Opinion

It’s no secret. Magazine and newspaper circulation and ad sales are down and paper costs are up. Publishers are scrambling for methods to keep up with today’s digital lifestyle—and to catch eyeballs—but are often running into far too many misses than hits.

First there were those who completely missed the boat. You know the publications that stayed clear of the Web during the first Internet boom? Feeling vindicated after the bust, these publications either remained offline with no changes to the print brand or only half-heartedly erected an online companion. (We’re not talking about The New York Times or Wall Street Journal here.) But now we’re in the Web 2.0 days, and people are watching more than 100 million videos a day on Internet video search site YouTube.

In response, publishers chasing the 18-34 market are giving away content for free. But I say: that ain’t the way to do it. Sure RSS Feeds can be advertiser and sponsor supported, but the verdict for increasing revenues and subscribers is still out on that one. RSS Feeds are a free distribution channel enabling users to subscribe through a newsreader service, but they are not paying for those subscriptions. Why not? Perhaps the Web is all about democratization and open source, but there are proven examples that people will pay for quality content (hint: they were mentioned above). So why give it away for free?

Nylon magazine, a hipster lifestyle publication, lets readers download the magazine for free from its website. They also have a profile page on the ever-popular youth social networking site MySpace where visitors can listen to the issue for free. Then there’s The Fader Magazine, another lifestyle publication for the indie set. Its website is set up as a blog and you can download the issue as a podcast from iTunes. Really cute, clever ideas—but the setup enables readers to interact more with the distribution channel than the actual publication itself. For example, when a link for an article from a local weekly (not this one, of course) ends up on the front page of Digg.com, a social news aggregator where members vote on which articles appear first —what’s in it for the weekly? OK, the publication gets a link with page views (that could result in ad dollars), but the user goes back to Digg to interact. And besides, services like Digg, Netscape and Google News aren’t paying publishers to distribute their content.

If the goal is to improve circulation or to even improve awareness of the media outlet’s brand, these aren’t necessarily the best methods to reach those goals. And while the digital subscription model might be closer to an example of what works, if no one is reading your paper, they’re not paying to download a full issue—especially not when there are papers and magazines that give full issues away for free on their sites.

The argument is moving further away from Print vs. Web nowadays anyway. Print isn’t going anywhere. We saw that with the first Internet boom. And while some critics may argue that papers and magazines will become primarily available for the masses in digital formats, I’m not buying it. Certainly publications like The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times wouldn’t mind having a print-only version for the elite. Isn’t that where the Times is headed anyway with its division between The New York Times and Times Select online?

Perhaps those guys are onto something, but I’m putting my money on convergence. Because I know that people want options: print, Web, PDA and mobile downloadable options. The digital distribution system has moved beyond the Web and onto devices that people use in their cars, on subways and while walking down the street. Recall the scene from the 2002 flick Minority Report starring Tom Cruise, where a Metro passenger is reading a paper that appears to be USA Today. The paper is actually a thin video screen, with changing pictures and text that can be folded up. It’s probably downloading the updates from some source of wireless connectivity. Trust me, it’s being worked on already.

Lynne D. Johnson is Senior Editor at FastCompany.com