A Moocher's Offer to Tribune Owner Sam Zell

For an Online Subscription,
Take My Money--Please!

Dear Sam Zell:

Confession: Like millions of moochers, I’ve been reading the Chicago Tribune every day for years without paying a penny. No, I don’t borrow or steal your paper. I read it online. Sure, ChicagoTribune.com sells my eyeballs to advertisers for maybe $25 a year but, obviously, not for enough to staunch your company’s financial bleeding.

With Tribune Company in bankruptcy proceedings, and other major newspapers disappearing as quickly as our beloved Cubbies in post-season play, it’s time for moochers like me to create our own bailout—not of the newspaper industry (no more paper, no more manufacturing), but of the news business and of the journalism profession.

To save the Tribune, I hereby offer $49 a year for an online subscription. Deciding to pay for something I’m getting free was difficult. I was frugal before frugality became a fad (or in these times, a necessity). Why did I? Guilt? Hardly.

Truth be told, for decades, I worked as a journalist. I hate to see journalists and journalism suffer so. And, I appreciate the vital importance of news, and free speech, to our nation’s democracy. Donating is my civic duty, a small price to pay for a better Chicago.

To succeed online, start with these steps:

* Announce that you will soon charge for online access. Despite strong consumer resistance, it is inevitable that newspapers will eventually charge for online access. Lead the charge of the right brigade. Other major dailies will follow in a flash.

Prepare your readers as if you were General Eisenhower planning D-Day. Create a marketing campaign that makes Obama’s pale in comparison. For starters, enlist local celebrities to rattle the tin cup for you in online videos. Award a prize to the one who raises the most money. The star of the first one: you!

* Begin by encouraging visitors to pay voluntarily. To overcome your understandable reluctance to charge for content, start by creating the ability on ChicagoTribune.com for me to voluntarily pay for an online subscription with a credit card. See how that works. Shame the skinflints. Beg, if you must. Appeal to their civic virtue and pride.

Start today by adding a Tip Jar, such as the one from Pay Pal used by journalist Ana Marie Cox.

What disturbs me is that you haven’t even bothered to ask us to pay! Given all the free content online, and the failure of a few valiant, but half-hearted efforts to get online readers to pay, I understand your trepidation. But you must believe in your product--and improve it. Readership of news is growing. Charge for content or die.

* Make it cool to contribute. Offer anyone who contributes $25 or more a free pass for one year after the Tribune begins charging for access. For every year after the first year, those founding contributors will receive a 10% discount on a subscription. Publish the name (and dollar amount) of each contributor. Showcase them in their own video testimonials.

* Require payment. When you get the nerve, require payment for most content. Offer two online subscriptions: one with ads, for $49 (one-third of your print subscription fee). One without ads, for $79. For the two-thirds of your visitors who do not live in Chicago offer a discounted subscription. Test $19 and $9 a year.

* Be creative. Instead of selling cookies to raise money, the Girl Scouts can collect commissions for selling your online subs. Figure out a clever way to market your paid content as bottled water that competes successfully with free water (content). Be pure, trusted, prestigious, convenient, whatever makes your product unique and worth paying for. Find ways to feed people's innate curiosity as effectively as Starbucks feeds their need for status and caffeine.

But be realistic. Most content you publish has little or no interest to most people, even to your loyal readers. Solution?

* Charge to have selected content e-mailed. For $5 a year each, say, offer online access to individual sections: columns, sports, travel, editorials, business. Let readers select from a menu. Offer those sections, too, with ads and without. Also offer to “push” that content to me, on my smart phone, for example, rather than require me to come to your site.

Create your own version of Google Reader that allows me to subscribe to any content containing words I select (a person's name, for example, or "Cubs Win World Championship").

You killed ChicagoSports.com, I’m told, because 80% of its visitors were ex-Chicagoans wanting to follow the Bears. Why not charge them $5 or more a year to receive every story you publish on the Bears? Same with the Cubs, Sox, etc. Create a premium product by adding video highlights of each game, interviews with players, etc.

* Test other ways to charge. Down the road, consider charging me a penny or so for each article I read. Better yet, charge a penny or so per minute. Charge for each article I e-mail to a friend. Experiment with those micropayments and other bold initiatives. Warn your staff: "Innovate or abdicate!"

