Why Newspapers are Failing Online

There’s been a lot of stories lately about failing newspapers. In fact, in late December, 2008 the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that the internet is now used as a news source by more Americans than newspapers.

In order to survive newspapers are re-doubling their efforts to gain presence online and remain relevant.

And, apart from a few standouts, most newspapers are not doing a very good job of it. I want to share a brief, but very enlightening experience I had with one newspaper outlet that is just not getting it, The Syndey Morning Herald. Now it might seem that I’m picking on the Herald, and I kind of am, but there’s a huge number of other newspaper websites that are making the same mistakes.

So let me set up the situation.

A leaked Australian Defense Department report  was obtained by some intrepid reporters at the Sydney Morning Herald.

It was a very juicy story. So one of the bloggers on DeSmogBlog, a site I manage, wrote up a quick post based on the Herald story. So far so good. But I thought that the post would be a lot better if I could get a copy of the actual secret military report. The report was nowhere to be found on the Herald website.

So now you know the background and based on this and my attempts to get a copy of the Defense report I’ll share with you what I think are some very good reasons newspapers are failing online.

The internet is infinite, newspapers aren’t

The Herald could have easily laid out the contents of the Defense report and also made available a copy of the report for download for those interested in writing their own story. It seems to me that newspapers are still stuck in thinking that they’re constrained by the size of the broadsheet. They’re forgetting that the internet offers all the space they could ever want to broaden the story past what was printed in the newspaper to provide extra content. In the case of the Herald article, they did nothing more than cut the story and paste it online. The Herald could have done so much more to engage their readership, keeping them longer on their site, clicking around to related material, which has an obvious impact on their online ad revenue.

Not to mention the fact that if I would have found a copy of the report on their site I would have flogged it all over the internet with full credit to the Herald including lots of linkbacks.

The Web demands people

Online media today is very different than traditional media in that there is an interactive global conversation online. In fact, in my new media seminars I am talking more and more about looking at the internet as a conversation instead of an information source. This is very different then what newspapers are used to. For the most part newspapers have only “interacted” with readers through the odd phone call and letters-to-the-editor.

The online conversation demands one-on-one interaction, we want to talk to people or at least we want the feeling that when we’re interacting with a website, we’re interacting with people on some level. When I didn’t find a copy of the Defense report on the Herald’s site I started looking around for the email address for the reporter who wrote the story. Couldn’t find it anywhere. So I went looking for someone, anyone I could email and all I could find on the page was a generic offer for me to email them news tips if I come across any. The only thing personable I could find was the name of the reporter who wrote the story. Finally I conceded and used the dreaded info@ email address.

The Dreaded auto-email

So after finally finding an email address, I drafted a nice note saying that I manage an influential blog on the subject of climate change and we would be very happy to promote the Herald’s great investigative work further if they could kindly post the leaked report on their website. Heck, I was even going to write an article on Huffington Post (the largest Blog in the world) about this. I mean what are they going to do with the report now that they’ve written a story about it?

In return for my kind offer to drive thousands of people to their site, boosting their ad revenue and probably generating some pretty nice links, I get this:

(click to enlarge)

And that was the last time I heard from them.

Share and share alike

This is my final point.

If the internet is one big conversation and Web 2.0 is social, then that’s what newspaper outlets like the Sydney Morning Herald have to realize. They need to get social. If the editor of the newspaper is an old curmudgeon with a disdain for the unwashed masses, then put him in a room and let someone else interact with the audience. Now I’m not saying that every single comment and every single email has to be personally addressed, I know these newspaper sites get a lot of traffic. But they’re not going to continue to get that traffic in the long run if they don’t start to appear to be interested and willing participants in the online conversation.

As for my experience, I would suggest that ignoring bloggers who want to promote a newspaper’s work is a death knell in the long run. All I was asking was for them to share a report with me that’s probably in the recycling bin now and in return I would sing their praises all over the internet. But instead of spending the time promoting their content, I’m spending the time deconstructing their online short-comings. If newspapers want people to promote their content on blogs or Facebook, Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Twitter etc., they need to figure out that its a two way street - you scratch my back I’ll scratch yours. Reciprocity is the very basis of our social structure and I’ll only get suckered into scratching your back so many times.

This post isn’t one of those “traditional media is dead” stories. Honestly, it really isn’t. I truly hope newspapers figure it out and start to run profitable online outlets and its in this spirit that I am writing this post.

A lot of the information I use online starts with great investigative work like the Syndey Morning Herald showed with their Defense report story. If it wasn’t for them the story would have never seen the light of day. But in not fully taking advantage of the new media opprotunities the Herald (and a lot of other newspapers) is missing out on an amazing opportunity to seriously amplify their work and at the same time make huge online ad revenue with their original content. And if  newspapers don’t figure this out very soon, we all lose.

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