Newspapers, barn doors, Facebook and Google

Friend Chris Tomlinson at the Houston Chronicle has a good column on the latest Facebook brouhaha of many, and not the only one in the past month.

It's not his only one on the subject. It's generally good, as far as it goes. Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg would probably sell his own grandmother to the devil for some new Facebook innovation. That's even as, in the US, Facebook traffic appears to have hit a wall and may even be tailing off. (The increasing number of Facebook memories I see in my own feed for suggested sharing — and the number that I see friends actually sharing — would be anecdotal evidence in support.)

That said, many newspapers (don't know about Chris's Chronicle) made their bed a year or two ago by signing off on the Facebook Partners program, or exactly whatever it's called.

That, in turn, continues a string of 20-plus years of multiple bad decisions related to All Things Internet.

It began in the mid-1990s when Dean Singleton, not only the creator of the now-foundering MediaNews empire, but also at that time chairman of the AP's board of directors, agreed with other AP board members that the "TV model" for newspapers would be just fine as far as "monetization" of the Internet.

The "TV model" basic point was that TV, like radio, was free, and did fine with advertising. So, why couldn't online newspapers be the same?

Well, this ignored several things.

First, cable TV wasn't free.

You counter: But, that's the same as paying an ISP provider for Internet.

First, pay cable TV channels existed in the mid-1990s, and HBO and the Playboy Channel, at least, were 15-plus years old by then.

So, it's not just hindsight to say Deano et al were wrong.

They may have been wrong in misunderestimating the reach of the Net. The first tech bubble crash at the turn of the century, followed by the Greenspan-Bush post-911 bubble inflating their ad revenues, probably fed newspaper owners' ongoing motivated reasoning.

But, they were still wrong.

They probably had a chance, by the late 1990s, if not by the early 2000s, to reverse the AP party line on "retransmission costs" for Yahoo, the first big news aggregator, and up-and-coming Google. Remember when Yahoo was the bomb?

But, eventually, that chance faded away. And, the Net and other things aided both Reuters and AFP in expanding their American presences, too. And, any agreement between them on pricing web content would be collusion.

So, AP at least stiffs smaller dailies more and more on the content of "content," even while jacking the price. The most basic AP package doesn't even include photos.

As to Facebook?

Beyond what I said above?

Algorithms are no match for people in "curation," a word that with online media is even more barf-inducing than "content."

That's true whether it's Facebook or Google.

That said, Facebook is a threat not just to daily papers of size.

The rise of Facebook Groups threatens the future of small daily and non-daily community papers as well. I know this from experience.

If people don't like your coverage of an issue, if they think that, even though you keep a good eye on city hall in general, you just have to be wrong on Issue X?

Boom. New post on the "Citizens of X" Facebook group.

Don't want to turn a string of gossip into a semi-libelous news story?

Boom. New post on the "Citizens of X" Facebook group.

Some blogs used to be this way, as the unlamented, incarcerated felon Joey Dauben illustrated well. (It still blows my mind, as it did at the time, that the Dallas Observer thought him worthy of a long-form profile, especially without considering his possible psychological background.)

But, Facebook gives credence to this stuff, in a way that a random blog doesn't.

And, the mindset of DMCA, if not the act itself, protects it legally just as much as it protects YouTube. (It's also why Mark Zuckerberg steadfastly insists he is NOT a publisher.)

Which is too bad, in a way.

A few libel lawsuits against Facebook might clean some things up.

Beyond that, of course, Facebook can subconsciously manipulate your thoughts in a way that even Google can't. (Google just consciously controls what you see, by things like paid placement, and now, its "fake news" filter that, in America, screens out anything besides the duopoly.) And it's already done it repeatedly.

This all gets to "barn doors," if it's not clear.

A lot of newspaper paywalls are still pretty permeable. And they're afraid to make them less so, as I see it. It now seems to me that the vaunted Wall Street Journal is putting more articles outside its paywall, even, if accessed by social media.

It's like an addiction, even though it's known in most cases that the online ads won't pay for that, and that you're just enabling theoretically bad behavior anyway.

That said, many addictions often seem to be the best solution for a problem even after it seems more clear to non-addicts that they're not. And, until that's recognized by the person or entity with the addiction, that won't change.

Other than pointing out many larger newspaper chains are still too hypercapitalist in what they pay corporate executives, I'm not out to bash the industry. And, while I don't claim to have solutions, I do think, at a minimum, the downward spiral on readership and ads is diminishing.

