The New York Times' free online site offers more news value than its $500-plus a year hard-copy version.
By LAWRENCE S. DIETZ
American newspaper publishers have greeted the Internet with about as much enthusiasm as a downtown storekeeper contemplating the arrival of a suburban Wal Mart. Bad enough to read survey after survey showing that young people are reading papers less and less, worse to watch the erosion of traditional advertising support (every department store or supermarket mega-merger means one less corporate entity to place ads), worse still to hear all the natter about the information superhighway, which has every appearance of giving away for free what newspapers customarily charge for. Still, one by one they've edged their way into the Web.
Some shouldn't have bothered. Hold your nose and take a look at what the Dallas Morning News put up last year and hasn't even bothered to update or change -- a reprint of its Waco articles from 1993. Or find your way to the Detroit Free Press, essentially a gopher site sprinkled with a few articles and weather.
Others, however, have taken their Web presence seriously: USA Today (although the graphics are slow to load at 28.8), the Raleigh News and Observer, the Blacksburg (Va.) Independent (no kidding: a local commercial operation designed it), the Austin (Texas) Chronicle, and a contingent of Californians: the San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner, the San Jose Mercury-News, and, recently, the Los Angeles Times.
Which brings us to the big kahuna of American papers, the New York Times. Its Web version, stylish as any, carries a large amount of the paper's prodigious amount of daily news and features (but not the Book Review or Magazine). Those addicted to wasting time at their computer have been comforted to learn that the famed Times crossword puzzle is available daily in interactive form, a welcome change from Solitaire, Hearts or Free Cell.
One curious thing about the Times on the Web: each day it contains the full text of some stories that appear in the national edition only in single paragraph summary form. The national edition is that stripped-down version of the paper available outside the New York metropolitan area (the DMA, in market lingo -- which includes the city, Northern New Jersey and Connecticut). The national edition is an important element of the paper's circulation bragging rights (about 1.2 million). It accounts for some 500,000 copies on weekdays, while only 350,000 are sold in New York City itself (mostly in Manhattan).
But the national edition is light on advertising -- like all American papers (save USA Today), the Times gets a huge chunk of its weekday revenue from local advertisers, who pay to appear in the New York DMA edition only. The predicament that faces the editors of the paper's national edition every evening is that it's impossible to cram all the editorial material about to appear in the local edition into a news hole perhaps a third as large.
The answer has been not only to omit stories (often with reader-friendly justification: does anyone outside New York care about, say, conflicts in the city council?), but to trim ones that do appear. Over the past couple of years, friends in New York, knowing my wife is writing a book about breast cancer, have faxed Times pieces about the subject; the same story in the national edition, printed in Southern California, would often be cut by a few, not inconsequential, paragraphs.
Those ghostly stories, as well as the Sunday sections missing from the Web site, point up the fundamental dilemma facing newspaper publishers who venture into the online world: where is the money going to come from? Sure, the editorial product already exists, and there are no paper, printing, or physical distribution costs. But thems who count beans at newspapers want to see income. The Mercury-News expects you to pay, if you want anything more than a headline service. The Wall Street Journal will charge beginning July 31. The Times (New York and Los Angeles) are free, the former expecting that advertising will carry the freight.
The Web does provide a way for the paper to furnish local news to the truly devoted, by boiling down eight or ten city and metro area stories each day down to a single paragraph, then making them available in full onine. Fair enough, and it works well for some: I know an unreconstructed Yankee fan living in Los Angeles who has started gleefully clicking onto the Times Web site every day to read stories about the Yanks that don't make it into the national edition.
It remains odd, however, that a national-edition-paying print customer has to go to the paper's free electronic version to read a story. The Times' motto, "All The News That's Fit to Print," might be amended for its national edition to "All The News That Fits" and tweaked for the Web: "News That Doesn't Fit."
Lawrence S. Dietz, a former editor at New West and Playboy, is finishing a book called "The Creation of Paradise," a history of Los Angeles and the L.A. Times-founding Chandler family.