“Were it left to us to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate for a moment to prefer the latter.” -Thomas Jefferson
Chances are your daily newspaper is struggling if not panicking. The financial crisis is pushing the entire newspaper industry to the brink, triggering a wave of dividend cuts, bankruptcies and outright closures. In Jefferson’s opinion, this ought to be cause for concern. “This matters,” writes James Warren in the Atlantic, “because of the unique role journalism plays in a democracy. So much public information and official government knowledge depends on a private business model that is now failing.”
In 2007, the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) delivered 1.3 billion newspapers to U.S. households. While that’s a lot of dead trees, it actually represents a steady decline of nearly 50% over the previous 20 years, and the economic crisis is accelerating this trend. The Rocky Mountain News published its final edition last Friday after 150 years of publication, and it’s possible that the San Francisco Chronicle could follow, becoming the largest U.S. city to lose its main daily newspaper. This has prompted the newspaper industry to take a serious look at its business model and the way it operates.
This is the context in which we announce our first newspaper partnership with 22nd Century Media, which publishes six local papers in the Chicago area. The New Lenox Patriot is the first of these to be distributed digitally to every street address in the Village of New Lenox, Illinois, via Zumbox. You may have noticed that we added a specific tab in your Zumbox dedicated to receiving newspapers.
From The Patriot: What our partnership with Zumbox means is that you can access the same newspaper you received in your mailbox each week anytime, anywhere, as long as there is an Internet connection. How is this different than our Web site? Well, the paper in your Zumbox looks exactly like the print version. You can flip the pages the same way, but unlike our print paper, we can embed videos right into what appears in your Zumbox, and link interactive content to our Web site. Zumbox also allows you to get The Patriot — and all of your mail — even if you’re not at home. Let’s say you’re on vacation or staying at your summer home in Florida (lucky), all you have to do is log on to Zumbox with your mailing address and you can read The Patriot just as you would sitting at your kitchen table at home.
While it’s a bit premature to claim that Zumbox will save the newspaper industry, we do think Zumbox merits serious consideration as a way to distribute newspaper content (and advertising) more efficiently. After all, newspaper publishers have their subscribers’ street addresses, which means they can also send papers the their Zumboxes (the addresses are one and the same). It costs little or nothing to send electronic editions to them via Zumbox. At the very least, it gives the subscriber a choice to view the paper online or off, depending on their given circumstances. At the very most, it can give publishers a second chance, as Zumbox opens new possibilities for content delivery, personalization, and monetization.
The recent TIME magazine cover story on “How to Save Your Newspaper” makes the case that readers should be willing to offer micro-payments in exchange for quality journalism. While there is plenty of debate as to whether this is viable or not, the subscription model has not worked for websites. Zumbox significantly changes the distribution model for online content. Rather than having to deliver a person to your website, Zumbox enables the content to be delivered to the person, much as it’s been done with paper. As Warren points out, The Economist, which looks like a magazine but fancies itself a newspaper, has increased its U.S. circulation while raising prices substantially. This despite the fact that all of its content is available for free on its website. (We’re loyal print subscribers.)
We also believe that the experience of reading a newspaper online can be more valuable and engaging than simply reading an article on the newspaper’s website. A piece in DMNews describes this best:
The page-flipping technology used by digital editions may also help keep readers engaged with the product, and with ads on each page, longer than the piecemeal approach of most Web sites.
Jack Ryan [22nd Century Media founder] explained, “A lot of people, especially with local news, don’t know exactly what they’re looking for, so it’s hard to search for it. They like the serendipity of flipping through the pages and saying ‘I didn’t know that.’”
We’re clearly at the earliest stage of delivering newspapers to your Zumbox. The formats and business models for delivering content via Zumbox are certain to evolve. Whether this means newspaper publishers will adapt to the medium or entirely new media companies will be built around it is anyone’s guess. But we are confident that Zumbox provides a unique and compelling way for publishers and consumers of content to benefit from our digital home delivery platform.
While we can do little to help the Rocky Mountain News or San Francisco Chronicle at this point, there are thousands of state and local papers who are welcome to start using Zumbox as a new way to deliver the news, to keep people informed, and to further the pursuits of the Fourth Estate.
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Good concept, but you really need to flesh out your FAQs. For example:
–What happens if I move? How do I give up my current Zumbox, which is presumably tied to my current address?
mohan: Currently you can contact customer service (support@zumbox.com) to execute an address change. In the very near future, a new feature will solve this issue quite easily. Stay tuned! and thanks for using Zumbox