Making the Internet Pay the Bills

Krish Raghav — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 06:11:00 GMT

History has been made today, if buzz on the Internet is to be believed.

American journalist Jeff Jarvis, writing for the Guardian, writes that the L.A.Times, the much beleagured paper seeing cuts in circulation, a strained buyout, and criticism in the wake of layoffs, now earns enough through online ad revenue to cover it's 'entire editorial payroll - print and online.'

Jarvis cites an 'email' and Russ Stanton, the editor of the paper, as the source for this information, which apparently, and rather boisterously, says: 'Given where we were five years ago, I don't think anyone thought that would ever happen.'

Of course, it's hard to say if the L.A.Times has reinvented the wheel here until more information pours in - it's been forced to cut editorial staff drastically (and is hence a much smaller operation), and, since a lot of advertising packages bundle print and web together, it won't be that easy to cleanly cleave the two (just yet), even at a time when the Internet is overtaking print as a 'primary news source'

The L.A.Times website itself doesn't really look too different - it has a clean, clear design, with (unavoidably) garish ads liberally sprinkled all over, and clicking on a story replaces the top banner with another ad, like above. (Yes, very much aware of the irony, thank you)

In fact, what's telling here is that the L.A.Times approach is not so much cutting-edge and radical, but smart and reasoned. They've been quietly pushing for change and tweaking things around since 2006's infamous internal memo that called it a 'web-stupid' organization. A conference talk by Jason Oberfest, head of Product Strategy and Business Development at the paper highlights some of their key approaches, and some are very interesting in their sheer common-senseness:

” The first thing that was really clear to us is that newspaper articles online frankly just don't cut it. We knew we had to change that paradigm -we had to build a more functional product, a more utility oriented product.”

Newspaper websites, in India atleast, have till now largely functioned as large, inglorious dumps of all their print articles - an approach made worse by a clunky, ancient search capability and a poorly organized database. Small first step this, but perhaps the most difficult.

“We recognized the extent of the local opportunity… There are many categories of news and information where a one-size fits all approach to developing products works ok (like classifieds)"

Few Indian papers do this, but that could also be because very few daily papers can indeed be called 'local'.

(From the LAtimes website)

“Content aggregation is as important as content creation.

Probably the most important of them all: recognizing that readers will rarely, if ever, rely solely on YOU and your website for all their information, especially when the idea is to greedily hoard all your content in a keep and charge for entry (metaphorically speaking, of course)

It is indeed good news that a digital operation can help pay the bills in such a significant manner, but whether we have, in the L.A.Times, a model of efficiency and cleverness, or merely an affect of drastic and ruthless cost-cutting - we'll have to wait and see. But Jarvis, on the other hand, is positively buoyant:

'So in the LA Times revelation, I see hope: the possibility that online revenue could support digital journalism for a city. The enterprise will be smaller, but it could well be more profitable than its print forebears today and - here's the real news - it would grow from there. Imagine that: news as a growth industry again.'

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Making the Internet Pay the Bills