Seacoast History Blog #99
November 7, 2010

As the guy with one of the “alternative” Portsmouth Web sites, I’ve been getting an earful from people about the Portsmouth Herald’s decision to begin charging for access to their Web site this month. There’s no real comparison. My site is run by a staff of one and posts a single article per day. The Herald is the local newspaper of record, a multi-million dollar operation with dozens of employees, and a spanking new facility out at Pease Tradeport. The only connections are that we both focus on this region, we’ve both been online for about 15 years, and until now, our Web sites have both been free. I write a history column for the Herald, but I hope that doesn’t color my opinion. And my opinion is this – I think it’s about time they started charging a fee. So raise the flag and fire off the cannon, because for once, Rupert Murdoch and I agree on something. (Continued below) 

(NOTE: After ir appeared here, the Seacoast Media Group, owners of the Portsmouth Herald, asked permission to run the following commentary on the front page of their Sunday newspaper. Permission was granted, and it also aooears on their Web site that has now moved to a paywall format.)

I burned up considerable calories discussing this topic this week. It is a big deal. As we all know, most newspapers give away their paper content online and it’s killing them. As paper subscribers decline and costs rise, these companies are being forced to give away their content. Forced by whom? Forced by the sudden and powerful conventions of the evolving Internet media where a new generation of consumers wants everything free, fast, and perfect. I fell into this trap in 1996 and have been trying to dig myself out of it ever since. Before the dot-com bubble burst, we all thought advertisers were going to rush to the Internet. They did, but they built their own Web sites. Unless you have millions of visitors a day, it’s hard to make money online. Even YouTube is still trying to figure it out.  

I got in for a penny, posting a little bit a day with a few loyal sponsors for a few thousand daily readers. The Herald was in for a pound, or a ton, with tens of thousands of page views. The paper supported the Web site, at first, which was simply another way of disseminating the news. Then along came the Internet generation, laptops, hand held wireless devices, ebooks, iPhones – you know the song. And with that came the decline in newspaper subscribers, reductions in journalists and support staff, and the rise of cable media, blogs, alternative news outlets, and on and on. A few tough publications like the Wall Street Journal managed to charge for their online content. Others, like the Christian Science Monitor, folded up their paper editions and went strictly digital.  

The rest of us continued to give it away. I stayed alive by staying small and focused. The newspaper built a bigger and bigger online site and searched for ways to “monetize” the increasing flow of content. The bigger and better the content got, the more people started turning to it daily. Now Seacoast Media Group wants to charge a modest fee (about $60 a year, compared to nearly $200 for the paper version) for its online content. That seems immensely fair to me – a little more than a dollar a week for roughly the same content delivered to wherever in the world you want to read it, without the paper.  

From the comments I’ve been getting, the reaction seems to be split 50-50. But the reaction is strong. People either like the idea or hate it. I’ve spoken to those who believe they have some sort of constitutional right to get free news. Those people need to wake up and smell the printer’s ink. Sure there have been free weeklies around here for decades. I used to write for the Rockingham Gazette, Portsmouth Magazine (the newspaper), the NH Gazette, and more. The Wire is great. We have a healthy cluster of glossy specialized publications. But these publications do not have the staff or the content to cover daily news 365-days a year. These are supplemental publications. They exist because the daily paper is there – there to expand on, criticize, and feed off. We, and I include myself, are the sucker fish, the remora of the media, and we owe our niche markets to the big fish. Real newspapers – the kind with news – haven’t been free in these parts since Daniel Fowle moved his printing press to Portsmouth in 1756.  

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