On the ads side, as Zuckerberg continues to shoot himself in his Facebook foot, newspapers have a reputation to sell, as well as the package of targeted online sales — and better targeting on the print side, too.

As for past sliding? On the circulation side, at least, as top German papers show, it's not just an American problem.

Major daily newspapers — run by snide, arrogant elitists

David Chavern, the CEO of the Newspaper Association of America, the trade and lobbying organization for the major dailies (it does represent some others, but the National Newspaper Association is the primary group for "community" newspapers) wrote a howler op-ed piece last week for Digiday, an online magazine that covers issues in digital advertising and publishing.

The header should tell you just how snide, arrogant and elitist this is:

Ad blocking threatens democracy.

First, democracy was around before modern newspapers were, whether in its classical Athenian version, the Roman Republic, or the first modern gropings toward it of American founding fathers, the British realms, or the Swiss Confederation.

If one wants to claim that Athens and Rome with slaves weren't truly democratic, neither was America before 1865, and American newspapers, primarily but not only in the South, supported that slavery.

So, we should add both "historically inaccurate" and "histrionic" to the debunking of this nonsense.

That said, here’s Chavern’s nut graf, as far as I can tell:

People who download ad-blocking software may be looking for a faster browsing experience in the short-term, but they are also knowingly or unknowingly participating in the longer-term destruction of our ad-supported system for free and low-cost news and other content. As ad-blockers proliferate, the inevitable result will be either much higher subscription rates or a deterioration in the quality and availability of thoughtful, reliable news as news media and content creators are forced out of business. This, in turn, will put us on a dangerous path toward information inequality. News content will be reserved for those who can pay high subscription fees, and everyone else will be left without access to valuable information — with disastrous implications for our democracy.

But wait, it gets better!

Like this:

Are we really willing to exchange exposure to digital ads for significantly higher prices for everyone, where reliable information is only available to the elite? 

Wowza.

So, newspapers that use paywalls as part of their digital stream, not just the elitist Wall Street Journal and semi-elite New York Times, but the Gannett chain, are actually read only by elites? European papers, who long relied more on higher circulation prices and less in ads in print editions, are read only by elites?

Arrogant and elitist is what this piece is.

First, Mr. Chavern, as you either DO know or else SHOULD know, most newspapers were slow to jump on paywalls in the first place because Deano Singleton and other AP board members drank the "TV model" Kool-Aid, ignoring that pay cable channels like HBO existed already in the 1970s.

Second, "elitist"? From big metro dailies that run BOTH real estate ads AND puff pieces for McMansions, or BOTH auto ads AND puff review pieces for Beemers, Lexuses, etc. THAT's elitist.

Even more elitist is the "style" columnists and shutterbugs showing up at black-tie events for the locally rich and famous, and the name-dropping that goes with that.

Third? Newspapers who may have written about growing income inequality without tackling the causes of it, and without really wanting to do that too much (I'll plead a small mea culpa myself, at least on being afraid to rock corporate boats on op-ed pages) are elitist.

Fourth? On the technical side? Besides craptacular web ads? Let's not even get into the abuse of tracking cookies. Some websites, sometimes newspapers, sometimes others, Ghostery shows me it's blocking 30 cookies.

But let us please get into what Chavern calls "native advertising" and I still call good old "advertorial."

Chavern says:

Part of (improving digital ad experience) may also involve better “native ads” that are more fully integrated into the overall experience of visiting a news site. 

First, the Federal Trade Commission has already ixnayed that, publishing guidelines that it wants advertorial less "integrated," not more. So, we have an industry trade group CEO who's either making up shit and hoping people don't pay attention, or else one who's not paying attention himself. (Speaking of, I use the browser extension called Ad Detector, folks. It can't block advertorial, and it's not perfect at what it catches, but what it does catch, it flags with a bright red bar.)

He then points to TV native ads. Well, IMO, a lot of his comparison is apples to oranges, and the apples to apples part needs ....

More FTC regulation.

That leads me to Steve Brill, who writes the perfect antidote to Chavern and his member newspapers.

That's because, in part, he said that at American Lawyer, he resisted urges to put lipstick on the advertorial pig to make it look more editorial.

But, that's down low on the piece.

The starter is calling out papers for their timidity and cluelessness on paywalls, saying stuff I totally agree with about use of the paywall, where to set the "meter" and much more.

