Why The Independent is not on the internet

The Independent was one of the first newspapers online in the early 1990’s. It was new and we thought at the time that it was a good supplement to our paper, especially when we had breaking news between issues. 

After several years on the internet, we would get people telling us that they were quite happy with the internet version, even though eventually we had less than half the stories and pictures posted there. So, in response to that, we cut the number of stories to about two and the pictures to about five, always letting the readers know that there was much more in our print edition. 

We found that people were still happy with our reduced content and felt no need to subscribe— which is when we discontinued any news on the internet a few years ago. The numbers we are talking about are not large— only about 200 people had signed up for our email news alerts out of 3,000 circulation, but the trend told us the number of viewers online were not enough to enable us to start selling advertising online, and a good online presence should not be free of charge.

There has been much talk about the demise of the newspaper. One thing that is driving papers under is not just the loss of subscribers and advertisers, as it is being over-leveraged. Too much debt and the overuse of credit is one of the main culprits in this economic crisis. For many industries including the newspaper industry, it’s been one merger and buyout after another, and they have always been viewed as good by Wall Street. These new models are fine as long as there is no significant downturn. Take the Ann Arbor News for example. If it was still locally owned with not a lot of debt, it could have handled a downturn in revenues of 30-40%. There are always ways to cut staff and costs. Instead, the decision was made to close it after 170 years in business by the large media company that bought it a few years ago. 

Many big news conglomerates who over the past decade or so recently bought paper after paper, now have debt ballooning into the billions. So a 30% downturn nationally now means that someone at the head office says you have to let go of the bottom performing papers. Suddenly you have several 150-year-old weeklies in places like Denver and San Francisco, killed when they could have  survived another downturn like in the past. After all, these papers had survived the Great Depression already. 

The internet is not doing in the newspaper. The bad business model of giving away news for free, combined with the economic downturn, and too much debt, is doing in the newspaper. Newsweek recently proposed that papers stop giving away their news on the web and come up with a micropayment system in which you can buy an article for 5 or 10 cents with only one simple click. This is part of a good solution, but difficult to implement at this point in time, unless all the big players get on board. 

We would be willing to rejoin the internet with 100% of our paper available if several things could happen: 1. If it were inexpensive and easy for us to transfer content to the web site. 2. That we would get just as much for the internet subscription as for our paper. ($26 per year). 3. The server that has our paper tracks IP addresses, so that someone with an ID and password could not give it away to 10 friends. Even if we could get these three things to happen, we are doubtful that we would get a significant number of subscribers willing to pay for the online edition. News is free all over the web, and those people that complain to us about not being on the internet seem to feel that we are somehow obliged to provide ours for free as well. 

Newspapers survived the advent of the radio, then TV, then cable, then the internet. Now radio and TV are “old media” and are looking for ways to survive the internet as well. What people don’t think about is that as each new media has been created over the past 100 years, each older media has survived, but lost some market share along the way. We are getting tired of reading the obituary of the newspaper industry this past year. What about the obituary for the radio and TV industry? They are getting hit just as hard and having to make huge adjustments as well. But guess what? Television, radio and newspapers all will survive alongside this new media, the internet. 

We deal in local news that we create and it’s not going to be found anywhere else but here. 80% of the news is in our paper and nowhere else. Exclusivity is our savior, and even though we may be losing some revenues and subscribers like everyone else, we know that we are at least not digging our own grave like many other papers by giving away our news for free. 

For those who think the internet is the only media left out there, all you have to do is look at the numbers. Newspaper readership is down, but not by that much. Plus apparently people are still turning on their radios and TVs as well.