Media challenges

I talked with Rachel’s father, Michael, who with her mother had sold their IT start-up and bought the Berkeley (California) newspaper, the Daily Planet. The paper has recently turned into a weekly (still free) with a Web site that updates more frequently. The trick is figuring out how to make money off the Web site (which people refer to as “monetizing?). The challenges facing the paper are not unlike those facing papers across the country. (In Tallahassee, the “Democrat” has gone to virtually all local news, and these forces also helped kill off my old employer, the “Florida Flambeau.”). Papers are squeezed on the one side by the growing dominance of national and regional papers such as “USA Today,” “New York Times,” “Wall Street Journal,,” and – in the Berkeley paper’s case – the “San Francisco Chronicle. And cable TV and the Internet (and the lack of interest on the part of some young people in reading), on the other side.

Google has mastered the Web ad market. Companies pay so that, when people search for certain terms, their listings come up first on Google (in a different color – I almost always ignore these). Then, other people’s Web sites (like the “Daily Planet” site) or blogs (like ours?) allow ads to appear on their pages. (Potential advertisers scan the topics of Web sites and blogs willing to incorporate ads to see if these sites might attract users the advertiser wants to reach. For example, said Rachel’s father, our blog includes some political commentary and, if we made our blog available for ads, companies selling political paraphernalia such as buttons, T-shirts, or bumper stickers might try to advertise on the blog.)

But Google and the site owner only get paid if users click on the ad for more information (almost like a coupon in a newspaper ad). If no one clicks on the ad, no one gets any money. Even with clicks, the amount of money per click that Google pays is not very much. I imagine that you need a lot of traffic on your web site and popular ads to make a lot of money (Berkeley does generate some potential text, photo, and video content that may drive some traffic to the Planet site – Pro-military motorcycle gangs protesting Berkeley’s ordinance banning the U.S. Marines from recruiting in Berkeley, and tree protection activists (the arrest of one pictured above) staying up in trees slated for removal for a new University of California at Berkeley football training facility for more than 500 days.) Rachel’s father says their site doesn’t actually include video clips – just links to clips posted on YouTube.-

(Rachel’s father also said many young people get their news now from outlets such as John Stewart’s “The Daily Show” – which Chris and Rachel helped introduce me to – and these shows are very cheap to make because almost all of the news content they cannibalize off of other sources. Even though Rachel’s parents do a lot of the work themselves and they rely on homeless people to distribute the free hard-copy papers to newspaper boxes around the community, they still pay a staff of writers (which Stewart’s show doesn’t have to do. Presumably, writing stories weekly costs less. On the other hand, if their hard-copy and Web versions succeed in generating story arcs and driving traffic to the Web site, users want to know the very latest about the motorcycle-gang or tree-hugging stories, until the Web site is almost like the wire services – like United Press International, which I worked for – which may need to update./re-write stories all day, which can be very labor intensive (and therefore expensive.)

Best wishes to Rachel’s parents and all of those trying to keep struggling papers afloat.