The media industry is in limbo, with print and online media battling for shrinking advertising dollars. With print publications struggling across the country, The Newport Daily News is swimming against the industry tide: Instead of creating daily digital designs for its Web site and keeping it as an addendum to the print version, the newspaper on May 22 began offering online subscriptions for interactive PDF versions of its print version.
Executive Editor Sheila L. Mullowney recently spoke about the transition.
PBN: When did Newport Daily News originally post a Web site? Has the site been profitable?
MULLOWNEY: We’ve had a Web site since at least 2001 and we’ve always made a conscious decision to not put everything that is in the daily paper up on the Web site. So I think that was an important decision – even back when we started the Web site, we knew we were not going to put the whole newspaper online. … It certainly made money and still makes money today, but it’s never made the kind of money to do what the advertising revenue does for the daily newspaper and the [other] print products.
It never got to the point where we had a designated Web staff other than the salesperson. It never could sustain itself [and] … our circulation department was arguing that people were reading the stories online for free and not getting the paper.
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PBN: When did the Daily News decide to move to an e-edition? PBN: And the e-edition Web site isn’t generated by The Newport Daily News? PBN: How much does this cost per year? PBN: Are a lot of people grumbling about how buying it both online and in print is cheaper than just buying it online. PBN: So it looks like you’re devaluing your product? PBN: What type of feedback have your readers given you? PBN: Will it be possible to comment on the stories in the future? PBN: How long did it take to make a decision to go ahead with this? Were the newsroom and executive board onboard right away? INTERVIEW
MULLOWNEY: A few months ago we started keeping the juicy stories off the Web site and teasing them because we wanted people to buy the paper. So if we had something we knew would be a talker in town, we actually started making a conscious decision not to put it up there – whereas before we would have because we knew we would get a lot of reader comments and attention.
This sort of happened at the same time that we knew we were going to move toward this model of offering the entire paper online for a fee.
MULLOWNEY: No, this is a third-party server, Tecnavia. I guess we started with the question: What would be the easiest, most efficient way to put the newspaper online? [The answer] was to take the PDFs of the pages – we were doing them every day for archival purposes – and put them online in a way people could read.
MULLOWNEY: It’s minimally more expensive than what we were doing before. It’s about $10,000 a year.
Obviously, because it’s relatively low-cost, it was easy to run some numbers to figure out how many subscriptions you need to cover the cost.
And another part of this – and this is something that some people miss – is that we’re not doing this to make a lot of money. People look at the $345 a year [for just online, while print-and-online subscriptions are $245] and say we’re greedy. But we’re actually doing this to make home delivery the most attractive option for people.
MULLOWNEY: Yes, and that I think goes against the grain for a lot of people because they think there are no incremental gains that go against the cost.
MULLOWNEY: Right, but what we’re actually doing is trying to make the print product the most accessible product. If we make the print product the most accessible product for the biggest number of people, that protects our franchise. A lot of newspapers make a cheaper [online version] than home-delivery version. We’re kind of going against that grain because we know from nearly 10 years experience that an online version is not sustainable. … It’s less than $100,000 a year we’re making online.
MULLOWNEY: Other than when we relaunched the paper about five years ago, this is the most feedback I’ve gotten from people about something we’ve done.
There are two camps. … There are people who really like the fact that it looks just like the paper. They know how to navigate it. And then there are … people disappointed in it because it is old-fashioned and they want the more interactive, blogging, 24-hour news type of site, which we’re not prepared to do.
MULLOWNEY: We’re working with Tecnavia to make that possible. Obviously, we know the reader comments were an important feature of our site and we want to maintain that with the online subscription. In conjunction with this, we’re also redesigning our home site. … And there will be opportunities on that Web site for people to post stories, also.
MULLOWNEY: You know, I want to say that everyone was onboard right away. But it did take us a long time to get to this point. … I think all of this came together with the recession and what’s going on in the news industry. When I started seeing very large, very historic newspapers closing, I got scared. I stopped thinking about Internet readers as being unlimited potential for readership and started thinking about … [getting] more subscribers. Because we need more subscribers and we need more advertisers. •
Sheila L. Mullowney
POSITION: Executive editor, The Newport Daily News, Mercury, Newport Life Magazine
BACKGROUND: After college, Mullowney worked at the Times Ledger Newspaper group in Queens, N.Y. She then made her way to the Norwich Bulletin, in Conn., where during a four-year stint she worked as a reporter, copy editor, bureau chief and assistant city editor. Mullowney joined The Newport Daily News as copy editor in 1999. Within two years, she was managing editor. In 2007, she became executive editor.
EDUCATION: B.A. in newspaper journalism, Syracuse University, 1991.
FIRST JOB: Working at Petri’s Bakery in New York as teenager.
RESIDENCE: Middletown
AGE: 39
