Free newspapers are our future

Twenty-four hour cable news shows, Internet news sites, Google and Yahoo news home pages, Internet news aggregators, news magazines, entertainment news, financial news shows, financial Web sites, sports shows, ESPN, your local and national newspapers: There is an avalanche of news coming at us every day. And almost without exception, it’s all free.

This has big implications for the future of newspapers: Why are newspapers nearly the only media type that requires you to pay for them? What’s wrong with this picture? It’s no wonder people aren’t renewing their subscriptions or becoming subscribers in the first place.

People are overloaded, many swamped, some tuning out as much as possible, and some bathing in a personalized steady stream of news they’ve designed for themselves. What incentive do people have to subscribe — actually pay — for more media to arrive each day on their doorstep?

Do people want to pay for their news? No way.

The advertiser-financed news model suits them just fine. When you read a newspaper, do you begrudge the ad space? I doubt it. More ads and a cheaper newspaper are probably just fine with you.

A smaller newspaper is probably just fine with you, as long as you can find what you want to find.

This new environment may well require newspapers to forego their subscription revenue in favor of other forms of compensation. Frankly the choice is simple: Serve a small and declining percentage of the local population, perhaps just 10 percent to 30 percent of them, or reach out with a new model to a much larger percentage of your potential readership.

That has big implications for the future of news design. The reasons for this are obvious: A newspaper can’t continue to afford to deliver a large newspaper when subscribers pay nothing.

Advertisers are learning ways to do without their newspaper advertising. Just because half of the population in an area might begin to receive a free newspaper, this does not necessarily mean that advertising rates can increase. Perhaps they can. But newspapers are going to scale back their free versions because they can and because it makes dollars and sense.

What a newsroom cares about is providing comprehensive community news. Where this news gets presented, in print or online, matters less.

Newspapers are going to be examining slimmer versions. They are going to be using their Web sites to deliver news in more creative ways. Web sites are going to be entertaining and interactive as much as they are going to be news delivery vehicles. Competition for people’s attention is simply too great for this not to be the case.

So what do I foresee exactly? How small can a newspaper become? I think a period of creative redesigns will be forced upon us. And these redesigns won’t be about rearranging the deck chairs or the furniture.

What do I foresee? New models: Newspapers as entertaining, creative display indexes to full stories online. Every page could be an open, display page, except for advertising on its flip side, so that every ad faces a well-designed engaging news page. Inside page design? It could be a problem of the past … A newspaper might be a collection of 20 display pages, mini-section fronts or topic pages, with the full stories online. Small, sleek, entertaining and obvious about the wealth of material available online.

The newspaper would be so time-saving and good looking, that people would order it up. Why not? It would be free.