Post Gazette Plus: A Look Behind The Subscription Veil

Nov.16th: PG-Plus Offers a Free Peak!

This screen capture is what PostGazette.com looked like on 11/16/09:

Finally, a look behind the Veil of Subscription! I was pleased they were offering a free visit to PG-Plus, a chance to look around, but I wasn't really impressed at what I saw there.

I think it would be unethical to (re-)present their proprietary content, since that is their value proposition. I was stumped on how to discuss this supposed new business model and I came upon two points I thought were reasonable: (1) wait a month, so as to not steal anybody's thunder, and (2) instead of showing content, let's just check the images from PG+'s first page to analyze the focus - because if a page is designed right, you can look at the pictures and know what it's about.

These are the key images from the first page of PG+ on 11/16/09.

I was surprised at two things: (1) this was all there was, and (2) this was the content on the day they chose to offer a Free Preview - when they should put their best page forward. What I saw in PG-Plus was not hyperlocal media, it was more like 1986 Yinzer-AOL-2.0

Perhaps there's a market for that, but I don't think it's the basis for a subscription website. It would be interesting to see some subscription numbers. I hope they publish them in the non-subscription website.

Hyperlocal News Buzz: Newsday Follows PG+'s Lead

Long Island (lohng-eye-land) newspaper Newsday will move their website to a $5/week subscription-based model on Wednesday. Most of their content will go behind the wall, with some minor content (home page, school closings, weather) available to all.

If you subscribe to the dead-trees Newsday, or get your cable service from local ISP Cablevision, you're in for free. The cable company crossover is an interesting crossover that gives them 2.5 million "subscribers" from Day One — although they're all passive, no-marginal-charge accounts that are likely to artificially inflate the numbers like a Vietnam body-bag count (now in XML format!)

What's most interesting to me is that they're flogging the hyperlocal news buzztheme:

"We are excited about this model because in addition to a unique ability to immediately reach about 75 percent of Long Island households, we believe the hyper-local approach is right for Long Island," said Debby Krenek, Newsday managing editor and senior vice president/digital.

The Washington Post just shut down their hyperlocal news experiment in Loudoun County, Va.

“We found that our experiment with LoudounExtra.com as a separate site was not a sustainable model,” said Kris Coratti, a spokeswoman for the Washington Post Company. “Updating the large amount of special features and technologies” on the site, which was run by Post staff members, proved unsustainable...

To a certain extent, hyperlocal news is the news industry's dot-com bubble: the industry is failing and both legacy powers and new entrants are throwing money into a possible web front with no indication of probability. If the bubble collapses in a progression of mergers, the last man standing may have enough eyeballs to either save a local paper, or drive the local paper out of business.


The nascent hyperlocal news bubble will give legacy players something to do while they're burning through their cash reserves, it'll keep the outsourced web shops busy, it'll give the new journalism grads a casual dress sort-of-job while they're working on their screenplays, and in the end the hyperlocal news fad will probably be another nail in the coffin for newspapers.

Features that would be truly game changing would be Google Earth mashups with local crime and accident reports and real estate - in other words, co-opt the CraigsList ads and the OpenGov movement - but that's already a crowded webspace without an established path to profitability. It's going to be very hard for a local newspaper to cost-justify building their own geo-news service, so the national startups may have a foothold: the legacy papers have the local touch, and the national players have the applications.

My PG Plus Wishlist

Here's what I'd like the Post Gazette Plus to do for me - help me to visualize the hyperlocal news within Pittsburgh's somewhat unique geographic context. Pittsburgh is a hodgepodge of overlapping backwater municipalities, and although I've been consuming local news since I moved here in 1985 I still end up wondering "where is that, exactly" when I see a news story about Lincoln-Lemington or Blawnox. I'd love to see box-in-a-box imagery that shows me, on maps, where these stories are happening. Stratification by niche neighborhoods isn't exclusive to Pittsburgh - I think about Dumbo, for instance, in Brooklyn - but it is an established attribute of Pittsburgh that the web channel could exploit.

Post Gazette Plus Subscription

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is launching a subscription-only, value-added web presence at midnight tonight.

PG+ will not replace post-gazette.com, which will continue to offer the same breaking news, features and multimedia content as always. Rather, it will allow subscribers access to a new stream of exclusive blogs, videos, live chats and behind-the-scenes insights into the news of the day.