It gets better from there. He says many newspaper publishers inherited their businesses, sometimes through multiple generations, and were and are clueless about running them well as businesses because of that.

(And, although the publisher of THE Dallas Morning News is not a Belo family member, nonetheless, Monroney is arguably a snide, arrogant elitist, as it continues to slouch toward Gomorrah.)

Why newspapers are dying, point the self-referential

When newspapers are filling internal positions, that is, jobs at the newspaper, and a majority of applicants, when asked where they heard about the position, do NOT say:

"The newspaper's own ad"  ...

But instead answer ...

Referring to the classified ads Internet-era archenemy of newspapers ...

"I saw it on Craigslist" ...

Houston, we have a problem.

Just another sign of where the newspaper biz is these days.

That said, this is a small weekly that's near, but not itself a part of, a metro area of about 300,000. It's not like the Metroplex, the Bay Area, or something like that.

I mean, it's kind of sad to write that. But, it's not like I'm giving anything away in terms of trade secrets or something. I'm just stating the facts on the ground.

And, newspapers have the money for genius-level ad reps?

I think Editor and Publisher is becoming divorced from reality, more and more. (That said, it probably isn't making money, or close to it, even as an online-only product, and thus is stretching the bounds more and more.)

This new article, about what newspapers should want in their "Net 2.0" sales force, is a good example.

Millennials are a great work force? Really?

Beyond that snark, let's get to the meat of the article.

And, how much is an ad salesperson whom you also expect to be an "educator" and more going to want? Probably more in money, and more in non-monetary compensation, than a newspaper is going to pay based on the overall sales market in the area.

So, let's be skeptical of this:

(360 Ad Sales chief executive officer Ryan) Dohrn advises publishers to hire sales people who can be educators. “New products come out every day and they need to be able to teach people about them.” Communication plays a big part, but Dohrn said sales people should also “listen more and talk less” in order to find what advertisers need.

Related to that, where's the training money coming from? And, do people like Dohrn provide any guarantees?

Then, there’s problems like this in the piece:

Even though “advertisers are fleeing print for digital,” said Dohrn, sales people are constantly requesting help on “how not to cannibalize print for digital.”

 “The problem is marketing,” he said. “Look at where you live and at advertisers like car dealers and jewelers. They’re everywhere. They understand marketing 101. You need to advertise in multiple ways on multiple days.”

 To be successful, Dohrn said sales people need to help advertisers understand multimedia. “Offer a better affordable package that includes print, social media and video. Don’t make it print verses digital.”

But, that IS quasi-cannibalizing, at least. You’re being “forced” to offer a lower price on a multimedia product.

Meanwhile, you have advisers contradicting one another. Remember Dohrn, talking about  selling multimedia packages? Arnie Stein disagrees:

“Look hard at separating your print and digital sales teams,” Stein said. “If your digital revenue is 20 percent or more of your core revenue, consider spinning them off into separate sales teams and working in non-traditional ways.”

So, which is it? Especially if these trainers don’t guarantee results, it compounds the problem. 

Also not mentioned here is the extra time on building different advertising products. That’s especially true if video is involved. Is a smaller-sized daily paper, even one that posts one or two 30-second video quickies a week to its website on the news side, really equipped to shoot video of an advertising client? Erm, no.

If the town is too small for a TV station, the video is still going to be compared in quality to that on the nearest regional station.

And, are you as a paper then going to scrape up the money to get a staff photographer who’s that good at video? And how much salary will he or she want?

Speaking of, we finally get a small dose of realism, three-quarters of the way in:

“The biggest change post-recession is lack of sales staff. There are not enough feet on the street, not enough inside reps making outbound calls to get back to pre-recession revenues,” (Janet) DeGeorge said. “Sales staff cuts have to be replenished in order to get the money back again.” 

But, it's more than just post-recession, at least at larger papers. The big chains continue to cut and cut and cut, even at seven-day dailies of, say medium-small 25K circulation. Those cuts aren't going to be replenished.

I agree with one publisher, that you can find easy non-gimmick tricks, like making the font size in your print classys larger. But, should it have taken this long after the collapse of newspapers, to think about something like that?

Also, that's not digitally-related at all. It's pure print.

Newspapers are dying, at least in Austin

When I'm in the library in the big city, or nearest thing to one that's nearby, I like scanning metropolitan dailies to see just how they're faring on ad inches.

