"No Ink, No Paper: What's The Value Of An E-Book?" - NPR

This interesting story got me thinking about the pricing of newspapers - both digital and in print.

Consider this.....

How good a job do we do of explaining the process that brings news to reader customers? When was the last story you read in a newspaper that ran through the cost of that story, taking into account everything from the fully allocated cost of the reporter, her/his expenses, support tools and facilities...and on through the publicaiton process in whichever media? Imagine that this covered the range from a foreign correspondent in a conflict area to the coverage of what's happening at the corner store.

That helps readers and potential readers understand more of the cost side of the business, and I think it could be done occasionally in print and permanently (but updated) on any newspaper website. It helps reader customers think of themselves as being more insiders than we usually treat them as being.

Then think about the value delivered and how we do it.

There are two pieces to this.

One is the value of both news and advertising (as well as any other content) to real people. I am repeatedly disappointed to see promotions for newspaper sales talk only about the "deal" and virtually not at all about the content and service delivered if you sign up. We can do such a better job - being in the story-telling business! - of conveying that value generally and in terms of real people for whom one or more thing in the newspaper made a difference in their lives. Those stories are out there; we just never go look for them other than the occasional promotion department mention.

There is a print advertisement running locally here for a local bank. It is well done in that it features several local business people who are that bank's customers and allows them to talk about the bank in more than a movie review snippet. I am not suggesting that this is what newspapers should do more often, but it might be included. What I am suggesting is that telling the story in actual articles with good graphic support, objectively, of how the newspaper impacted various lives is what we should do.

The second piece is how we communicate the value of what is in the paper, today.

In one of our local newspapers here today, I found a full page of coupons from a moderately large food retailer - Harris Teeter. It is unusual in that it offers discounts only to people holding the Harris-Teeter loyalty card, but the added value is that you can apply a total of $16 in discounts to any products of your choice up to a maximum of ten and you must do it during three days.

That makes that page of newsprint, to Harris-Teeter loyalty card holders, worth up to $16. The price of the newspaper is about 5% of that.

I almost missed it in that it is on a back page that usually has nothing of special interest to me.

There is nothing on the Harris-Teeter website about this.

My point - on this second piece - is that newspapers have an incentive and surely have the technological and reportorial skills needs to communicate (another newspaper purported skill) to us customers the value of what is in the printed paper today.

Suppose the newspaper simply maintained a mailing list of people interested in knowing when something especially noteworthy or valuable like this was going to be in the paper. I bet a lot of people - given this example - might very well sign up.

In a weekly e-mail that I receive from Harris-Teeter, which attempts to tell me how personalized it is, there is a graphic telling me to look in my local newspaper for the page that I have described here. Wouldn't it be so much more powerful if that mentioned the newspapers - by name - in my area where the ad is appearing? Did the newspapers try to make this happen?