Sacramento Bee’s new online pub experiments with time-shifting to boost value of the paper’s political reporting
by Peter Scheer
A few weeks ago I wrote in this space that newspapers, in their rush to generate ad revenues on the internet, had made a strategic mistake in giving away their news content, free, online. I suggested that, to reestablish the value of their content, metro papers should consider embargoing their news articles from the free Internet for a brief period–say, 24 hours–after they are made available to paying customers.
An embargo, by starving the web of its only free sources of comparatively trustworthy and credible news in real-time, would, I argued, demonstrate the true value of that information. Without newspaper and wire service stories, internet portals and news aggregators would have little to offer except out-of-date articles from mainstream media and blogosphere musings on last week’s news.
Now comes word that McClatchy Company’s flagship daily, the Sacramento Bee, has decided to package its best political news and commentary into a new subscription-only online product, “Capitol Alert,” that will be made available to readers the evening before the same articles are posted to the Bee’s free internet site and delivered to subscribers to the print edition.
Like my proposed embargo–only smarter–the Bee’s experiment is an attempt to recapture lost value in its editorial content by shifting the timing of its availability to favor readers willing not only to pay, but to pay a premium, in order to get the information before the rest of the world. Since this approach does not degrade the Bee’s primary service and the new product entails minimal incremental cost, Capitol Alert can be successful at a very low level of subscriptions.
This approach may not work for most newspapers. The Bee is unusual in having a segment of its readers who are intensely interested in a segment of its editorial content. Still, Capitol Alert is worth watching in an industry that doesn’t have an abundance of good options.