I don’t usually watch The Colbert Report (mostly because I’m an old lady and go to bed before 11), but after reading a tweet from my QWF teacher (and fellow Hour reporter) Craig Silverman, I watched a few clips from the recent show where Stephen Colbert interviews Newspaper Association of America President John Sturm.
In typical Colbert fashion, Sturm gets skewered when Colbert asks him various questions about the crisis in the newspaper industry, to the point where Colbert asks Sturm a knock-knock joke at the end of the interview that goes like this:
Colbert: Knock-knock!
Sturm: Who’s there?
Colbert: The death of the newspaper industry.
Needless to say, Sturm didn’t find this terribly funny. But you know what? Colbert’s report, humorous as it may have been with its suggestion to incorporate huge porn sections into online newspapers, has a serious point: what’s up with the online newspaper’s business model?! I have been wondering for years why anyone would “buy the milk when you can get the cow for free,” so to speak, but perhaps more importantly, I have to ask: If newspapers continue to give their content away for free, doesn’t this undermine their whole existence? Honestly, why should anyone go out and buy a daily paper—or even a subscription delivered to their front door—when you can have all of the exact same news delivered to your inbox or your feed reader, every day, automatically, without paying a cent?
“That’s a hard business model,” Colbert observes. And he’s exactly right. So what are newspapers doing to get their business models updated for the 21st century? How do they plan to make money as many close their doors completely and others can’t compete online with the millions of blogs, Twitter and other amateur reporters posting up-to-the-second information around the clock?
While Colbert’s suggestion to add porn to the news sites is obviously seen as contrary to journalistic ethics, I don’t see why it couldn’t be taken seriously. After all, if you’ll pay for porn, why not pay for porn and news together? If news sites require age verification like any porn site, this will keep minors from accessing it (in theory, anyway—which is really all anyone can hope for even on actual porn sites), and those readers not interested in a porn + news combo-pack can go for a less expensive “news only” option. I personally predict no one will sign up for the “news only” option, but best to offer it nevertheless.
I don’t particularly think that reputable news outlets like the New York Times will be amenable to the concept of offering news alongside porn content, and they’d certainly have to partner up with a porn site that is equally “venerable” in its own line of business to make it work, but it’s not a completely insane idea, either. After all, there’s plenty of sex journalism out there already, and many weekly/alternative papers already offer personal ads, escorting and massage ads, and a sex column in the back of the paper. Is it really that far a stretch to consider adding sexual content to sell online news? For that matter, is there anything unethical about offering people what they really want to see or read? Isn’t that, in the end, the whole point of publishing?
UPDATED 1:41 PM: If you’re looking for a few slightly more serious suggestions on how to save your paper, try Gypsy Bandito’s “How to Save a Local Newspaper” or, if you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area, you might want to check out Spot.Us, an open source project to pioneer “community funded reporting.”
