Shane Croucher

I’ve just had someone from the Lincolnshire Echo knock on my door. They offered me the print version of the paper for half price over the next five weeks, including delivery. Are they really trying the hard sell? Is this where they see the future? Luring people in with cheap deals, in the hope that they’ll continue to buy the paper after the five-week period.

No doubt they’ll hook a few punters, but is this an answer to the problems facing local newspapers? It seems like a very superficial way of attempting to change their fortune, without actually applying any large or serious changes to they way they operate.

The Lincolnshire Echo is a daily newspaper which tries to cover the whole county. The trouble is, they’re under-resourced, which will make it difficult to do that. Rather than having to scrape stories together for a county-wide daily operation, would changing to a weekly paper that is Lincoln-centric do better?

This would cut their printing costs significantly. It would also make their news more focused, and allow for more time to be spent investigating and researching stories. The team could comprise as follows:

Editor, sub-editor, two reporters covering the city and county councils, an education and health reporter, two court reporters, three general reporters whose coverage would include residents meetings, a photographer, two sports reporters.

With one issue a week, the Lincolnshire Echo would be able to cut down on stories that just fill space. This, alongside the time to enable reporters to work on their stories, will generate much better content. I reckon that Lincoln residents would much rather pay £1.20 a week for one large and relevant newspaper, than fork out 40p a day for a couple of good stories but mostly dross.

Now, a problem arises if there’s a big news story that crops up during the week. However, the website can be used to publish very basic copy, which gives an outline of the story. The one print issue each week could then be used for analysis and in-depth reports, giving the reader a comprehensive understanding of the story, the facts, any background information etc.

As for the content from the newspaper being put up on the website; have a pay-wall. It doesn’t have to be expensive, but if you start giving quality content on a once a week basis, people may actually pay a subscription to view your content. Obviously, the key to making people pay is making your content worthwhile. That’s what I think the Lincolnshire Echo can do by making their content focused solely on Lincoln, and giving themselves the time to put together a quality once a week newspaper.

What about those who don’t want a subscription, I hear you cry?  Put a voucher in the newspaper which has a unique code, allowing a week’s access to the stories. That way, they get a week’s access to the website as a reward for buying the paper itself. If you don’t buy the newspaper, then you pay a subscription.

With sport, which is popular locally, have a two-person team offering running updates on a separate but affiliated blog, to which access is included with the subscription. The newspaper can focus on features and analysis, whereas the news and gossip can all be online. Making sport worthwhile, in my opinion, revolves around the sports reporters being charismatic and well-liked by the local clubs and teams, on top of being locals themselves, ensuring a passion and genuine interest in local sport. If the Lincolnshire Echo can find a couple of locals who fit that, then they’re laughing.

I think that such a large shift in what the Lincolnshire Echo is, effectively turning it into the Lincoln Echo, would be a very positive shift. It would allow for cheaper running costs and a higher quality of stories and coverage. Of course, having quality content is fundamental to making your paper profitable, but I think the Echo can achieve this.

Micropayments at the minute, through something like Paypal, would be too fiddly. As Charlie Brooker puts it, newspapers need:

Some simple means of easily “tossing a penny in a cup” for the internet

What about having a sort of subscription-based micropayments system? I’ll try my best to explain what I mean, so here it goes…

Let’s say you want to read the Guardian, Telegraph and The Sun. Except, what you really want is access to CiF, Telegraph news and Sun Sport. So, each publication has its own micropayments system in place. All of the main, daily and weekly publications have an agreement with one outside payments systemy thing like Paypal (excuse my technological ignorance). The consumer signs up to Paypal, inputs all of their card details once, and only once. Then, they have their own accounts for Guardian, Telegraph and The Sun. Each of these accounts will be linked to your Paypal account, perhaps by entering a code on your first sign in. Then, each article would have a one-click button that sends through a payment to Paypal. So, all you have had to do is get a Paypal account once, and sign up to the publications you want to read. Once all the accounts are set up it’s just a case of signing in and clicking once on each article.

In order for that to work, though, all of the main daily and weekly publications would have to put their heads together and sign themselves in a deal with Paypal, whereby they could all use this ‘one-click payment’ system.

One other issue that could arise is it would cost more to process the payment than the payment is actually worth. But you could get around this by totalling it every week and on a set day and at a set time, taking the accumulated amount owed.

There are more than likely several flaws to this, and it’s also probably not very well articulated. But it’s late, so all comments are welcome!