And, the Tuesday, Aug. 26 Austin American Statesman?

Not faring well at all.

Now, Tuesday's not a great day, but, it's not quite as slow as Monday.

But 12 percent? Four pages worth of paid ads in a 50-page paper? That's sad, and ugly.

(One week later, they were up to a full 15.5 percent for Tuesday, Sept. 3. That said, the paper had been cut to 32 pages. And, some of the paid ads were tax-and-budget season legals.)

Add to it that, as fluff, the Statesman's copy staff (which aren't even in Austin, as all but the sports pages are built at a sister Cox paper, the Dayton Daily News) had two pages worth of house ads. That many house ads, compared to that few of paid ads, stand out like a sore thumb.

That said, even bigger papers aren't that much better off.

With September and rising car sale ads, the Dallas Morning News is now above 40 percent on Saturdays, but, on a Wednesday, which is an "OK/decent" day for advertising, it still normally doesn't break 25 percent. Maybe it pushes 30 at times. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram will run about halfway between it and the Statesman. (This library doesn't get the Houston Chronicle, so I can't comment on it.)

The Waco and Temple papers, as smaller seven-days, run around Austin, it seems, on ad percentages. That said, there's no state capital in Waco or Temple, and there's no major oil or other minerals.

And, let's remember, Texas has a pretty "decent" economy.

According to the Columbia Journalism Review, a recent Monday L.A. Times was at just 40 pages. Let's say that they didn't want to run at less than 20 percent advertising. (On all papers, I count classys and obits as straight advertising inches.) Even with the Net economy, surely the Times would have  3x the classys as Austin, and more paid obits, even at higher rates.

So, it couldn't have had more than a 35 percent edge on retail ad space above the Statesman. That's horrible.

I don't know if he had a typo and actually meant 2015, but Ryan Chittum of CJR said that he expects LA to not have a seven-day print daily by the end of this year. That might be a stark guess, but giving Chittum the year's benefit of the doubt, that wouldn't surprise me at all.

Gannett takes a tumble (updated)

Sure, part of the newspaper giant's 12-percent drop in fourth-quarter 2013 advertising versus the year before is due to no political ads, but not all of it.

That said, this could be glass half full/glass half empty news:

Excluding the effects of the extra week in 2012's fourth quarter, publishing revenue fell 5 percent to $944.3 million on lower advertising. Meanwhile, revenue at the company's broadcast division fell 16 percent to $228.2 million, largely due to the drop in political advertising.

Maybe the drip, drip, drip of declining print ad revenues is stabilizing. Allow for the political ads dropoff (though Gannett had some ads from Virginia odd-year elections) and other advertising may have been nearly stable.  Small consolation, but something.

Flip side? Are broadcast TV stations becoming more and more dependent on political ad revenue?

Update, Feb. 10: Ryan Chittum of CJR has more on why Gannett took a tumble. He notes that, in its newspaper division, its aggressive use of paywalls is like putting lipstick on a pig. And, will we be able to say the same about CNHI someday?

I work at the fifth-worst job: more on newspaper revenue streams

Picking this up, after a week-plus of hiatus on the thread, as to why newspaper journalism is, according to a job hunting site, the fifth-worst job in America at this time.

Well, that's because newspapers still haven't figured out the revenue stream issue, and it's probably only going to get worse, according to this Forbes article that brags about how well it's doing.

Here's the two biggest takeways, quantified:
1. 150,000 new Internet banner ads are produced every second.
2. Ad rates of return are now as low as 1/100 of a cent per impression.

Item 1 means that item 2 will only get worse. And reflects a further point in the story, that ad streams/diffusion will only get worse. Let's add that some states are looking at or have allowed public notice classifieds to run in places besides a "newspaper of record" and you get the picture.

And, don't believe that mobile/app ads will be a guaranteed savior. The reason for their relatively higher rates of return are current relative scarcity of numbers adn relative scarcity of mobile space, or perceptions thereof. That will change, especially the first.

Smaller, non-corporate newspapers, really just starting to seriously feel the effects of Web 2.0 and cheaper business websites, will probably start feeling more and more what the big boys have for several years, even as the mobile world soon proves more ephemeral than believed. And, will be diffusing their sales efforts more and more at the wrong time.

That's why I again say "paywalls." That said, it may the case of shutting the barn door too late.

But, let's take a further look at the issue.

