Printed Matters

This is a new – and hopefully better – draft of a post originally published a week ago – Tim.

Try as hard as you might – make the most leak-proof containers, use the strongest pumps – you will not create a perfect vacuum. Something, anything, will rush in to fill the void. It’s a result of fundamental physical laws and the structure of the universe.

When ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle said nature abhors a vacuum, he might just as well have been talking about the World Wide Web. It has a fundamental structure, too. “The WWW world consists of documents, and links,” wrote web inventor Tim Berners-Lee in 1992.

The web is made of documents and links. Documents are linked together into a web by hyperlinks. Links are the essence of the thing, the feature without which the web would not be a web.

Any activity – or policy, or habit, or standard, or behaviour – which discourages linking is abhorrent in such a universe, just as vacuums are abhorrent in our physical universe. Any activity which has the effect of discouraging or reducing the number of links on the web is, by definition, anti-web. And it is my thesis that any business model built on hostility toward linking is bound to fail.

Yet newspaper companies and their owners, managers, and website developers continue to espouse and implement website strategies that cut against the grain of what the web is all about. And that’s not good, because the future of journalism is at stake, and with it, the traditional watchdog function of journalists. As more and more readers abandon print newspapers in favour of news websites, newspaper companies are losing their traditional source of revenue: print advertising. And if they can’t adapt themselves to the new Internet platform, if news organizations can’t reach readers where the readers are, then it’s hard to see how quality journalism will be funded.

Over the holiday season I read three more examples of how newspaper companies fail to “get” the web. These anti-web modes of thought keep popping up, and keep refusing to die, among newspaper company web strategies.

First up: the tired old pay wall debate. Stanford University journalism professor Joel Brinkley suggested, in a San Francisco Chronicle opinion piece, that newspapers can save themselves by ganging up on the rest of us with pay walls. Under his plan, you will have to pay subscription fees to read the news on any newspaper website.

If this reminds you of protection rackets run by thugs, it should. He wants publishers to go to the Justice Department and ask for “an antitrust exemption that would allow publishers to collaborate on a decision to begin charging for their web sites.”

This won’t work. Not just because it’s a knuckle-dragging, club-’em-on-the-head solution, nor because it’s old and tired, nor even because there’s empirical evidence it won’t work. The reason is both simpler and deeper: pay walls, because they discourage linking, are an anti-web behaviour. That is bad business strategy for the web. Like a business based on a perpetual motion machine, it can not work, even in principle.

These publishers would collude to create an information vacuum on the web. And the first little leak – such as an entrepreneur deciding to put advertising-supported news on the web for free – will blow that vacuum wide open. It will instantly destroy the consortium and its business plan.

All this would be self-evident to a company that “got” the web. But newspapers don’t – and neither, apparently, do their academic elites, represented here by Brinkley – because what works on the web is the complete opposite of what newspapers used to do in the good old print monopoly days.

The next business strategy to rear its ugly head during my Christmas blog readings was the old “you can’t link to me without my permission” argument, in which a news organization tries to control how others link to its stories. GateHouse Media, which runs several Boston-area local news sites, is suing the New York Times Co because some local NYT-run sites have audaciously linked to stories on GateHouse sites. The latter objected, complaining NYT is making money on the back of GateHouse-controlled content.

That is an awful and laughably obtuse misinterpretation of what the web is about. It should be obvious by now: if you discourage linking – and suing someone for linking must certainly be seen as a discouragement – then you’re creating a vacuum, which will leak, burst, and be filled by someone else. I’ll let newspaper consultant and “recovering journalist” Mark Potts express my dismay in this quote from his blog:

“I see this, and I scratch my head and ask, yet again, what decade are we in? C’mon, GateHouse. That’s how the Web works. Sites link to each other … what, exactly, is the problem?”

What decade indeed? Look at the next example in our litany of backward strategies for the Web. Dan Jacobson, the publisher and owner of the TriCityNews in Monmouth County, New Jersey, claims that by keeping his newspaper off the web altogether he is saving his business.

But Jacobson is leaving his business on the table for someone else to take.

He says, “There may come a time when the web is all there is, and we will try to adapt…”

But they will not adapt, because they will be steamrolled by web-savvy companies that are ready for when the web is all there is.

“… and if we don’t, well, hey, we had a great run.”

Which means: “I am a short-term thinker in a privately-held company and I obviously answer to no one. Ride with me as I guide my company through short-term profits; walk away with me after I’ve squeezed it dry.”

We are starting a brand new year, one that may well go down in history as an annus horribilus for the newspaper industry. Yet I’m afraid we haven’t seen the last of the vacuous thinking that first got newspapers into this mess.

I wish for progress in online newspaper strategies in 2009. I hope that news websites will learn to venerate the humble link to quality, original journalism on competing sites; cultivate and encourage incoming links; and play the web game as hard as they can, experimenting, tinkering and innovating to find the winning combination.

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