Most of my blogging has moved to jeffsonderman.com. This blog is mostly dormant for now, but I'm preserving the previous posts and keeping the domain active. I may return to this domain some day, but for now follow my journalism blogging at the new site.

Newspaper people tend to carry a certain set of false assumptions about readers. We tend to believe that readers see our line between news and opinion columns (few do). We tell ourselves that readers buy the paper because of our great news reporting. Some do, but many people also buy "bad" papers because they actually want the classifieds, crosswords, comics, TV listings and obits.

And, at the height of hubris, we envision that every reader, every day, reads or at least sees each story we print. With this belief in mind, journalists frequently pass on stories with the excuse that "We already did that story a few weeks ago" -- as if everyone must have seen it then.

The Myth Of Regular Readership was never true, and it is even less true online. Nonetheless, many newspaper folk who continue to think of their websites as a digital edition of the paper have carried this myth online. 

Born-again newspaperman Jeff Jarvis described this in a past post:

The problem here is the myth of regular readership. When I started newspaper sites, I had publishers on my rear because they expected people to read them every day, just as (they thought) people read newspapers. But just because the thing plops on the front porch every day, that doesn’t mean everybody reads everything – or sees every ad. That was the myth that fueled overpriced ad rates and overinflated editorial egos. Online, we get to see what people really read – and what it’s really worth to them – and that’s a lot less than we ever thought.

The reality is, most visitors to a given newspaper website come by just a few times a month -- usually to see some specific report they heard about from an acquaintance. The average visitor spends about 5 to 15 minutes on the site in a month. 

Very few visitors are the diehard daily loyalists we imagine come to us for all the day's package of news. The web browsing experience does not involve long, deep stays on one domain. 
News is shared via links among social networks and various types of aggregators and organizers. 

Each site gets its 15 minutes of fame a month. If you think you can force users to pay for access, can you think of any service you use for 15 minutes a month that you would pay regular fees for? Especially if you could get a similar service elsewhere for free? 

Replace the Myth of Regular Readership with the Truth of Irregular Readership -- and build your business model on that. Your hardcore 10% of diehard daily readers may be willing to pay, but consider the "long tail" of infrequent users you will turn away. You could gain a few bucks in the shortterm, but also administrative headaches and loss of relevance and advertising.

For every old media company that gets the Internet wrong and slides into obscurity, there will be another company that gets it right at their expense.

That is what's about to happen with AP and Reuters. As AP imitates the RIAA and focuses on protecting its old power centers, rival news agency Reuters is happy to focus on serving users and embracing how the Internet really works.

On July 24, the president of Reuters media, Chris Ahern (@CJAhearn), directed a tweet at Jeff Jarvis saying "Reuters stands ready to help those who wish an alternative to the AP". Now see this column today elaborating:

"I don’t believe you could or should charge others for simply linking to your content. Appropriate excerpting and referencing are not only acceptable, but encouraged. If someone wants to create a business on the back of others’ original content, the parties should have a business relationship that benefits both."

And later:

"Our news ecosystem is evolving and learning how it can be open, diverse, inclusive and effective. With all the new tools and capabilities we should be entering a new golden age of journalism – call it journalism 3.0. Let’s identify how we can birth it and agree what is “fair use” or “fair compensation” and have a conversation about how we can work together to fuel a vibrant, productive and trusted digital news industry. Let’s identify business models that are inclusive and that create a win-win relationship for all parties."

No one has all the answers yet to a thriving new media business model, but I have a lot more faith that Chris Ahern's Reuters is going to be part of it than the Dean Singleton-led AP.

News organizations need to be guided by economics, not emotion or nostalgia, as they seek a business model for the future.

The reason is that the laws of economics are ruthless and the sole arbiter of the marketplace. They don't bend to what you want or feel entitled to.

The huge fallacy I hear all the time behind arguments for requiring readers to pay for news goes like this: Our work is IMPORTANT and EXPENSIVE to produce. Society needs it, and we incur huge expenses to provide it, so consumers should pay us.

As a journalist, I completely agree that good journalism is vital to a healthy society. But that says nothing about whether it should be paid for by the consumer. Things even more essential to our survival -- air and sunlight -- we pay nothing for. Why? Because they are abundant and freely distributed.

General news and commentary online is the same way. Yes, it's important and valuable, but as long as there is abundant, elastic supply, competition will drive the consumer price to zero.

Economics also disregards the second point of the fallacy -- that professional journalism is expensive to produce, we have to pay huge expenses for reporters, editors and other staff and readers should pay to support that.

Consumers couldn't care less how much it costs to produce a product, be it news, clothing or cars. They don't inspect your production facility and balance sheets to determine whether the price is fair.

Price is determined by the UNIQUE value your product provides TO THE CONSUMER. Both parts of the equation matter: how useful/valuable is it to the consumer, and could the same value be obtained elsewhere for less? Regarding news online, the second question is key.

"News" -- broadly defined as information and happenings of interest to a person -- can be obtained from almost infinite sources online. There are many traditional news outlets, of course, but also blogs and social networks.

Anytime you set out to answer the question -- What is the price of a thing? -- your answer had better be based on supply and demand economics. The answer may not be what you want to hear. It may be massively disruptive to your current business model and cost structure. But you're better off building on the truth than self-serving deceptions.

I'm sure that Ryan Chittum's blog post tonight will get a lot of attention. It uses some statistics to show the "surprising resiliency of print" in holding audience share despite all the buzz about online news.

Just as when Martin Langveld pulled a statistical rabbit out of his hat to show that almost all "newspaper reading" happens in print, this post will be celebrated by print executives seeking comfort in their old ways.

Chittum argues that most newspaper audience consumption happens in print, not online.

Chittum calculates total time on the New York Times' site by multiplying 17.4 million visitors by the 14:29 average each visitor spent on the site (in a normal month the TOS is twice that, as he acknowledges). 17.4 million visitors times the more-normal 30 minutes on site per visit would be 8.7 million hours a month online. (Update: An earlier version calculated time based on data of time per visit. Nielsen actually counts total time per visitor for the month, as Ryan notes in the comments. Numbers have been updated.)

Chittum calculates readers spend 26.4 million with the print newspaper each month. And that calculation is far less certain. To calculate the amount of hours spent with the newspaper, Chittum adopts an internal estimate by the New York Times that every reader spends an average of 30 minutes a day. That's an unsubstantiated internal number thrown out by an executive (during a web chat, ironically). There's just no way this is true. Many subscribers don't even pick up the paper on a given day, many more only see the front page. Certainly there aren't 2.2 readers each spending an average of 30 minutes a day with every copy printed. When a newspaper pays a consultant to tell them people spend time reading their paper, the consultant tells them that. At least web analytics are real.

This numbers argument aside, Chittum's a pretty smart guy. I disagree with him on some things (pay walls, AP's DRM strategy), but he's not one of the ink-stained denialists.

He acknowledges at the end of his post that the discussion of the present numbers isn't even the most important metric. What matters is the trend -- what market is growing, which one is shrinking:

"This analysis doesn’t present any trendlines, which are moving away from print and toward online. But this is fifteen years into the age of the online newspaper—and going on a decade into the high-speed Internet era—and you can spin it a couple of ways: It points to the surprising resiliency of print, or it signals the pitiful job newspapers have done online.
"I’d say it’s some of both."

So whatever you choose to believe about the current balance of readership, we all know which way it's going -- online -- and that we need to get ahead of it.