The future of news.

It’s getting close to a week after the Chicago Journalism Town Hall, on which I was a panelist along with 13 other of the city’s media luminaries (that there were far more watching us supposed experts from the audience speaks to the depth and breadth of talent in Chicago — any number of them could have taken our place.) You can listen to the three hour discussion in two parts on chicagopublicradio.org. I’d hoped to jump right into the fray here on the blog, but work has kept me from getting my thoughts out in print.

First, some background on me. My media career tracks directly with the rise of the Web, and bridges the two worlds. I graduated from journalism school at The Ohio State University in 1997; the Mosaic browser was released my freshman year, and the school paper was producing its first website when I was on staff (and hey! my clips from back then are online again — check out my Kissinger interview). While at OSU, I helped launch an alt-monthly (we couldn’t afford to go weekly) and learned how to code html by looking under the hood at sites like Suck. (I tried out a new search engine called Google for the first time in the Lantern newsroom. It seemed like an OK alternative to my favorite at the time, Hotbot.)

After school, I spent a summer laying out and copyediting the McHenry Star newspaper group (five weeklies with a smaller combined circulation than my school paper). I worked with a combination of DOS and Quark, and printed out the pages in the old typesetting room at the Elgin Courier News — where there were still a couple typesetters employed, dropping printed out columns of copy into news holes instead of actual hot lead. There were maybe three or four of them left in a room big enough to fit 30; I bet they were gone within a year after I left.

After school I also started writing a monthly email newsletter for my family and friends; after a couple years, I decided to put “the Huff Report” online, first on a Geocities page, then its own site, this one. The cost of getting me3dia up and running was trivial — about 25 bucks to host it for a year, with a free CMS (Blogger, then Movable Type, now Textpattern).

Thanks to those experiences, I knew how much it cost to create a newspaper and how difficult it was — and how easy and cheap it was to create a website. So when No East, a quarterly-ish art and lit project, was started up, I counseled against doing a print version to go with the online. And when Gapers Block started to form in the back of my head, there was no doubt that it would be an online project. The overhead of print was far too great. (Granted, we were also enamored of blogs, but Naz and I did toy with a print version, too.)

Gapers Block was founded as a labor of love — we were all volunteers, and we didn’t even think about making a living on it. We took donations and occasionally ran ads, but they covered the cost of the server and not much else. Only after a couple years which saw GB take up more and more of my time and attention — as well as gain more interest from advertisers — did we take the step of incorporating it as an LLC, and another year before we started treating it as a business (more or less). The job of ad sales unfortunately rested on my shoulders, fighting for time against editing, writing a ton, managing staff and responding to endless email. Thus Gapers Block’s advertising was entirely reactive, sales occurring only when someone reached out to us. I tried for years to relieve myself of that burden, and only finally succeeded in November with the formation of Denizen Ad network, which also works with several other sites in a similar position.

And here we get to one of three basic things that bothered me about the discussion during the Town Hall. I heard over and over that websites weren’t making any money on advertising, and GB was even cited as evidence. While it’s true we’re not making a ton of money, we’ve been profitable, inasmuch as we’ve made more money than we’ve spent, for years. The size of that profit has been limited in large part due to my personal lack of time to devote to selling ads. Not a lack of a market, but the inability to serve that market. Even without a dedicated sales force, we’ve made enough in the last couple years for me to quit my job and make Gapers Block part of my full-time work. And now that we’ve got someone actively selling ads for us, I’m confident that profits will continue to increase, allowing us to pay more than just me. (We started to pay the editors this year; it’s a pittance, but it’s something.)

A point I tried to make during the Town Hall, but we got sidetracked, was that the Tribune and Sun-Times have vast ad sales departments, but nobody in the room was able to tell me how many of those salespeople were dedicated to selling online ads. The reason the papers’ websites aren’t making much money is because there aren’t many ads being sold on them. But if you’ve got a hundred salespeople filling the website with ads, the major dailies could probably go online-only tomorrow and preserve their current journalist staff. Think about where most of those ad dollars go: toward printing and distribution costs (and, right now, servicing enormous debt loads). Eliminate those burdens of physicality, and the cost of producing the news goes way down — making it a lot easier to fund that $2-4 million newsroom Geoff Dougherty proposed (which many seem to have forgotten was a number pulled out of thin air by Community Media Workshop’s Thom Clark).

That there wasn’t a single business-side representative up on the stage was unfortunate, considering how central the topic was to the discussion. It hindered us in talking in concrete terms — and boy would that have been helpful, as people began suggesting that media should charge Google/readers/everyone for news content and all sorts of other pie-in-the-sky schemes. Hopefully future events will include more of that portion of the media business.

Speaking of Google, another thing that bugged me was this impression many people seemed to have that the media was “giving away the news for free” online. If there’s an ad on the page, it’s not free — it’s subsidized by the ad, just like in print. May not be much, but those ads add up. And if there’s more than one ad on the page, they add up even faster — whether they’re clicked on or not. See my above point.

I could go on and on — there are now dozens of blog posts and comment threads discussing the Town Hall and the issues brought up by it, and much of what I have to say has already been said by others. I’d like to end this post on a mostly positive note looking forward:

There is a future for print newspapers. It just might not be daily.

I didn’t get a chance to say this during the Town Hall, but I think there’s a print newspaper model that will survive and possibly thrive even as the daily papers die off. Localized weekly newspapers — community papers like the Chicago Journal group and Pioneer Press papers — have three things going for them:

1. Local coverage of topics close to their readers’ home


2. A local advertiser base that’s interested in reaching people in the neighborhood


3. Low overhead thanks to a smaller staff and weekly distribution

A local weekly can sell enough ads to local businesses (and national advertisers interested in a local market) to make the paper free to its readers, who usually actually read it looking for news about the neighborhood. A small staff of reporters can easily cover the paper’s limited subscriber area well enough to satisfy readers and act as a supplement to whatever other media sources its readers are following. The Chicago Journal even draws readers to its website with online-only articles and features — leveraging the web as yet another advertising revenue stream.