A User-First Framework for Sustaining Local News - Harvard ...

Beard’s focus on the numbers is telling. He’s an idealistic, enthusiastic journalist who
has never worked on the business side of news. These days, though, the business cards
for staffers at Yahoo.com arrayed to the right of his keyboard have more to do with the
monetizing of news than its gathering or presentation.
Beard jokes that his efforts encouraging Yahoo! and other aggregators to link to
Globe stories is turning him into “the best quality pitch person” possible, a long way
from his days as a foreign correspondent for the Associated Press in South America. “I
know this isn’t exactly journalism,” he says of his work to monetize Globe content, “but
my whole focus is to see how many reporters’ desks I can save.” 108
Who Says Free Can’t Be a Business Model?
Among the challenges of the user‐first approach to circulation pricing is the
overwhelming preference, among some users, for a price point of free. As hundreds of
alternative weeklies discovered long ago, there’s money to be made by giving the paper
away. Florida’s biggest newspaper, The St. Petersburg Times, discovered as much when it
broke even on its free daily tabloid, tbt, about two years after its launch.
Times editor and CEO Paul Tash won’t provide numbers, but says the edition has
become “nicely profitable.” The Times puts as many as 80,000 copies of tbt in the hands of
readers Monday through Thursday, with a press run of 110,000 for the entertainment‐
rich Friday paper. Cover photos and headlines in tbt display more restraint than many
tabloids but a lot less than readers of the Times’ traditional broadsheet edition would
find acceptable. The key to tbt’s success, according to Tash, is that “different kinds of
readers are introducing us to different kinds of advertisers.” Once introduced, of course,
ad reps for The Times are able to pitch the new advertisers on deals for the mother ship,
which sells about 240,000 papers during the week and about 370,000 on Sundays. 109
Kinsey Wilson, NPR’s senior vice president and general manager, digital media,
points out that pricing decisions on products like an iPhone app depend a lot on
circumstances.
Some organizations might generate more money by building a large audience for a
free app, others by collecting payment from a significantly smaller group of listeners.
Before NPR released its app without charge in 2009, executives concluded they would
36