Insomniactive

Remember the bit in Monty Python and the Holy Grail when:

“in the frozen lands of Nador, they were forced to eat Sir Robin’s minstrels-and there was much rejoicing (yaaay!)?”

I felt a similar, vaguely queasy reaction to last week’s Pew Center announcement-not without its own Arthurian fanfare- that the internet had surpassed newspapers as the primary source of the polity’s news. TV still leads the pack, but not for long.

Why the stomach rumblies? Shouldn’t this be great news for enthusiasts awaiting the online channel to return newspapers to their rightful if historically unique place as a doers of great good and printers of bounteous cash-eesh? Weren’t we all just waiting for online readership to “catch up” with print, so that the dollars could follow and newspaper journalists could retake their rightful and authoritative place near the top of the news heap? Aren’t newspapers the rightful inheritors of a brave, new, pixellated world of journalism?

Not so fast, brave Sir Robin. Anyone who is looking to make a business out of online news should shudder at the Pew Center announcement. Think about it. In 2007, advertisers spent roughly $42 billion with newspapers. Circulation revs make it a nearly $55 billion industry.

So now that the online channel has surpassed the lump in the driveway in terms of reach and presumably influence, how looks the picture on the revenue side? Well, no one has asserted that online accounts for more than a single digit percentage of total newspaper ad revs. For the sake of argument, then, let’s say the reported score is 39-3, $billions that is, in favor of print. Subtract from the $3 billion in putative “online” newspaper revenue the accounting benefit the channel gets from the typical “wrap and roll” approach to selling print and online as a bundle. What is the size of that overstatement? 10%? 20% . Let’s say the “true” online number for newspapers is $2.5b.

(With the help of Lauren Fine at ContentNext, my cumulative revenue estimate for “all other” news sites rolls up to about the same size, even though they have twice the number of uniques. But that’s not important for this analysis).

*****

So, here we stand, lords and ladies of the online newspaper business. This is our big day! We are now more important to our readers than print! We should rejoice! Let a quadrillion pixels bloom! You, there, lad: procure for me a capon leg! (Or was that Henry VIII……?)

But, hark, or as they would have said in the quaint old days: STOP THE PRESSES! What? Our advertisers only want to fork over 4% as much cash as they did for the print product! Even though we’re more influential?! And they want us to…..measure results? And what’s that you say…. OUR READERS DON’T WANT TO PAY ANYTHING AT ALL? Why, that’s preposterous! And…you can’t really mean it…online revenue is down this year? It was supposed to grow in double digits at least until Jessica and Tony’s kids got their first cell phones?!

Four percent. Perhaps rather than rejoicing, we should consider up-chucking in the nearest trash can.

You see, the online news outlets of the future are shaping up to be-and it grieves me to say this-a bunch of grubby, cruddy, marginally profitable little businesses. Entry costs are essentially zero, technology and inventory abundance is shifting power to the advertiser at lightning speed, and there’s less than no correlation between quality journalism and quality of earnings. Sorry, Philip Meyer, it was a nice idea. It just happens to be dead wrong at a time in which the assets that were the newspaper’s biggest strategic advantage are now the albatross around its rapidly drowning neck.

Can some of these things make a little money? Sure, why not? It’ll be sort of like a Mad Maxmovie, or Cormac McCarthy’s The Road-after the nuclear holocaust, plenty of assorted post-armageddon, beady eyed-sole proprietors with shopping carts and automatic weapons will do just fine-cockroach-like, and speaking in the broadest of relative terms.

In a college town, for instance one could (and I just may) put up a site that has no content which strays far from eating, drinking, going to class, getting free stuff, getting laid-oh, and sports, and certainly not in that order-and earn a fine living for a handful of intrepid entrepreneurs. But would they call anyone among them a journalist? Duuuude! Who the f- wants to be a journalist? Toxic Tank’s Pub & Grub wants to sponsor Barely Legal Cheerleader Mud Wrestlingagain on our site! Riiiiiighteous!! Pulitzer?! Fur sure, we had a whole case of that around here somewhere! Their lite beer rocks! Piiiiiizza maaaan!!!! WHOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!

Ok, there. I’m better. A little. But I think I may have puked up my Elitist Card-I was forced to eat it by a ruffian band of entertainment bloggers when TMZ’s November uniques number hit the wire.

Honestly. Is there any hope that a brave new online model-driven entirely by market forces- could bring forth the resources necessary to actually improve the quality of newspaper journalism, after easily of generation of decline? Sorry. I just don’t see it. And as long as we’re on the topic of serious newspaper journalism, another Monty Python line comes to mind:

”I’m not dead—yet.”