July 25, 2006

Bad Move

Nashville Business Journal (and, I'm assuming, all of the other 41weekly city business journals owned by the American City Business Journals unit of Advance Publications Inc.) has started putting all of its news and feature from its print-edition online - but will make the online content accessible only to readers who are subscribers to the print edition. Details here.

Previously, NBJ and its sister papers made the top eight stories from their print edition, published Fridays, available online for free the following Mondays.

A one-year subscription to the NBJ costs $85.

My prediction: NBJ stories will now be read by fewer people.

The good news: it appears that access to the archives is still free.

Full disclosure: I worked for NBJ from 1990-1993, when it had no Internet presence, and again for about eight months in late 1997 and early 1998 when it was beginning to put content online.

The paper - like most print-media properties - faces a tough challenge created by the Internet. It needs to be online, yet the vast majority of its revenue comes from selling ads in the print edition. And, like many print publications, it fears that putting its content online will undermine its cash cow, especially if it gives the content away for free. That's why NBJ and other ACBJ papers have for a long time put only the first eight print-edition stories online, and not until three days after the print edition was delivered to subscribers.

Yet as more and more readers get their news and information online, that kind of approach looks increasingly untenable - but putting all the print stories and features online for free the same day as the print edition is delivered doesn't seem to be an attractive option either given the paper's need for ad revenue.

The natural solution seems to be putting all the print content online in a timely fashion, but making it available only to paid subscribers. But I'm not so sure that's the right approach, either. It doesn't add much value for subscribers - It merely provides them a second way to read the same stories.

I'd have counseled the paper to take a more value-added approach. The paper is published weekly, in an era when people are accustomed to much more rapid information flow. Instead of using its website as a perk for print-edition subscribers, NBJ could give business-news consumers in the Nashville region good reason to pay for a second subscription in addition to the $85 annual fee for the print product.

How? By refashioning the print edition as a more analytical, predictive, long-range publication, while turning the website into a daily publication that carries that hard news and breaking stories formerly carried in the print edition. By adding reporter-written, beat-specific blogs to the website. By training reporters in how to do interactive reader-involved journalism. And by training reporters in how to shoot and edit video.

The goal: Create a daily, multimedia business publication that would compete daily with NashvillePost.com, which currently dominates the breaking business news niche in Nashville.

Remember: in this new-media world of cheap digital technologies, it will be easier for print publications to get into the TV media's business than the other way around.