My preference: paying per minute. I would resent having to pay even a micro-penny after clicking a headline and finding, as I often do, a three-sentence article that doesn’t add much more information than was in the headline.

If you charge per minute, automatically cut me off whenever I walk away from my computer--or fall asleep in front of it. The more minutes I use, the lower I pay per minute. Keep a running tab and charge my credit card monthly, or sell minutes in advance. The technology exists. Try it. Try anything. Try everything. Frankly, I don’t see much innovation from you.

Update: For one innovative idea, see "Plans for a Paid Online Media Service," in the April 15 edition of the New York Times. (See a summary here.)

On May 10, News Corp announed plans to introduce micro payments for individual articles and premium subscriptions to the Wall Street Journal's web site starting this fall.

* Reduce the price of your e-Edition. For the electronic edition, you charge $130 a year, only $13 less than for the print edition. Dramatically lower that price. Getting even $10 a year is better than nothing (and costs you nothing more to produce and distribute). For a premium, let customers read that edition on a Kindle or other portable e-reader.

* Rely heavily on reader-generated content. Among the most effective online features are reader comments. (I’m told they produce 30 percent of your page views!) Expand these and other interactive features that create connection and community. Add meaningful surveys.

Invite readers to contribute to a story before it’s published. Ask their areas of expertise and e-mail them when you’re writing about that topic and invite their input. Involve them in reporting the news.

Offer to host blogs free for anyone who will write a quality blog free. For the best blogs, offer a revenue-sharing program.

* Monetize your photo gallery. Figure out a better way to profit from traffic to your photo gallery, which I’m told produces 30 percent of your page views. Charge a penny per minute to visit the gallery. Offer the photos for sale, some as posters, and split the proceeds with the photographers. Invite visitors to vote for their favorites. Award prizes.

For my contribution, I demand ten drastic concessions:

1. Slash overhead. Lease to others all but one floor of Tribune Tower. Require editorial staffers to work from home or on their beats. Outsource most non-editorial functions.

2. Sell non-essential assets. Selling the Cubs is a great start. Retain only those resources necessary to produce an outstanding product. In this historic crisis, a news organization has no business owning real estate, especially as much of it as the Trib owns. Personally buy all Tribune Company’s real estate and provide the company space, rent free, for the rest of your life.

3. Buy or create a new distribution channel. RCN, Comcast and others who provide Internet access to your online customers outsmarted you. They now get the revenue--$49.95 a month--your online customers pay them to access your online edition. They own your new distribution channel. Buy back that valuable asset. Or force them to pay for your content the way they pay those who provide content for their cable TV channels. Also, find a way to receive revenue from search engines, portals and aggregators, or create your own.

4. Reclaim classifieds. Find a way, a better one than just owning Classified Ventures, to win back the classified advertising that once generated much of your net profit. Yes, the phenomenal success of a virtually free Craigslist presents a formidable challenge. So assign to that task the brightest minds you can find.

One idea from my friend Tim: Add photos and videos to your classifieds. Unleash and showcase the creativity of someone selling his car or couch or looking for a home for her pet. If the ad generates significant traffic, refund the cost. Make the ads entertaining.

5. Stop the presses. If you can’t kill the print edition immediately, quadruple the subscription fee to cover all its costs--including polluting our environment with delivery trucks and depleting our oil supply--with enough left over to subsidize your technology infrastructure and online efforts. For the rest of its natural life, make the print edition your highest-margin product. As an intermediate step, print only the Sunday edition, which I suspect generates most of your print revenue.

6. Focus on news. By abandoning your readers and focusing on the needs of your advertisers, who are rapidly abandoning you, you forgot your mission: to publish the news. (Newspaper; get it?)

7. Emphasize local news. By local, I mean the city of Chicago. (Chicago Tribune; get it?) It’s not the Metropolitan Statistical Area Tribune, nor the National nor World Tribune, as published in Chicago. Any non-local story must have a strong local angle.

Many disagree, but, in my opinion, your business isn’t to tell me what happened in Washington, D. C., or in Afghanistan, unless you tell me how that news significantly affects my life in Chicago. Assume that I have other news sources (television and national online media, in my case). To sharpen your focus, change your name, at least conceptually, to Chicago News.

