In an earlier post I talked about the impending demise of print media and offered a probably not-incredibly-useful proposal for improving the quality of new hires into the industry.
Here’s another idea, which I’m convinced could actually add a revenue stream for circulation-lacking papers like The New York Times. And with the demise of The New York Sun this week just another in a long line of portents, it’s time for them to listen.
During a car ride to the city the other day, my cousin Jarema was talking about how she wished she could read the newspaper every day, but she didn’t have the time. And she described how, in addition to listening to music, she loves using her iPod to listen to audiobooks while she works (as a painter for an art collective). If only she could listen to the newspaper on her iPod!
Well, why can’t she?
The Times needs subscription revenue, but readers are flocking to the website instead. The paper tried a pay-for-view scheme for some web content, but with the abundance of free news online there’s no reason to pay.
Meanwhile, many people (like me) love the content from the Times but just can’t read every article. We like the actual paper for the variety, depth, and quality of its coverage. In contrast, the local and even national TV news and news radio lack this quality and depth, and lack the user-side control of clicking around on the Times Online.
Add to that the efficiency of using iPods for purposes other than music. For instance, I download History Channel documentaries and listen to them while I walk around.
So what’s the prescription? The Times should team up with Apple to offer a daily download of the paper, divided into tracks for each article. It shouldn’t be too difficult to have a few voice artists record the articles every night; use one artist for the dozen or so articles in each section — a Diane Sawyer type for International News; a Ray Romano sound-alike for Sports; for the Metro Section, Fran Drescher (she might be available for this, right?).
I don’t subscribe to the print version of the paper because I move around too much, it’s too bulky, and there’s not enough value added over the online version. But I’d subscribe to the audio downloadable paper for sure. Just as I get an email whenever there’s a new Mad Men episode available for download, I’d have an email in my inbox every morning with a one-click link to the audio of the day’s paper. A minute later, I’d have my iPod earbuds in, on my way to the elevator, hearing the day’s headline article read to me.
Maybe I’d skip articles on telecom mergers or soccer matches, but I’d get a much wider variety of news than when I click around the articles that pop out on me on the website.
Another benefit: people love to dissociate payment from their purchases — it adds utility. It’s why we convert money into chips when we go into a casino: we suffer the expense once and then we don’t have to think about it. Paying for a subscription to the Times on iTunes would be quick and painless, making us more likely to expend money we wouldn’t in increments of $1.50 over 365 days.
Bottom line: with minimal effort and expense, the paper can make a whole new generation into Times subscribers. By making our currently unproductive time productive — letting us hear the Times while walking the streets — they’ll add value to their reporting that makes it worthwhile for us to spend money on the news. New revenue abounds.
Update (10/1/08): So it turns out that a company called Audible, bought by Amazon in January for $300 million, offers an “Audio Digest” version of the Times for like $13/mo. So someone over at the Times is recording an abridged version of the paper every night. They’re just not making it easily available — nor marketing it aggressively — to the iPod generation. To get it, one has to go to audible.com and find it, then create an account, download it, and import to iTunes. And let’s face it: nothing with the word “Digest” in its name is being marketed to millennials. This Digest should be made a lot sexier and be made easily available through the iTunes Store. Of course, it’s also worth noting that you can subscribe to some New York Times podcasts, but nothing akin to what I describe above.
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Image may be NSFW.
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Image may be NSFW.
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Image may be NSFW.
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