Press Row

The tech industry continues to pave the way for the next generation of the media business model; that’s a topic we’ll tackle later.

In there here-and-now, more and more popular tech magazines are ditching their print operation in favor of an online-only style, starting with longtime tech mag InfoWorld last year.

In November, PC Magazine, another stalwart on the technology sector, announced their January issue would be their final in print, also opting for an all-online medium.

The reasons, at the surface, are obvious; printing hundreds of thousands of pages each month costs tons of money. Printing content online costs a fraction of that. Additionally, manning an online-only publication probably takes a quarter of the staff.

The rising costs of producing a print pub, as NY Times pointed out, arrives as advertising profits continue to plummet:

• “But magazine and newspaper publishers have been contending with a decline in advertising at the same time that their costs, including ink, printing, and distribution, are rising.
  
  Advertising pages for the December issues of monthly magazines are down more than 17 percent from the December issues of 2007, according to the Media Industry Newsletter, and that is leading to layoffs and the closing of titles.”

The next wave, in my humble opinion, will start when the first brave newspaper decides to go exclusively online. And make no mistake about it—it will happen. The ability to adapt to the changing landscape—and to adjust your business model accordingly—is an absolute must if any of the dying print industry hope to make it out of this economy with their paper still in existence.

The clear challenge is figuring out how to remain profitable in an online-only world.

As we previously mentioned, online-only pubs can carry a much smaller staff than the current model; I’d guess-timate a quarter. Paper boys, printing companies, and others are no longer needed. You get your one or two necessary contributors in each section.  Everyone else gets let go, and you have fewer people covering more ground.

Next—assimilate the failures. (Man, that just sounds cold.) What I mean is this: at the end of this economic struggle, we won’t have three papers per major metropolis. How do you think we arrived at papers like the Chicago Sun-Times to begin with? At some point, there was probably a Chicago Sun and a Chicago Times. One won out, and it acquired the other. That will happen again soon.

Whatever concoction of papers comes out of that (we’ll call it the Chicago Tribune-Sun) will need to figure out how to make online media profitable. And if you read PC Mag’s announcement, here’s a little insight: take advantage of all the compelling mediums the internet has to offer.

- It arrives in your e-mail automatically. Just click the link to either download the latest edition, or to view it entirely online.
- It is portable. Once you’ve downloaded the issue (which takes a matter of seconds), just power up your PC and view it anywhere, on an airplane, in your hotel room, wherever.
- It’s lively and interactive. Our digital edition will eventually offer rich media options within a magazine format. So, for example, next to the product review you’re reading in First Looks, you can easily view a slideshow of that product. Or while you’re reading a Solutions article on Microsoft Outlook tips, our PC Labs experts can walk you through the steps of some of those tips in a video.
- It’s searchable. Here’s something PC Magazine print cannot do. Enter a search term and PC Magazine Digital will fill all the related pages.
- A live TOC: The table of contents is not only a place to find out what’s in this month’s issue. You can use it to navigate directly to the stories you want to read.

There is the key: offer an experience that is superb to the typical newspaper read, and make it accessible anywhere, to anyone with a computer.  The biggest starter to profitability is get people reading.  Newspapers will soon face the challenge of convincing the average reader that they are worth the time of picking up and reading–and finding content that wouldn’t be found in the USA Today or CNN.com.  The bottom line is that the stagnancy of the newspaper culture has to go; news agencies are expected to be flexible, versatile, and on the cutting edge.

Newspapers—your blueprint is here. Who will be the first to take the plunge?

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