Aspire to be the best, and the most profitable, local online news service in the world!

8. Improve your content. Every time you run a story about any celebrity’s canine, as you did recently about the dead dogs of Martha Stewart and Oprah, you hasten your demise. Invest primarily in relevant, in-depth, investigative journalism.

The word Tribune comes from the name of an officer of ancient Rome elected by plebeians to protect their rights from arbitrary acts of patrician magistrates. Be true to your paper’s name; become a true champion of the people.

The Atlanta Journal has long boasted, poetically, that it covers Dixie like the dew. In one of America’s most corrupt cities, Chicago News should cover our city like the humidity: It should leave honest officials sweating profusely and dishonest officials gasping for air—on their way to prison.

9. Hire the best journalists and pay them commissions. Content is king online (and off), so hire the cream of the crop, then provide the resources needed to create a first-rate product. As a constant reminder that publishing is a business and that all journalists are in sales, cut their salaries by half, then pay them for every page view their articles or sections generate. Award a bonus for every “excellent” rating by readers.

10. Sell your stock. Chicago News should be owned by someone whose sole passion is creating the best local news organization in America. Sorry, Sam, you’re not our guy. As soon as you stabilize the company, please, kind sir, sell your stock--better yet, donate it to your employees—then mount your motorcycle and ride off, quietly, into the sunset.

You’ll be a hero, a champion of the people, perhaps a savior of journalism!

Do we have a deal?
Ric Cox

Author's Note: Ric Cox earned a Bachelor of Science degree in journalism from Southern Illinois University in 1966 and a Master of Science degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in New York City in 1967. Over four decades, he worked as a newspaper reporter and magazine editor. In 2001, he created ChicagoCondosOnline.com, a subscription-based Web application that provides content to real-estate professionals and consumers. He blogs at ChicagoCondosOnline.blogspot.com and at SaveOurTribune.blogspot.com.

Links to Additional Resources
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/16/why-newspapers-cant-be-saved-but-the-news-can http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1877161,00.html
http://www.usatoday.com/money/media/2009-03-17-newspapers-downturn_N.htm?loc=interstitialskip http://www.stateofthenewsmedia.org/2009/narrative_overview_majortrends.php?cat=1&media=1
http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/
http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=45&aid=158210 (Steve Brill)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steven-johnson/old-growth-media-and-the_b_175313.html
http://www.naa.org/Resources/Publications/PRESSTIME/PRESSTIME-2009-April/01-Cover-Dont-Stop-the-Presses/01-Cover-Dont-Stop-the-Presses.aspx
http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=4491
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/08/AR2009040802989.html
http://mediacafe.blogspot.com/ (Downloadable spreadsheet to test various paid scenarios)
http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/2009/04/publishers-zero-in-on-charging-for.html#comments
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/13/technology/start-ups/13hyperlocal.html?ref=business
http://www.guardian.co.uk/open-platform
http://mashable.com/2009/03/11/newspaper-industry/

Comments

From Len Iaquinta, founder, www.excellence-in-communications.com, Kenosha, WI:

"This is the most thoughtful, intelligent and useful commentary on the subject I have seen. I agree that the newspaper business has been somnambulant into this century. There has been a lack of creativity, adaptability and vision that is breathtaking. The kind of thinking you have advanced is its only hope.

"In the 1970s, for Ed Barrett at the Academy for Educational Development, I prepared a visioning paper on the future electronic delivery of news. I foresaw users developing their own menus of video and print news for delivery to them at their selected times. I wrote that it would be a computer mediated delivery system that would allow each person to program a personal news service. With such high value, subscriptions would be very attractive. Delivery on paper, printed at the home, would be optional.

"I’m still waiting."


From Barry Jagoda, Director of Communications, University of California, San Diego:

"Even though there have been numerous suggestions along the pay-per-use terms you outline for the Trib--one recent good and somewhat similar approach came from Walter Isaacson--I thought yours was one of the best, thoughtful and most comprehensive.

"The idea I liked the least was for the Tribune to no longer be a national newspaper and the one that I really enjoyed was quadrupling, or whatever, the cost of the print edition to make it pay for itself.

"Very well-written piece and I hope someone is paying attention."

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