I was making a point about print readers, yes. But I took care and am taking care to acknowledge and serve web audiences too.

Please read my last par of the previous post.

That said, perceptions are important, so the fact you think I’m print centric is food for thought.

The Mail (and The Post and Sunday Merc) have some amazingly dedicated webfolk who have helped the website come on in leaps and bounds.

But the way you talk about online readers makes them sound like a secondary concern at most – possibly not even as customers at all!

That worries me as newspaper circulations are not just declining because of resource cuts in the business, they are declining because buying habits are changing.

So surely the (very scary) job now is to start pushing for ways to make the website pay its way?

As I’ve said before, I think what you did may have been the best way to maximise the return of a story at this moment.

But I can’t help worrying that, from what you have just said, you have decided you can not make money out of the web and, instead, have opted to manage the decline of a newsprint business.

The “readers” I’m talking about in this instance are those paying 42p for the print edition. That’s 42p EVERY day, six days a week, 52 weeks a year for, depending on the day, up to 70,000 readers.

If we do not serve these readers, then they will slip away faster than they already are across the industry. And if they disappear, the audience that advertisers pay for disappears, which means advertising revenues decline faster, as well as circulation revenue, which means we can’t afford the same resource for journalism to serve those readers, and so on in ever-declining circles.

I’m not suggesting the above has not happened/is not happening anyway, to certain extents. And I’m certainly not suggesting doing nothing for online readers, who will and do form part of the Birmingham Mail’s future (and I’m sure JG will confirm how our serving has improved online… with mile still to go!).

But it’s all about managing these relationships, serving the pockets of readers in different media properly and, over time, changing these servings as the balance of audience and revenue changes.

Does that make any sense?

also you have to look behind those numbers – how many of those hits were people looking for the Barry story only to find the full letter not there and leaving disappointed – and pissed off with the Post.

as mentioned above – no reader will thank you for not publishing something in their chosen vehicle for reading news.

initially I came down on the the side of witholding the story and generating much needed paper sales (I think that despite lack of proof this was definitely achieved) – but then I thought all you are doing there is protecting your legacy product at the expense of your future product (the website).

Prolonging the death of your paper while stunting the growth of your own website, if you will.

Now I’m sure that the paper still brings in more cash than the web, but you have to give your web sales team something to sell too – preferably before the whole lot goes tits up

But you have a job to do and if the Post is owned by one of the large local newspaper groups you have my every sympathy as they really couldn’t give a shit about the readers they only care about squeezing as much as possible out of the fewer and fewer staff they employ.

The shameful bit comes when the same company professes to be serving its readers. Now, that is plainly not true. It is pretty obvious that the readers would have been best served by putting the letter online free. If I were an Aston Villa fan, I would not be happy that the newspaper is doing this to me. And if I happened to stumble upon this here discussion, I would grow very angry. And I would grudgingly buy the Mail until it enjoys that kind of monopoly, but would ditch it the moment a more respectful alternative comes up. And that is what I think will happen to most newspapers that only pretend to be *serving* a public, while in fact what they are doing is to be *milking* it. People are not cows, you know.

I’m inclined to agree with you.

The obvious success of the Barry story has made me realise that, when you have content that you don’t want others reproducing, newspapers are better off using the distribution method they know how to control: the paper.

Online news is so easily copied and news organisations (including public service providers) are so disinclined to credit that putting out an exclusive online for free is likely to undermine its value.

I think, perhaps, the 4pm idea might have been a bit ambitious – but using the website the evening before and in the morning to publicise the existence of the letter makes sense.

I don’t agree with Dilyan. If Barry had wanted to reach fans without a newspaper, he could have by publishing his letter online in his own way.

He went to the Mail because he knew it gave him easy access to a specific audience. I suspect the Mail also did the hard work of building up some relationship with the footballer that made him come to them instead of a national or another regional rival.

As a business, The Mail spends time and money building that audience and I don’t think there’s any shame in trying to maximise the return it gets on a great story.

But this sees us back at the same thorny problem we’ve always had. We may be able to use the web to squeeze as much value out of the newspaper as possible but, as newspaper circulation is declines, can we find a way to stop the value of a story dissipating when it is put online? Or do we have to admit defeat?

NB. I also think Paul Bradshaw’s post “In defence of paywalls” is well worth a read on this topic.

Having seen the Gareth Barry story break as I was flying off to sunkissed Fuerteventura last week, I’ve only just caught up with this fascinating debate – and I have to say I’m with Steve.
His job is (and will be for some years to come, I think) to sell print newspapers. So when the Mail got a fantastic exclusive story such as this, they were entirely right to milk it for all it was worth and get as many people as possible to shell out their 42p for the whole thing.
After all, despite what most of the new-media community wants to tell us, print newspapers are by far the biggest source of revenue for media companies and that’s not going to change any time soon.
Putting the whole thing on the web (for free, remember) more or less straight away would not have been a sensible business decision, IMO.
Isn’t there a comparison with how the Telegraph have been mercilessly drip-feeding us MPs’ expenses’ stories for the past six weeks rather than getting it all out in one go?
Would that have had the same impact if it had just been released (again, for free) on the web rather than siphoned out and dressed up with a good number of high-quality staff able to assess it and present it and charge 90p a time for it? And look what it’s done for their print sales figures.