Newspapers and Technology March 2000
No time like the present for a Web site
By Rob Carrigan
"I hate it in friends, when they come too late to help." -- Euripides, c. 455
Depending on who you are talking with, if you are a newspaper that has yet to embrace the Internet with your own site, you are either way too late -- or a few years early.
But maybe now is as good a time as any.
If you are building to try to keep ahead of the boom -- growth is already slowing. Information from Jupiter Communications indicates that year-to-year growth of the Internet has decreased from 62 percent in 1997 to 20 percent in 1998 and an expected 15 percent in 1999. The growth is also expected to slow to a mere 8 percent by 2003. Will the developing bandwidth soon spur on the boom once again? Or as Don Valentine, the founder of Sequoia Capital, is quoted in Forbes' most recent ASAP, do "we have nearly 10,000 Internet companies too many?"
If you are building to keep ahead of the millions of teenagers and grade school children who want their own sites, you are way behind the curve.
The Progress and Freedom Foundation reports that four out of ten adults in America use the Internet to some extent, but you don't have to look very far to find anecdotal information about your son's or daughter's composition class posting their individual Web sites on the school's server as part of a class project.
If you are trying to make money by the fistful, (not to be confused with spending other people's money like some of the dot.coms burning through venture capital), some folks think it is still a little early.
Strong Internet financial models by newspaper companies exist, but in most of these cases, ink on paper is still king and the online market is secondary. Many newspaper company forays into the online world are defensive measures that address a perceived threat. And as such, don't really go after new business, but instead try to keep the old business from slipping away.
Is it our fate to build and maintain local portals or gates or doors to an Internet that will take you anywhere in the world? And are we to survive by putting up a billboard or some other subtle form of advertising in front of those gates?
Conventional models that involve selling advertising and using news, features, photos and other information to draw people to a site may evolve into sales partnerships where we take a cut of the total sales dollar churned through our vehicle. Where we once were dependent on single copy sales of newspapers and subscriptions for a substantial revenue stream, we may have to transform into an online host taking reservations for the local hotel or restaurant.
It is an absolute certainty that we will have to market ourselves out there in the online world. We must build on our closeness to the community, our quality and quantity of local content, and our understanding of the neighborhood. It is a sure thing that we will have to become more interactive with consumers of our goods and services.
But if we were to start today, are we too late or too early? Maybe now is as good a time as any.
Rob Carrigan specializes in prepress systems for weekly newspapers. He is the publisher of the Ute Pass Courier in Woodland Park, the Gold Rush in Cripple Creek, and the Pikes Peak Journal in Manitou Springs, all Westward Communications Inc. weeklies in Colorado. He can be reached via e-mail at RCarrigan@aol.com.