When Newspapers Attack: Colorado Blog Under Siege

If you’re anything like me you long ago gave up on opening your morning newspaper and instead fire up the RSS reader over your morning coffee. And if you are like me, well we’re hardly alone. Newspaper subscriptions have been in decline for decades and with the loss of advertising revenue the collapse of most American dailies seems all but inevitable.

Paradoxically though, as dead tree readership has fallen we’ve seen an explosion of readership of online news sources; websites acting as web portals of their dead tree brethren, websites (like this one) that do their own reporting, blogs to filter the news and provide commentary and analysis  and aggregators like Memeorandum. So while our hands have fewer ink stains on them we’re staying as well informed, if not more-so, of the news that interests us and excites us as ever before.

Not surprisingly the old guards in the news business have struggled to adapt their businesses to this new reality. The frustration felt by many in the old guard towards new media is palpable and today the latest skirmish between old and new media went public. The owners of 18 Colorado newspapers, ranging from The Denver Post all the way down to some fish wrap known as the Windsor Now, have threatened legal action against the nationally recognized Colorado political blog, Colorado Pols for alleged copyright infringements. In a rebuttal to the bullying of these news agencies the authors at Colorado Pols note the obvious,

The idea that the Post will suddenly become more valuable if it is not offered for free online doesn’t fix the fundamental problem that the news in general is already offered online, everywhere, for free. It doesn’t make the print version of a newspaper more valuable or more relevant if you have to pay to read it online; all it does is make the newspaper more complicated to read, and thus, less attractive to most potential readers (and advertisers). In going to a paid online model, what they will be doing is saying, “you can’t get our version of the news for free anymore.” In response, most people will just shrug and visit other websites instead, just like we are doing in response to this letter.

You would think that the owners of these Colorado newspapers would realize that their position is untenable and that these petulant displays are going to have the opposite intended effect. But apparently they don’t have time to keep up with industry news so we’ll lay it all out there for them.  In 2007 The New York Times aborted its 2 year old experiment whereby premium content was walled off behind a pay site.  I’ll let the Times explain what happened,

What changed, The Times said, was that many more readers started coming to the site from search engines and links on other sites instead of coming directly to NYTimes.com. These indirect readers, unable to get access to articles behind the pay wall and less likely to pay subscription fees than the more loyal direct users, were seen as opportunities for more page views and increased advertising revenue.

“What wasn’t anticipated was the explosion in how much of our traffic would be generated by Google, by Yahoo and some others,” Ms. Schiller said.

You see, what The New York Times found out was that they didn’t have a monopoly on good journalism, good analysis, or good commentary. Obviously brand loyalty was not what the Times thought it was.  With innumerable other sources of news at their fingertips readers weren’t tied to The New York Times. And if readers won’t be tied down to the most esteemed newspaper in the country, what would they be tied to? Certainly not The Denver Post.

Pols continues,

It’s no secret that traditional media executives… blame “the blogs” for much of their recent decline, but what they should really be blaming is the Internet in general. We didn’t change the rules or the reality – the Internet did that all in one big bang. What’s done is done, and there’s no going back to the days before Al Gore built the Internet tubes.

There are really two ways to deal with the advent of new media and ‘uncontrolled’ distribution of the news: you can either accommodate this new reality and find ways to mutually benefit (and increase your online traffic) like our partners at The Washington Post and National Journal have gainfully done, or you can break out the lawyers and try to retreat into a paid firewall content cave. The first approach is useful in increasing website traffic and generating new links, which leads to more online traffic, and so on. We honestly can’t tell you the benefit of the latter. We submit to you, our loyal readers since 2004, that only one of these approaches will result in survival for the print newsrooms we all greatly respect and value.

I don’t want newspapers to die out, I truly don’t. But that’s not because newspapers are themselves irreplaceable but rather because good journalism is irreplaceable. If The Denver Post goes out of business tomorrow news in Colorado will continue to be made and news in Colorado will continue to be reported. The same goes for every community and every newspaper in the country.

Right now everyone in the media is struggling to find a way to finance good journalism. It’s a tremendous challenge and no one model seems to be the magic bullet. TFT is itself an experiment, venerable print magazines have bulked up their online presence and newspapers far greater than The Denver Post have co-opted prominent bloggers. What model will work is anyone’s guess but what won’t work is blindingly obvious. The quickest way to irrelevancy for any media outlet is to engage in the petulant games that these Colorado newspapers have. If The Denver Post wants to take its internet ball and go home no one will notice and no one will care. The Denver Post will only succeed in hastening its own demise.

The newspapers don’t own the news and the sooner they figure this out the more likely it is that they’ll survive. And those that don’t learn to adapt will simply be relegated to history books and museums – relics of times past and Rockwell Americana.

Update: Licensed attorney, and fellow Colorado blogger, Andrew Oh-Willeke calls the copyright claims at issue here “dubious, at best.“