RatcliffeBlog - Mitch Thinking Out Loud

Doc stirring the pot

Doc stirring the pot

Doc Searls dove head-first into the Googlewashing debate, going head-on with the forces of tsk-tsk, Andrew Orlowski and Geoffrey Nunberg. His argument has been called wholly flawed by Christopher Coulter and Doc fires back, finally making the point he's been aiming at all along in the lead paragraph and not the bottom of the posting:

"The real issue is about what the Web can do for publishers and vice versa. That's it. Everything else, blogging included, is a red herring."

That's the real problem, which I find ironic to see ignored by journalists. The big papers are closing themselves out of participating in the creation of a robust record of the times by limiting access to their archives. What newspaper exec, if you asked them, "Would you like people be talking about your articles every day and pointing to old ones to make their points" wouldn't like that? Especially if you threw up two or three new, fresh ads with each page view?

See, once you've invested in paying a journalist to create an article, the paper usually gets one or two days worth of opportunities to make money on it, if they break it in two parts or do a follow-up story. A genuinely big story, like Watergate, that a single paper can own and that lasts months, comes along once in a lifetime, unless you manfacture them, like happens today with Laci Peterson and Jon Benet Ramsey, among others.

By closing the archives, the papers lose the chance to amortize their content more frequently. Yes, they can charge to get into the archives today, but what percentage of people will do that at $2.50 an article. By creating free traffic to the article, a story can generate $5, $10, or much more in repeat visits that generate ad inventory or the could also charge for reprint rights by offering people the ability to place an entire article in a personal site for $1.00 (with NYT ads), a right you don't get for $2.50, which lets you save the piece on your system and print it, but no more.

All the sturm und drang is misplaced. A smart publisher would be milking traffic, not restricting it. Hell, put ten ads on an article. But keep it in the open, where the public record is a robust reflection of the times and not shut away from only those willing to open their wallets to view an older article.