News outlets must publish to the Web first

I recently sat in the offices of a small paper, talking with the firm’s principles about the direction of their website. I was disheartened to hear some of the room’s decision makers say they should be holding back their best content from the Web. After all, they believed, if they put all of their content online, no one would bother to read their publication. I’ve heard similar arguments in television newsrooms, where the fear isn’t so much in undercutting their efforts as it is not wanting to tip their hand to the competition before they’ve had a chance to break a story on air. These are lines of reasoning that make sense to many print and broadcast professionals,  but whether they realize it or not, we’ve moved to a time where all news media outlets need to be, first and foremost, Web publishers.

According to an early 2008 survey by Zogby International, almost half of the respondents said the Internet was their primary source for news. What’s more, that was an eight percent increase from a similar survey just one year earlier. If we want to extrapolate that out a bit more dramatically, we could say that in a single year, nearly a tenth of the American population moved from television, radio and newspapers to the Internet as the place to which they first turn for information. That trend is not about to reverse. What percentage of readers and viewers must first turn to the Web before its seen as the place to break a story? Will another eight percent jump in 2009 allow a publication to see its website as not competing with the primary interest but instead as the primary interest?

Regardless of the current revenue split between online and offline ad sales, it’s an ever weighted scale, whose balance continues to shift towards the Web. The current revenue model won’t persist. The only question for traditional media is whether those dollars move to their sites or someone else’s. And in a time of blogger journalists and increasing aggregation, where I can find much of the same content on any number of sites, the competition is no longer limited to another daily or the TV station across town.

Warner Brothers Chairman Barry M. Meyer told the New York Times he believes that, despite the recent focus on new methods of content distribution, eventually “… distribution gets commoditized.” Warner Brothers, he said, will continue to focus on content creation. After all, “at the end of it all, it’s just a blank screen.” This is the time that news media must be converting readers, listeners and viewers into users, their website’s users. You do that by focusing on the content you’re creating, not on the method of distribution.

Will television go away? No, though its mode of delivery will change. People will still buy and read magazines and newspapers. There will still be some place for radio, too. And the Web as it is today will give way to some other incarnation. But, in the end, they’re all just methods of increasingly commoditized distribution. Focus, instead, on filling those blank screens. Your consumers want content, and, for now, there’s an almost 50 percent chance they’ll first look to your website. But if they don’t find what they’re looking for, they’ll look elsewhere. More often than not, they won’t bother returning to your site to see if you’ve gotten your act together.