Printed Matters

I just conducted an interview with Montreal Gazette copy editor Steve Faguy, better known here in bloggerdom as the excellent and useful Fagstein. It’s for a magazine article I’m writing. I decided to call up Steve because he often makes insightful comments on newspaper websites that I completely agree with, even wish I’d said. (Don’t worry Tim, you will.) I told him as much when I was querying him. Since flattery gets you everywhere, that’s probably why he consented to the interview. (That, and also House was a rerun tonight.)

During the course of our talk I learned that Steve is a nice guy and well-spoken, and he made quite a few points that I think are worth noting.

“I’m not an expert in the finances of big media companies, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a deconcentration in media,” he said. “The big companies will be forced to sell off assets, or they’ll go into bankruptcy and the assets will be sold off. There will be some serious upheaval in the next few years.”

By assets he means the various newspaper holdings of a large media company. They’ll be sold to pay down the huge debts they have incurred during the last few years.

The upshot is that even if some of the big media companies go down – something that looks more and more possible as the recession tightens its noose – that doesn’t mean all the newspapers that made up the company will just stop printing. The profitable ones, and there are still lots of profitable ones, will carry on. A fairly upbeat point to keep in mind in this hour of gloom and doom.

Here’s a real gem:

The thing to remember is that journalism itself has never made money. Newspapers have always been subsidized by all kinds of other moneymaking things – classifieds, for example. But now these are all drying up.

Journalism itself has never made money. The news has always been packaged with other things that do make money. What happens when you take the news out of that package?

At about the same time tonight, Scott Karp was toiling away on an almost identical point over on his Publishing 2.0 blog:

People ask why no one wants to pay for news anymore, referencing the decline in newspaper circulation, when in fact that misrepresents the value equation. People were paying for newsPAPERS, which contained a lot more than news, and they were also paying for newspaper delivery, which is a service.

Great minds think alike, they say.

Later still, Steve makes a point that made me tear up with joy. I asked him what newspapers need to do better online, and he said, “Hire more programmers.”

Yeah! The editorial types like to frig with style, and design, and making the articles perfect just like they do in the print papers. But it doesn’t matter if nobody sees the damned articles because the site has not been optimized for search engines, or it’s difficult to find related articles on the site, or the site’s internal search engine doesn’t work.

So I think we need more technical people that don’t have to go sit in management meetings in order to tinker and innovate.

Right on, my brother!

Another great insight came when we were talking about what would have to happen to get online revenues up so they’re at least equal to what print revenues have been. He said, “It’s all about the advertisers. And news websites just aren’t mature enough to support good advertising revenues.”

“Not mature enough?” I bleated. “Haven’t news websites been around since pretty much the beginning of the web?”

Yes, said Steve, “but they’ve only been really doing stuff for the last five years. And newspapers have been, and still are, putting all their effort into the print side.”

And look, newspapers have been around for over a hundred years. They’ve had so much time to think of ways to make money with print newspapers – classifieds, crosswords, puzzles, comics – anything cheap to produce or popular enough that people are willing to pay for it. But you can get all that stuff online now. There are very few things from the traditional paper that you can’t get online. And people just don’t want to pay for anything online. So even though it’s been five years they’ve been at it, it’s still really immature.

Because immaturity implies a process of maturation – and greater online profits in the future – I take that as a positive note and will end on it.

Update: Steve thinks I made him look smart.

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