1. The solution may differ from paper to paper, whether a blanket paywall, a metered paywall like the Economist, a "freemium" paywall like some others, micropayments, or a mix of all the non-blanket options.
2. Especially at smaller papers, to prevent password sharing, the paper must require passwords to be changed every 90 days or so. No exceptions. No complains about remembering passwords from alleged "grandmothers" who are alleged "subscribers" and may well be neither.
3. No NYT-style fake paywalls, or LA Times type metered paywalls defeated in Firefox by "private browsing."

On the ads side, the best I can suggest is shorter length web and mobile pages, to hold more ads. More creative, embedded placement. No more "show story as single page" links.

This may still be primarily be shutting the barn door too late, but it has to be tried.

That said, good Facebook ... and in general ... friend Leo Lincourt objects to the advertising side of my presentation. He has valid points about the obtrusiveness, which is why all of us run some form of ad-blocking extensions on our browsers. (And, in my case, also run a beefed-up hosts file on my computer.)

I agree. But, as more and more news content shifts from hardcopy to digital (don't believe Audit Bureau of Circulation's latest numbers of newspapers' circ numbers rising; they've got multiple ways to "officially" calculate circulation numbers now, including digital; it's apples to broccoli on the comparisons), ad revenue will continue to decrease.

And, the papers outside NYC that are at $1 a copy for daily, non-Sunday issues are maxed out; they can't go higher on price for years. Heck, prices were 50 cents in most cities less than a decade ago, and no more than a quarter not much more than a decade ago.

So, while trying to figure out how to beat ad blockers and such, I think papers have to do something more on the online ad side. We're so used to getting stuff for free on the Net that, when newspapers go to subscription models, they can't afford to be too pricey.

So, what about audio ads? Or video ones?

Or very brief "priming" audio ads? Or brief "priming" text/graphics ads?

Or newspapers, rather than having things like NYClean hack fake paywalls, find ways to reverse-engineer against ad-block extensions? No, I don't want newspapers turning into "Gator" sites with text/news attached; that said, this makes clear that they've been and still are, abysmally slow to adapt.

And, then, watch the ad wars heat up.

Of course, none of this mentions that you and I can still read AP (plus Reuters and AFP, both with expanding US presences) on Google, Yahoo, etc. Or, the NYT, beyond fake paywalls, on MSNBC. And, having worked at a newspaper owned by MediaNews founder and long-time AP chairman of the board Dean Singleton, i can attest to that "abysmally slow to adapt" portion, or, let's just call it, "shortsighted."

The man ran his own company into Chapter 11 even while letting AP lose control of portions of its revenue stream vis-a-vis those news aggregators.

If the Newseum ever came up with the bright idea of a Wall of Shame, Singleton would be a charter member.

Vail Resorts snow job gets reporter fired

Bob Berwyn was, until recently, a reporter for Colorado-based Summit Daily News. Seeing a former colleague, now working for Vail Resorts, by far the biggest ski company in Colorado, doing an interview with The Weather Channel, he suspected a snow job on snowfall on the Western Slope vs. the east side of the Rockies.

And did a column about it.

Despite the fact there's now a ski report iPhone app to keep folks like Vail Resorts in line and honest, Vail Resorts yanked all its ads from the paper. Summit Daily News' managing editor insisted Berwyn needed to grovel and when he wouldn't, he fired him.

MediaNews’ I-News sounds like DMN’s CueCat

So MediaNews is starting what it calls an “Individuated News: personalized newspaper?

Peter Vandevanter, vice president of targeted products for MediaNews Group, told the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) “The Power of Print Conference” that the subscribers will get home delivery of a printed paper, through home printers or portable devices, with content personalized to their demands and including hyper-targeted advertising and coupon offers.

So, on the ad side, MediaNews and Dean Singleton are trying to out-Google Google and Sergey Brin? Good luck with that. Coupons? BFD. Everybody knows their use rate is in single digits.

If I want to read hardcopy, I can just go to a webpage and hit “print” if I have a home printer. If it doesn’t correctly format for 8.5x11, I can copy the text and paste in a Word document. Plus, if I have ad-block settings and/or a good hosts file, I don’t get any of Singleton’s ads.

What moronity.

But wait, that’s not ALL the moronity. The MediaNews printer ain’t a freebee:

Subscribers buy the printer at a deep discount and pay a “modest” subscription fee, Vandenvanter told Mitchell. The newspaper reimburses subscribers for the consumable. Advertisers pay the newspaper for targeted ads.

