A tiny New Jersey weekly newspaper avoids the Internet like the plague, but has also avoided many of the financial problems plaguing larger newspapers. But is there much to learn from its model?
From the NYT's David Carr (published Dec. 21):
TriCityNews of Monmouth County, N.J., is prospering precisely because it aggressively ignores the Web. Its Web site has a little boilerplate about the product and lists ad rates, but nothing more. (The address is trinews.com, for all the good it will do you.)
“Why would I put anything on the Web?” asked Dan Jacobson, the publisher and owner of the newspaper. “I don’t understand how putting content on the Web would do anything but help destroy our paper. Why should we give our readers any incentive whatsoever to not look at our content along with our advertisements, a large number of which are beautiful and cheap full-page ads?”
Other publications much larger than TriCityNews have been wondering about pumping resources into a medium that does not seem to show a promise of returns any time soon.
Writing in The New York Observer, John Koblin pointed out that when Forbes, Portfolio and Fortune went through recent retrenchments, the Web staffs were hit the hardest. That may be just an old print reflex, but there is a rational argument to be made that the part of the apparatus that has a working business model, declining or not, should receive the resources.
At a time when Web entrepreneurs like Nick Denton of Gawker Media are predicting a 40 percent decline in Web display advertising, it’s probably not a great time to be indexing into the Web either.
And there are signs that the free ride for consumers may be coming to an end. I started getting notices to renew my subscription to The Wall Street Journal and its Web site and waited, as I have in the past, for the deeply discounted offer. It never came. And according to company statements in October, paid subscriptions for The Journal’s Web site were up more than 7 percent from a year ago. ...
Mr. Jacobson is more than happy to be known as the Fred Flintstone of the publishing world. “There may come a time when the Web is all there is, and we will try to adapt,” he said, “and if we don’t, well, hey, we had a great run. But right now, the Web makes no business sense for us.”
I would say that a tiny paper serving a well-defined market doesn't really need to be online -- until the day comes that some other entrepreneur sees a market that wants to be served online. He may build an an audience that then starts to eat away at the TriCityNews.
Business is all about costs vs. revenues, risk vs. opportunity.
If someone else can reach more readers in Asbury Park, N.J. at less cost to advertisers, and put effective ads in front of those readers just as efficiently as TriCityNews while still making a profit, then the paper has a fight on its hands.
On a bigger stage, however, I would think the Internet genie is too far out of the bottle.