

If more and more people get into Twitter and get used to the micro-blogging approach to communication, would it be easier to get people to accept micro-payment news models?

(Follow me on Twitter.)

It is as if the Sunday newspaper carrier is a paid deliverer of inserts, and oh yeah, here are a few pages of news.

On Monday morning when I picked up the paper, it was so thin I honestly thought the carrier had left out a few sections. Nope. Just thinner than ever.

Then I thought about those inserts the day before. ROP advertising is down, but are inserts? Doesn’t seem like it in my local paper. I understand that newspapers get about $25 per thousand for the inserts. This is considerably less than they get for ROP ads, which help increase the pages in the paper.

Clearly, advertisers still want to reach newspaper subscribers, at least on Sundays. In 2007, more than $5 billion was spent on advertising inserts, according to a knowledgeable blogger. It may be lower now, but probably not much.

If the desire to spend that much money remains strong as newspaper readers are going away, what is going to happen to those insert dollars as we move toward the web? Turn inserts into web site pop-ups? That’s not going to work, but I have an idea.

The USPS is losing money. Maybe they could get into the insert delivery business on Sundays — and deliver mail as well, taking Mondays off instead — as newspapers complete their migration to the web. People could sign up or not, saving paper and trees.

Maybe some advertisers would run more Sunday ROP ads instead. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a thick Sunday morning paper again?

I hope someone will enlighten me about the economics of Sunday inserts….

It has been my experience that newspapers are incredibly reluctant to change, even as they read about the trials and tribulations in the industry every day. Despite evidence to the contrary, they seem to keep doing the same old things. Change is necessary, and the changes newspapers have to make to remain alive are not small or easy ones. But change must occur.

One of the many ideas that publishers are having a tough time dealing with is the interactive aspect of news web sites (and can include the print product, too). It is no longer a one-way street. Readers want to be a part of the action. What? Turn over content to the readers???

It’s called User Generated Content (UGC), and you need to make room for it on your web sites and tease to your UGC in the print product. I have talked about this in earlier posts. Set up reader blogs, wikis, photo galleries, and areas where special interest groups can get together and interact with one another. Get a few of your more creative staffers to start blogs as well. Readers will start jumping in with comments.

Get your your paper and your reporters on Twitter. Some readers will want to follow the paper or a particular reporter or both. You can report live action, send out follow-up links to important stories, get story ideas sent to you, and keep up with what people are talking about. Twitter is gaining more traction every day. (You can follow me on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/newsdesign.)

UGC seems to make so much sense because YOU don’t have to pay for it, yet readers want to read or see it. And advertisers are likely to want a piece of the action, too. That’s the point of all this isn’t it? Stop thinking about the old model. Your readers want more.

I also believe that many would be willing to pay for access to a web site that offers them information, interaction, and a pleasurable experience. Many would disagree with me, but I truly believe that if your web site is good enough, and you limit access to some portions of it to subscribers to the print product, you will find takers. Of course, you need to improve your print product as well….

An interesting piece along these lines from a British blog can be found here. Ideas worth thinking about.

Need some help going interactive? Let me help. E-mail me with your questions.

I feel certain this will happen faster and faster as more papers face the reality of declining advertising in the midst of a flailing economy.

Despite the spectre of job cuts, this is not necessarily bad for newspaper designers. Whatever the information product, you will always need people to put the product together, whether it’s in pixels or ink on dead trees. And good design, which is not simply cosmetic, can play a critical role in keeping and gaining readers.

These are bad times overall for the industry, but not necessarily for good designers. That is, if publishers are smart enough to realize the importance of good design to their business.

“Buy low, sell high” has always been good advice. Advertising during a down economy is also good advice, in part because many of your company’s competitors will pull back. You will become more visible in the marketplace as the cacophony of advertising messages lessens.

It will cost money, and the short term might be tight, but over the course of several years, as the economy inevitably cycles back, your company will be in the top position because you stuck around in the consumer’s mind.

For newspapers, it may mean a temporary lowering of ad rates. It will certainly call for aggressive and creative cross selling across print, web and mobile products, but it can be done. Not all companies will refuse to cut advertising, but the smart ones will.

And smart newspapers will put together appealing packages for them while they continuously improve their product. Information is a necessary commodity in any economic setting. I hope most newspapers are smarter than they have been acting so far in the downturn. Drastically cutting the producers is not the answer.

It will be interesting in a few years to see who survived and how they did it.
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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?