By Patrick Martin, editorial page editor
After years of watching other newspapers zooming past on the information superhighway, the Leader is cautiously inching its way onto the on-ramp.
The Flat Earth Society may revoke our membership, but we now have a website, Myleaderpaper.com.
We are starting our website primarily as a place for brief obituaries, breaking news, extra sports photos and as a contact point for every 23-year-old ad agency employee who reacted to our previous nonWebitude with a mixture of horror, mockery and disbelief. "You don't have a website?!!"
It is the collective wisdom of the 20-something set that the Internet will be the news vehicle of the future and that print is dead but doesn't know it yet.
Maybe.
It's curious, though, that Leader Publications has a requester list of more than 37,000 Jefferson Countians who have asked to have our paper - the printed one! - sent to their homes.
Of course, there are some things the Web can do better than a weekly newspaper. Obituaries are a prime example.
When someone dies, the personal network is the vehicle most often used to carry the news. Whether it is done in person, by phone, e-mail or a Facebook entry, that news travels fast.
A weekly newspaper can do a good job giving a detailed final story about a person's life, but rarely can it announce visitation or services in a timely manner.
With our website, we can post limited but important obituary information, including visitation and service times, as we get them from the funeral homes. When we know, you'll know.
A key word in that last paragraph is "limited."
Many newspapers have shot themselves not just in the foot, but in the brain, lungs, heart and - especially - the wallet, in the way they've used their website to give away the store.
Particularly for paid circulation papers, does it make sense to give away all content on the Web, then expect readers to pay for a print subscription?
In the newspaper industry, this is referred to as The Original Sin. When newspapers were developing websites in the early 1990s, they viewed them as a toy, or some vague attempt to get with the future. They posted their content because they could, without much thought to the long-term effect on their business.
Big mistake.
Circulation has plummeted at paid newspapers, and they wonder why?
A few of the big newspapers have tried to put a "pay wall" on their websites. A few who did so early in their Web life have done OK. Usually they tie access to their site to a print subscription. The Wall Street Journal has that model, for example.
But those who did it after conditioning readers that news is free lost 90-95 percent of their Web readers.
News is not free. Reporters and editors must be paid. Professionals have to be paid like professionals. In the Leader's case, you get the paper for free, but advertisers pay the cost. Eventually, you share in that payment when you shop with our advertisers.
Most newspapers get the majority of their revenue from advertising, not subscriptions. The Leader gets virtually all of it from advertising.
When newspapers move from print to the Web, most advertisers don't come along. Those who move do not pay near the rate for website advertising that they do for print. One publisher friend of mine calls it "converting dollars into nickels."
Advertisers prefer print ads, or insert fliers, to Web ads. They work better.
And yet print is dying? No, it isn't.
Big newspapers struggle, but not because they are demon, liberal left-wingers doomed by their slanted, socialist coverage. They struggle because of the simultaneous development of the Web, the companies' own shortsightedness and a frightfully bad economy.
Sorry, conspiracy buffs.
Our online readers will be spared the tirades of anonymous crackpots who apparently spend their days posting hateful bile and theories like the one above to news websites. Ours will not have a comment feature, but it will encourage signed letters to the editor, just like we do in the newspaper.
Eventually, we will sell ads on Myleaderpaper.com, once we have enough Web traffic to justify it.
Meanwhile, we will take advantage of the timeliness of the Web without giving away all our content. We will use our website to promote our newspaper, not destroy it.
Above all, we will continue to print. We will do that because we are a newspaper company, and that's what newspaper companies do.