The new site, hosted by a team of PG bloggers, will emphasize user interaction, with commenting throughout the site. Members also will be able to create a social networking profile to keep the conversation going.

The content will be provided by some of the Post-Gazette's best-known personalities, including Ed Bouchette, Mackenzie Carpenter, Doug Oster, Gene Collier, Reg Henry and Jack Kelly.

What's Conventional Wisdom on Pay-for-Web-News?

The conventional wisdom consists of three words, three words which are even scarier than "starring Ben Affleck": Doomed to Fail. Rupert Murdoch keeps threatening to move his news content ("news content", seems like "cheese product" - its kind of cheese, but..) beyond a pay-wall. I notice that he hasn't found the right situation to actually do that, yet.


The New York Times experimented with this in their Times Select product. They moved their best content - the editorial writers, the blogs, reader comments - behind the paywall. Here's some of the talent: Thomas Friedman, Nicholas Kristof, Bob Herbert, Paul Krugman. Total web eyeballs plummeted. Web ad revenue dropped. The subscriptions were not sufficient to justify the overall loss of web advertising. The NY Times was unable to make this work. (I really liked the Times Select product. My friend Mark bought a subscription. About a dozen of us used it.)

So, on the face of it, the Post Gazette appears to be betting that (1) they're smarter than Rupert Murdoch, (2) they're more webby than the NY Times, and that (3) Friedman, Kristof, Herbert and Krugman pale in comparison to Bouchette, Carpenter, Oster, Collier, Henry and Kelly. None of those propositions is true.

Let's Refute Conventional Wisdom

The P-G may get away with this, or at least get a one-year bounce out of it. In the current newspaper era, a one-year bounce isn't a bad thing, especially if you're trying to package the paper for a sale.

What does the PG have to lose?

If the PostGazette really does keep all it's present content free, and only puts additional, value-added content behind the pay-wall, they don't have much to lose. Normal web traffic should remain the same. If the incremental web traffic for PG+ is insufficient to pay the incremental salaries (which I bet is truly a relatively small amount), then there's not a lot of risk in this experiment; they can shut it down easily enough.

What will subscribers get?

Subscribers will get blogs, opinion, and social media - comments and discussion with other subscribers. This seems like a sure attraction for office workers that can't listen to talk radio at work, but have a web connection. That can't be too many people.

Timing is everything

Will the national attention on Pittsburgh for the G-20 bring a lot of subscribers? (Hint: Yinz can just read PghComet and Nullspace n'at.) Will the national focus on "the Pittsburgh Miracle" cause people from around the country to want to read what's going on? Will the Burgh's national sports visibility (football and hockey champions, and the Washington Wild Things) bring a desirable cachet?

A PG+ Formula: Hyperlocal + Diaspora + Geezer 2.0

How could PG+ succeed? I think a winning formula would require a financial committment to establishing hyperlocal news, subscription from the Diaspora, and bringing Geezers into Pittsburgh social media.

Hyperlocal news has been profitable by subscription. Hyperlocal news would, for instance, give us a news feed down to the specific neighborhoods. Instead of carrying Pittsburgh news and identifying it by neighborhood, "hyperlocal news" would have a blogger and a forum specifically covering Lincoln-Lemington-Belmar - and every other neighborhood. Perhaps you could configure your PG+ page to cover the neighborhoods that you live in, and the areas you and your spouse work in. In a city with such diverse and well-established neighborhoods, a hyperlocal news approach might succeed.

Will the Diaspora Subscribe?

If the Pittsburgh Diaspora (the legions who have left {for work, mostly} but still consider themselves Black and Gold) subscribe, this could be a successful adventure for the P-G. Just look at the list of Steelers' bars around the country.

Geezer 2.0

AOL was successful (for a decade) because it brought the web and webbish things to non-geeks. Your Aunt Mary could surf AOL and do email. The Geezer Demographic (which looks a lot like Pittsburgh) isn't tweeting, and they aren't into Facebook. If PG+ can bring "social-media-light" to the Geezers, they may have another profitable niche.

So, we'll see. Snarky prediction: Absence of a "two-day pass", like Salon uses, will keep people from buying something they cannot see; expect to see a "free look" option in 45 days. Unless they pursue the options above (hyperlocal, diaspora, geezer 2.0) this will struggle for eighteen months and then go away. Pundits will start referring to the "free" Post Gazette website as PG-Minus.

I wish them luck and success. They're not "too big to fail", but success of a local newspaper is important.

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