[Home] [ABCNews.com] [ColeGroup] [InfoWorld] [Money] [NYT]
Web publishing erects barriers between paper and readers
"Simple little things can stop delivery of the
new newspaper dead in its tracks."When the Red River flooded Grand Forks, N.D., the newspaper still managed to be distributed.
When downtown Grand Forks caught fire, burning down the newspaper building in the process, the newspaper still managed to get out. It went out not through the originally planned distribution methods, mind you, but via some backups that worked.
Last month, after a mix-up somewhere between the Newspaper Association of America, its Internet service provider and Network Solutions (the company that controls much of the Internet Domain Name Registry), the NAA was unable to distribute its web product.
Without an entry in the registry, there is no backup.
Newspapers have long had a special relationship with the people who buy them. Part of that comes from the ability to reliably deliver the paper, even in the face of horrendous odds.
Controlling the delivery mechanism from end to end went a long way toward maintaining that reliability. In an effort to cash in on new media and the Internet, we seem to have forgotten some of that.
In the early '80s, newspapers put their wares up on Prodigy and America Online and CompuServe. This brought the prestige of newspapers to these services. In return, the newspapers got exposure to new audiences. The only problem here was that they knew little more about their audiences than a screen name or whatever information the on-line service passed along, breaking the newspaper's control of the distribution channel.
The move into new media has put other roadblocks between our readers and us. Simple little things can stop delivery of the new newspaper dead in its tracks. For example, the NAA's web site was unavailable for several days. After several fruitless attempts to reach the site, a quick "whois" check at Network Solutions showed that the site was "on hold."
Now, "on hold," according to the people at Network Solutions, means that either someone hasn't paid the $35 annual bill to maintain the domain name, or there is a dispute with someone over the name.
Well, it wasn't a trademark dispute, according to the NAA. It apparently thought the ISP paid the bill, the ISP apparently thought the NAA did, and Network Solutions -- which currently controls the Domain Name Registry for top-level domains .com, .org and .net -- pulled the plug. The NAA coughed up the check fairly fast, but its site was missing in action for the better part of a weekend.
I've never been that involved in the money side or the circulation side of the business, but I cannot imagine the print distribution system being shut down because of a missing $35 check. And even if the bill is paid on time, the typical web site knows little more about its readers than the IP address and domain name from which they came -- not their home address or names, none of the demographic data advertisers want.
"We are in an environment where we no longer control distribution," said Randy Bennett, vice president of electronic media for the NAA. It wasn't that long ago that New York newspapers found themselves in a similar situation in print. A diverse collection of news agents and distribution companies had cut them off from their subscribers and the related demographics.
The New York Times solved that problem by buying most of them out as it formed City & Suburban, a consolidation of the many wholesalers that once served the metro area.
The Times has brought that concern to the Web, requiring registration (albeit free) to gain access to its site, gathering the demographic information that advertisers want in the process. Other papers have taken other steps to determine who their on-line readers are.
"Some other papers have gone to voluntary registration," Bennett said. "Some are building a database of customers by hosting games or contests. It's particularly important in this environment. Advertisers want to know more about who they are reaching."
The nice thing about working in a mature industry is that we have seen all the problems and know how to deal with them. The Internet is far from a mature industry. Make a typo in the DNS registry here and the Internet comes to a screeching halt. Dig a little too deep with a backhoe there and oops, a big chunk goes down the tube over there. Forget to check a security setting somewhere else and -- oops -- hackers have your site. Solving all these problems, while rapidly expanding the network and developing new content for it, is a bit of a problem.
In one of the Star Trek movies, Scottie makes a comment about the ease of disabling the new Enterprise just by simply fiddling with what he called "the plumbing" in the new ship.
If we're going to depend on the Internet to reach our readers, we need to keep some plumbers on hand.
Oh. And don't forget to pay the bill.
-- Steven E. Brier
From NEWSINC., Feb. 1, 1999, Copyright © 1999, All Rights Reserved.
