Protecting The Local Franchise Online   

Some newspapers are forging alliances designed to reinforce their brand names in cyberspace.

I am frequently asked to speak at meetings of state press associations and other newspaper industry groups, and high on the list of suggested topics is: What will the new information age do to newspapers, and will newspapers as we have known them survive?

My basic answer is that the burgeoning Internet services will of course have an impact on newspapers in ways good and ill and yet to be known, but that newspapers will survive this challenge as they have all others in the past. No form of media ever invented – from single-sheet flyers, political screeds, books and so on – has ever been destroyed altogether by something new.

The heart of the information age, of course, is the computer, and newspapers are as much a part of the new age of computer manipulation of information as any other media form. In a modern newspaper, computers control every aspect of putting a newspaper together except reporting news and selling advertising and subscriptions.

Indeed, newspapers could be on the verge of a vastly expanded use of computer power that would greatly enhance an already dominant hold on local information. David M. Cole, a technology consultant and publisher of The Cole Papers, a newsletter, wrote a fascinating article in a recent issue of Presstime about a concept dubbed "warehousing." By this he means that a newspaper stores every bit of information it gathers – news, announcements, advertisements, public notices and everything else.

Using birth announcements as an example, he describes how reporters using warehoused information could write about birth trends and future demands on public education, how retailers could be given mailing lists of new parents among potential customers, and so on. And that's just for birth announcements. The same strategy can be applied to home sales (lists for furniture and appliance firms) and numerous other categories of information routinely gathered by newspapers.

There is a bit of Big Brother in all this, but so is there in almost every other facet of the nation's commercial life. Newspapers in this environment cannot afford to pass up taking full advantage of their most important asset – the wealth of data that every newspaper collects about the lives, events and transactions that are the stuff of every local community.

The real concern of those who ask me to speak, though, is not about how newspapers use the new information tools to enhance newspapers as we have known them, but how others might use the same tools to take away influence and prosperity from newspapers. But here, too, most newspapers are moving rapidly onto the Internet with services designed to protect their local information franchises.

Establishing local Web sites for classified and other types of advertising and for local events and entertainment listings has become commonplace, with newspapers enjoying an inherent advantage over potential competitors since they already have most of the information on hand. Some newspapers have gone beyond this by establishing Web sites in collaboration with local organizations that clearly identify the newspaper as the font of all local information.

The Durham Herald-Sun in North Carolina, for example, has forged alliances with local chambers of commerce, medical associations, Realtors and other organizations to create Herald-News Web sites that provide all the information on local services that prospective or newly arrived residents could want. The benefit to the Herald-News is reinforcement of the paper's brand name and dominance as information provider.

None of this means that newspapers will not face increased competition from the likes of Microsoft's Sidewalk and other efforts aimed at newspapers' revenue streams. Recognizing this threat, three large newspaper companies – Times Mirror, the Tribune Co. and the Washington Post Co. – have created an online partnership for classified ads aimed specifically at Microsoft's Carpoint service.

The inventory of automotive classifieds taken from the partnership's 10 large dailies, which will be available on America Online, will dwarf Carpoint's offerings. The partnership will seek to include other newspaper companies and intends to expand its service to other classified categories.

Microsoft's Carpoint and Sidewalk and other competitors on the Internet will take a bite out of newspaper revenue – even a big bite if a newspaper is not alert to the challenge – but the world will not end for newspapers because of the new electronic age challenge, just as the world did not end with the advent of radio and then television, despite a lot of predictions to the contrary. l