How a newspaper works online

Nick Carr, best known for his IT Doesn't Matter Article in HBR five years ago, recently wrote about how newspapers should behave in the digital age. (Click here for his full post on Britannica.com.)

In short, Nick argues that users behave differently when reading a paper online.

In print, the appeal is the whole package, the journey from front to back (or the other way around) and the surprises one finds along the way. Online, the reader has a clear mission -- she knows what she wants to read and clicks on that link, ignoring much of the other material.

When a newspaper moves online, the bundle falls apart. Readers don’t flip through a mix of stories, advertisements, and other bits of content. They go directly to a particular story that interests them, often ignoring everything else. In many cases, they bypass the newspaper’s “front page” altogether, using search engines, feed readers, or headline aggregators like Google News, Digg, and Daylife to leap directly to an individual story. They may not even be aware of which newspaper’s site they’ve arrived at. For the publisher, the newspaper as a whole becomes far less important. What matters are the parts. Each story becomes a separate product standing naked in the maketplace. It lives or dies on its own economic merits.

And because of that changed behavior newspapers need to think about content differently. And they need to think about which stories will draw the most ads, and by implication that means the most traffic. In short, each story needs to stand on its own. Expensive, investigative pieces will suffer online simply because they cost much more to produce than service pieces and they will probably not draw many ads.

Each piece of content has to compete separately, consuming costs and generating revenues in isolation. So if you’re a beleaguered publisher, losing readers and money and facing Wall Street’s wrath, what are you going do as you shift your content online? Hire more investigative journalists? Or publish more articles about consumer electronics? It seems clear that as newspapers adapt to the economics of the Web, they are far more likely to continue to fire reporters than hire new ones.

As I've said before, it was inevitable newspapers (and magazines) would face this challenge. For too long they didn't consider what the reader wanted to read instead relying on they thought was best for the reader. The online world has only hastened this transformation.