The Web strategy hamster wheel

Today our company's CEO paid us a visit. To mark the occasion, we had a meeting to talk about how much content our paper should be putting online.

Our corporate owners have a policy about how much content we and the other papers should be putting online for free. I won't give a number, but suffice to say, it's not much. It's also a loose policy, it seems, since our paper puts almost all of our content online.

The purpose of holding back content is, of course, to make the printed version more valuable. If customers can't get the news anywhere else, they'll be forced to buy the printed paper or pay for a subscription to our PDF-based electronic edition.

This strategy would work if we were the only source of news in our community. We are not.News has come to us that our major competitor, a local TV station, is about to hire a couple more reporters and a second Web producer. Management sees this as an omen, a sign that TV is starting to take the Web seriously, a sign that they think they steal away some of our Web supremacy.

While we beat them consistently on traffic numbers -- if the figures from Compete.com are to be believed -- the TV news team consistent beats us to the Web. They are always minutes or, in some cases, hours ahead of us online. Their goal, I think, is to position themselves as the place people should turn to for news first.

I think they are making good progress toward that goal, despite our best efforts.

It is in this atmosphere that we met today to talk about how much content to put online. In reality, we talked about a much bigger subject: the uncertain balance between paper and electrons and how to invest in the future while keeping the doors open today.

The viewpoints:

• The advertising guy believes wholeheartedly that he can make the Web make money -- someday. We just have to have a popular Web site he can sell high-value ads on.
• The IT guy thinks that we do too much mirroring of content between print and the Web. The products aren't different enough to make either one of them special enough to "sell" to readers.
• The managing editor is worried that what we really need to do is put in more effort (somewhere), but we don't have the time or people to do more.
• The circulation director is worried that putting too much effort into the Web site erodes demand for his printed product, meaning that we lose paying subscribers.
• I, the Web editor, worry that if we cut back on the Web, we lose traffic and eventually worth, a loss we might not be able to recover -- thereby endangering my job and putting my family in risk of winding up on the street, begging for hamburgers and dancing for money.
• The publisher is chiefly concerned about the competition with the TV news and how that affects our current supremacy.
• The CEO wants the entire chain of papers to move forward as a unit, with a centralized policy, designed by committee and then tailored to each paper.

Solutions? None, of course, but a few ideas. Among them: paywalls, reducing the number of articles posted to the Web, metered access, making the Web and print versions distinct products and thinking ahead to other content platforms like the iPad and Kindle.

My favorite suggestion: an information wall. Keep the online content free, but require users to log in to see it all. That way, we gather information about our readers that we can use to sell targeted advertising -- that is, more valuable advertising that people might actually want to see.

The only practical thing that came out of the meeting today was that we don't know enough about what we're talking about to make any rational decisions about it. We need a readership survey. We need to know about our market and our audience, how they're getting our news and how they want it from us, how often they're getting it from our competition, etc.

Maybe this will happen. I hope so because I don't want us making business decisions blindly. That's just bad business.

Related posts:

1. Montreal Gazette to go Web-only on Sundays
2. New York Times plans to start charging its Web readers
3. Langeveld: Newspaper downturn caused by shift in American interests, not by Web
4. Local news and the Web
5. Journalism’s salvation is hiding in a mountain of data