Stop The Presses – The Young Just Might Pay For News If Delivered The Right Way

Philip M. Stone January 6, 2010 Follow on Twitter

Perhaps the biggest issue facing print newspapers today is how to get back younger readers who have gravitated almost universally to digital platforms without a care for information via paper. But if a 30-something is to be believed, information that is delivered on the right print platform is the way to get the young to pay.

Regular readers of this column know that the writer’s 30-something son has turned Dad down many times when offered free newspapers and the explanations are typical of complaints the young have about news delivered on paper. Dad has tried just about everything possible to encourage son to take up print, but, no, the free Internet rules supreme. The only day in the year when son actually buys a newspaper is Thanksgiving Day, for the sole need of going through all the advertising to find the best Black Friday shopping deals in which he expects to save hundreds of dollars. He doesn’t care that on Thanksgiving publishers jack up the price to a Sunday level or even higher – the savings he is looking to make in buying clothes at 50% or more off means the $1 or $2 for the newspaper is penny-ante.

And son is really into the Internet – he feels just about naked whenever he loses access. He’s got the usual social networking sites, he buys and sells shares online, pays his bills online, gets all his news online, constantly is instant messaging …the list just goes on and on but nowhere in there is “paper.”

So Dad almost fell out of his rocking chair over the Christmas holidays when son came to him and said he wouldn’t mind paying for news if it was the news he wanted delivered in the manner he wanted – and almost unbelievable to Dad came the line, “I want it on my printer by 6 a.m. every morning.”

He wants paper! Whether the technology is there now to give him the paper product he wants isn’t important. The important thing is that he knows the news he wants, he knows how he wants it delivered -- on his printer by the time he gets up in the morning -- and he’s willing to pay up to $7.99 a month for that convenience (his benchmark was less than $100 annually).  That’s worth looking into in more detail.

Son lives in Orlando, Florida, where he attended the University of Central Florida. He graduated some years ago but once a “Knight” always a “Knight” and he still follows very closely the university’s sports teams. Today he gets his daily/hourly sports fix from the Web, mostly from the sports section of the Orlando Sentinel and from ESPN.

But he has to go get all of this information and he’s getting lazy in his old age. He doesn’t want to keep pulling, he wants push. So he says to Dad, “Why can’t they deliver an updated sports section of the Orlando Sentinel directly to my printer by 6 a.m? It would have all the scores including west coast night games, and even though I’m not interested in every sport I’d be willing to pay for just that updated sports section, but it has to be on my printer in the morning.”

There are several things at play here. The print edition of the Sentinel is of no use to him, he says, because its deadline is far too early. Via the web before going to bed he knows scores and breaking sports stories that don’t make the Sentinel’s home print edition, so why waste time with it?

Early deadlines are the real bug-a-boo that costs print dearly. This writer remembers as a child in London in the 1950s that the broadsheet Daily Express arrived through the narrow mailbox around 7 a.m. The first thing the child did was to turn to the back page and at the bottom there was a horizontal column that carried the headline in boldface, 4 a.m. Final,  and in the column was a paragraph or two of any late breaking news. Assuming the headline was valid you knew that paper didn’t hit the press until after 4 a.m. and it was delivered to households within three hours. That type of deadline could compete with today’s Web since the paper hits the presses after normal bedtime; deadlines newspapers use today of before normal bedtime just don’t make the grade.

The other thing at play is that son wants paper delivery. Not the whole newspaper, mind you, just the sports, but he wants it on paper, up-to-date by a set hour each morning (same principal as the newspaper delivered to the front porch.)

So, are newspapers willing to distribute and charge electronically by section rather than by the whole? In print there have been some experiments delivering certain sections to certain households but it hasn’t been too successful. Some newspapers are delivering the Sunday TV Magazine to those who pay additional but by and large subscriptions mean you get everything. But the Web is a different animal where all is possible? Is it rocket science to have a an automatic control P command so that once the copy is delivered to the PC it will automatically print out, assuming the make and model of the printer has been provided so the right drivers are used?

To find out ftm asked Newspaper Direct (ND) -- if anyone should know it’s they.  Tim Cox said in an email that within the ND system it really isn’t possible now to deliver just one section of a newspaper. “No, unfortunately, it’s an all or nothing proposition in terms of what is downloaded. However one can ‘print to PDF’ a 2-page spread and save the PDF on their system (such as a sports section). One could do that for a series of pages and then combine them into one PDF …not terribly convenient, however.”

Automatic printing, however, may not be as difficult as first thought. He said that is part of the company’s Print-on-Demand product that “has a scheduling system built in so customers can set up automatic downloads of papers and have them printed. Hotels use this service, for example. It’s also available for yachts, should you own one!” So, what son wants may not be so farfetched although the editorial and technical aspects need some work -- for instance son doesn’t want the print edition’s sports section that is put to bed hours earlier, he wants an up-to-date sports print edition.

The important thing here is that the assumption the young are not willing to pay for news is not necessarily right. What they really want is their choice of up-to-date news delivered on the platform of their choice, and if editorial and the techies can do that at a reasonable price then newspaper publishers might just have a chance of getting the young back again.

Editorial and techies -- on your mark, get set, go…