Even THAT isn’t all the moronity. Allegedly, advertising rates for the I-News product “are 10 times print advertising rates.”

Good luck with that one!

How bad is the paper biz?

Josh Marshall thinks the negative trends against it are all structural.

While not disagreeing with the degree of structural problems, I note that some of this is, in fact, cyclical:

Who are two of biggest advertisers in newspapers? Realtors and auto dealers. Need I say more?

That said, part of the decline in both those sectors is structural, too.

Realtors are going to Craigslist, and may increase that, since a federal court has ruled that Craig's is NOT a newspaper and therefore not subject to Fair Housing guidelines.

Also on the structural side, there's been plenty of stupid decisions, just like in the auto business.

The AP not adopting a subscription model for online AP stories more than a decade ago would be the biggest.

If that had been in place, member newspapers then could have comfortably charged for online subscriptions.

BUT, circ is only about 25 percent of revenue and ads the other 75. Craigslist would have cut in no matter what. (And, it'skilling alt-weeklies even worse.)

Back to structural problems.

The biggest has been the assumption by newspaper owners that they're "entitled" to 25 percent profit margins. Well, those days are long gone.

Take Sam Zell. Stupidest thing he's doing is keeping 'Trib Co. and selling the Cubs. He should keep the Cubs, and WGN, and sell the rest.

Many of our cities will be missing a newspaper

If you're my age, you're old enough to remember the demise of the two-newspaper city in the U.S., except in its biggest cities.

Coming next? The For more on yesterday's events, demise of the one-newspaper city in a number of places, perhaps.

A number of liberal bloggers have rightly praised McClatchy's news coverage out of D.C. during the Bush Imperium. Well, it's one of the worst-off chains, financially.

Additional factors? Especially due to struggling car dealers, the ad downturn is local as well as national. Real estate's plummet is, of course, definitely a local issue, especially in subprime ground-zero spots. And, the credit crunch makes national advertising lines of credit hard to line up.

News content NOT the fault of newspaper decline

The WaPost’s Paul Farhi says it’s all about the business side, including but not limited to advertising.

Speaking of advertising, Internet advertising is flat right now, he notes; papers shouldn’t look to it for salvation.

As for the content and content-related parts of websites, he suggests adding stuff like Twitter feeds. But, he adds that this will exacerbate, if anything, online advertising issues, causing already flighty online readers to spend even less time with a particular website or webpage.

The real problem? Newspaper LBOs of the last five years, combined with all the economic shit hitting the fan.

Speaking of that, the Minneapolis Star Tribune has suspended debt payments. it, Philadelphia Newspapers and others have fallen out of bond compliance.

The future? Farhi is HUGELY pessimistic for many seven-day dailies:

Some newspapers entered their death spiral months ago.

And, speaking of that, why is Sam Zell trying to sell the Cubs? The man is an idiot.

Keep the Cubs and sell everything with the Trib name on it.

The future of the online newspaper

Kevin Drum and Ezra Klein, combined with my own professional interest on the matter and riffing on Ted Rall

First, to those who would claim that Internet ads have such high penetration rates, or similar, I say that technology has empowered we the "Net consumers," so that we have the power to "not see ads."

Example: I have Firefox on a PC. Between Firefox’s ad block, my extensive list of URLs on my hosts file and Firefox’s No Script to block videos from launching I simply do not see most ads.

That's a far physical difference from a hard-copy newspaper. Even if you know the ads are all “down there” on the bottom half, or bottom two-thirds, of the page, they at least partially catch your eye.

Heck, even with junk mail, it may catch the corner of my eye for five seconds.

Second is the atomization of news brought on by the Net. How likely is Poltico, Ezra’s focal point for his post, of even staying about water after the November election? Until recently, the major daily newspapers could charge such high ad rates because they had such large readerships.

Combine the two factors — relatively low readership of many online sites and the ability to dodge ads, and I can’t see that the present model is highly viable.

If you’re a specialized online news magazine, the obvious solution is a subscription model. And, a subscription model might be tweakable to defeat host files, or cookie-deniers or whatever, and force people to eyeball ads.

For the old hardcopy paper or mag? To me, the Guardian solution — not only being private, but being run by an official nonprofit — may be the way to go. It would reduce the focus on the bottom line, and it would also get financial speculators, the Sam Zells of the world, out of the business of buying newspapers.