Fall in Spring, Part II

Two caveats on this previous post:

There's nothing wrong with having a conversation or joining it. The Civic Journalism movement, of which the "join the conversation" emphasis seems to me an outgrowth, is a perfectly fine thing for newspapers to support. The problem is that Civic Journalism is often presented as if its major goals -- increasing public involvement in electoral politics and grappling with the issues of our time -- are, or at least are a major part of, the only true purpose of journalism. A newspaper is, once again, like a department store; it's not a boutique. Civic Journalism and the conversation are a department, maybe on the main floor or mezzanine, but if they are the main thing in the store, not many people are going to come in every day.

Even if those could be our only goals, Civic Journalism and joining the online conversation is not of itself a successful business model for newspapers, as is becoming clearer every month. To be fair, its advocates have never presented it as such. They present it as a civic good and assume therefore that it will find support; because it is in the public interest, the public will somehow arrange for it to work. This has always been a problem with Good Government initiatives.

Of course, if the conversation is about Miley Cyrus' photos, that might be a successful business model, but I doubt it's what Jay Rosen envisioned. But why a daily newspaper would believe that it would become in 2008 the major venue for a conversation about Miley is beyond me.

And the fact that a large number, possibly a third, of our paying print customers appear to use our online offerings as well is a wonderful thing. The seamless garment, to use a religious metaphor. We give it away online and they are still willing to pay for the print product, because they get added value from it. If we give them stuff exclusively in print and then give them other stuff online, instead of giving them the same stuff free, they might still be happy. Of course, they would still want the ability to e-mail to their friends a link to a story they read in the paper. This sort of stuff we can work out. But it seems that promoting print and then having online as added value to print is not a model being rejected by the newspaper marketplace.