The Evolving Newsroom

It's a question newspaper sites eventually face: do we or don't we charge for access to our archives? Assuming, of course, that they have a searchable archive.

Times Online, the website of the Times newspaper in the UK, launched its archive in June on a free trial basis and has just announced it is putting much of it behind a paywall, according to the Guardian:

An email to users described the first three months of the archive as the "free introductory period" and explained that although featured articles on the archive homepage would remain free, access will be charged at £4.95 for one day, £14.95 for one month and £74.95 for one year.

"On Thursday September 18, the free introductory period will end, so we're writing to let you know how you can continue to enjoy this wonderful resource," Times Online told its readers.

"All the featured content on our archive home page and on Times Online will remain free to view, but if you wish to search the archive there will be a charge to view the results."

Times Online editor-in-chief Anne Spackman said,"The trial allowed us to see what [kind of content] people were coming in for."

The archive attracts around 80,000 unique users each month, she said, with each visitor accessing between seven and eight pages on average.

Spackman said between 3,000 and 5,000 articles would be available for free at any one time, linked from an index page that connects archive stories with current events, such as the Wall Street crash.

"The only people who will be paying are the people pursuing a personal journey," said Spackman, adding that the new rates for the archive would be less than the Guardian with special offers for existing newspaper subscribers.

The 200-year archive includes news stories from 1785 to 1985 including the Battle of Waterloo, the arrival of convicts at Botany Bay and the execution of Marie Antoinette, all in the original page layout.

Times Online, as with other online newspapers, has had to decide whether to monetise its extensive archive by opening pages for free and relying on advertising, or whether to stick to traditional business-to-business revenues from libraries.

Introducing paid access to consumers means sites can preserve their existing contracts with library firms, while keeping the service available to consumers and is likely to be seen as a more stable revenue stream in the current economic climate.

The move follows a major announcement by Google last week, which is working with 100 newspaper partners, mostly in the US, to digitise and index their archives.

From a Washington Post media piece about still-declining ad revenue and "hiring freezes turned to buyouts and then to layoffs" come these two rather grim quotes:

“Never in my most bearish dreams six months ago did I think we’d be talking about negative 15 percent numbers against weak comps,” said Peter S. Appert, an analyst at Goldman Sachs. “I think the probability is very high that there will be a number of examples of individual newspapers and newspaper companies that fall into a loss position. And I think it’s inevitable that there will be closures in this industry, and maybe bankruptcies.”

Slightly less bearish but no cheerier:

Since the fall, when Media General, the owner of a major newspaper chain in the South, set its 2008 budget, “We have pulled our thinking down twice with respect to revenue,” said Marshall N. Morton, the chief executive.

Over the next few years, he predicted, “There’s got to be some assimilation,” with some major American newspapers going out of business or merging. At the corporate level, he said, “I would guess that rather than bankruptcies, you’d see combinations.”

I read the story in a newsletter sent out by the INMA, The International Newsmedia Marketing Association, who can usually be relied on for good news about newspapers even while everyone else is muttering dire predictions. But it appeared alongside a slew of stories about cuts in newspapers in the US:

• Washington State's Olympian to Lay Off 17 Employees as Part of Corporate Parent McClatchy's Cutback Drive
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• Outsourcing of Printing Work at the Boston Herald to Lead to the Lay Off of 130 to 160 Workers
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• Germany's Berliner Zeitung Cutting 30 Positions as Part of Cost-Saving Programme
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• News Corporation to Merge Marketing, Advertising, Online, and Circulation Functions of the Times and the Sun
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• Restructuring at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution to Cost 21 Jobs in the Information Technology Department
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• Oregon's Register-Guard Cutting 30 Jobs Following Budget Shortfalls
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• North Carolina's News & Observer Cutting 70 Jobs and to Jointly Produce Sports, Politics, and Features With the Charlotte Observer
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• Journal Register Said to be Considering Sale or Outside Investment
  
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• Reorganisation of Editorial, Administrative, and Sales Roles at Central Counties Newspapers in the UK Could Cost Up to 34 Jobs
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• Newsquest Cutting 8 Editorial Jobs at the York Press and the Gazette and Herald

Even in Taiwan:

• Taiwan's China Times to Cut Staff and Page Count as It Deals With Difficult Market Conditions

Just in case you were in any doubt that the newspaper business is in trouble.

I can never resist a bit of doomsaying from Silicon Alley Insider's Henry Blodget. This time he's arguing that within ten years newspaper circulation and advertising revenue will be a quarter what it is now:

Why? Because:

• As circulations and ad revenue continue to fall, print economies-of-scale will reverse, cutting further into already shrinking print margins.
  
• As "green business" practices take hold, a new generation of consumers will come to view the newspaper industry as a horrifically wasteful polluter that eats forests, gobbles fuel and electricity, and farts untold amounts of hydrocarbons into the atmosphere--all to deliver information that might have been interesting yesterday.
  
• A generation of newspaper ad salespeople and ad sales buyers will gradually retire or quit, and advertisers will increasingly ask themselves why they are spending billions on ads they have no idea whether anyone looks at.
• As financial and environmental pressures increase and a better grasp of reality sets in, more papers will opt to do what the Capital Times of Madison, Wisconsin, did last weekend: Shut down their print businesses, fire a third of their staff, and put what's left online.

As ever, Blodget sparks some lively debate and the comments are worth a read.

Nytimes.com and the Financial Times have both picked up traffic to their sites since dropping their paywalls but there hasn't been a corresponding rise in ad revenue, according to Silicon Alley Insider. A couple of interesting comments on the SAI piece.