BY TOM CALLINAN • TCALLINAN@ENQUIRER.COM • MARCH 5, 2010

(NOTE: The Kentucky Enquirer is also part of the ‘First in Print’ campaign.)

Sunday’s (Cincinnati) Enquirer will contain several stories with the logo “First in Print.”

What’s up with that?

First in Print evolved from an experiment begun a few weeks ago to showcase content that readers would find only in the print newspaper on Sunday mornings, and not on our Web site.

I’ll take personal responsibility for what might be called a series of Sunday waffles that left Enquirer staff and readers wondering what was going on.

I kept changing my mind.

At first, we opted not to post some stories online at all – investigations into Cincinnati police pension practices, teen homelessness, for example. But even if those stories drove readers to buy the Sunday print newspaper, I still was uncomfortable depriving citizens – even non-subscribers – of such important reporting.

After fiddling with a few other ideas, here is what we have settled on – for now:

On Sundays, we will designate stories from each section of the paper that will be available only in print that day. Those “First in Print” stories will not be available online until Monday morning.

This will reinforce the value of our content and, we hope, remind readers of the joy of relaxing with their Sunday paper.

While we don’t expect a dramatic increase in Sunday circulation, there’s a principle at stake here.

Print readers traditionally pay for their news, either by subscribing to have their papers delivered to their homes, or by dropping coins into a newspaper box.

When newspapers moved to the Internet, they followed a similar business model, but without a parallel plan to collect from Web readers.

Posting our content online for free was a noble endeavor that has served the public interest well. But in the long run, it’s a shaky business plan, and not one that can be sustained.

As a result, many newspapers are now finding that they need to ask readers to pay for that content.

Ever since the advent of radio, newspapers have watched as other media increasingly co-opted their content – from “rip and read” radio news, to the watered-down broadcast reports lifted from the morning paper, and on to today’s Internet, Google and Whatever Comes Next.

Watching broadcast outlets, Web sites and blogs essentially rob newspapers of their hard – and expensive – reporting has long been a vexation, but not a mortal threat.

But those days are numbered. They must be. Before we are.

This is a business. Gas stations don’t pump free gas into your tank. Grocers don’t give away bread and milk.

The Enquirer has a sizeable investment in its reporters, photographers and editors who work diligently to cover news, sports and entertainment, offer authoritative reports and provide context for their readers.

In the digital world, many readers get all of that for free. Meanwhile, others are profiting from our work.

We’re no longer willing to idly watch our good efforts stolen.

In an attempt to track down such content parasites, The Enquirer and Cincinnati.Com now employ technology that scours the media landscape for illegal use of our content. In recent weeks, we have sent warnings to several blogs, Web sites and radio stations.

We’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore.

Provide 61% Of The News

Talk about mad: Our friends at The Columbus Dispatch are zealous about the value of their Sunday newspaper, labeling more than 50 stories each week as print exclusives.

In a recent column to readers, Editor Ben Marrison cited a study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism that noted, “While the news landscape has rapidly expanded, most of what the public learns is still overwhelmingly driven by traditional media – particularly newspapers.”

“Researchers found that newspapers produce 61 percent of the news, while 28 percent of local news is reported by television stations. Interestingly, “new media” outlets generated just 4 percent of the local news during the one-week study of all news outlets in Baltimore,” Marrison wrote. “Those online-only ‘new-media’ operations regurgitate a lot of our work and some news releases but do little original reporting.”

Amen from Cincinnati, Ben – and from newspapers across America.

All eyes are on the mighty New York Times, which announced in January that it would charge for access to its NYTimes.com starting next January. Web readers will be allowed to view a limited number of stories each month, but they will have to pay for unlimited access. Subscribers to the print newspaper will have full access to the site without additional charges.

The Times hopes its plan will have little effect on occasional visitors to its 17-million-readers-a-month base. And it prays more loyal readers will see the value of paying for the complete package in print or online.

Will it work in New York or elsewhere?

We’ll watch New York but won’t know about elsewhere, especially until we figure out what “it” is in Cincinnati.

So far, no best practices are in place to follow. The media landscape is littered with scrapped plans, such as Newsday’s miserable experience with online paid subscriptions that initially captured 35 online-only subscribers.

In smaller markets, newspapers may have a better chance. The Arkansas Democrat & Gazette, for one, has been firm in protecting its content with a pay wall.

“It works because they have no desire to get Web traffic,” Cincinnati.Com Digital Content Manager Mandy Jenkins says of the ArkansasOnline approach. “You can’t have your cake and eat it, too.”

Jenkins, who manages social media and other projects, has done expansive research on the pay wall issue and last week discussed it on her blog, ZombieJournalism.com.

One respondent was Chris Wetterich, a Cincinnati native now living in Illinois, who posted: “Please, just let me pay for the print-only content online. I will. I promise. I can’t buy the paper. I would if I could. I’m not just stopping on the site for 30 seconds to see a brief about a car crash or to see that it happened to snow last night. I really want to read the in-depth coverage.”

Well, that’s one who would buy our cake. But it would take many more to build a pay model to offset the risk of losing advertising because of a smaller audience.

Lauren Rich Fine has less of an appetite for what’s going on. She is a former longtime newspaper analyst for Merrill Lynch, and is now a professor at Kent State.

I asked her what she thought about the Columbus and other pay wall experiments.

“There is a ton of news online, most of it free,” she said. “There isn’t much of an obstacle to leaving one site for another. However, if the content is both of perceived value and scarce, an individual might be willing to pay. There are a relatively small percentage of the latter. As long as radio and television ‘take’ newspaper content, the important stories become readily available.”

A Small, Cautious Step

Newspapers need to do something to stop the taking.

Looking into the crystal ball, it’s possible that devices such as Amazon’s Kindle reader, Apple’s iPad and Whatever Comes Next could become drivers of a pay wall model yet to be discovered.

Mobile applications also will change the landscape dramatically.

But as long as newspapers have unique and exclusive local content, I am optimistic they will remain vital to American life on whatever platform is provided.

The challenge will be hanging on until we figure all of this out.

I’d like to promise that the Sunday waffles are over. But this is new territory for us and I expect we will continue to experiment and modify.

Someday we likely will be asking digital readers to pay for more exclusive local content. While we would love your hometown newspaper to lead the way for the industry in finding the content-value solution, don’t count on it. Cincinnati.Com has one of the strongest, albeit largely non-paying, local audiences in the nation.

Our challenge will be to continue our digital leadership and protect the more traditional parts of our business.

Sunday is just a start, a small cautious step.

There’s a saying in the media business, traced back to the slogan of the International News Service founded by newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst in 1909:

“Get It First, But First Get It Right.”

It may take awhile to figure out exactly what our new model will be. If it were easy, we would have (and perhaps should have) done it 15 years ago.

But we did not.

And neither has anyone else.

Yet.

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