Stop The Presses: Before Leaving, Ohio AG Dann Preserved Print Media Advertising Monopoly

CINCINNATI (TDB) -- Two weeks before scandal drove Marc Dann from office on May 14, Ohio's former attorney general issued a formal legal opinion that drew a distinct boundary between digital and print media. He said the state's growing crop of online publications are not eligible for some forms of official legal advertising. The seven-page decision preserved a financial plum for Old Media print newspapers and closed off a potential revenue source for New Media. Print continues to have a monopoly on legal ads after Dann's declaration that, "An online version of a newspaper . . . is not a 'newspaper of general circulation' for the purpose of notice by publication . . ." The complete text of the seven-page opinion is available here.

Dann's April 30 ruling was in response to a question by Betsy Houchen, executive director of the Ohio Board of Nursing, which regulates the nursing profession. Houchen's inquiry sought to learn if state law would allow the nursing board to notify license holders of disciplinary hearings through means other than service by mail or legal ads in print publications. Dann said no, and found the Internet was different than print, though he noted that newspapers have online versions.

"Newspapers vary in their online offerings. Some sites are free for all users to view, while others may require payment of an online subscription fee or maintenance of an existing subscription to the print edition of the newspaper. Newspapers often reformat print editions for their web sites. Online newspapers typically present a series of links to various news stories or links to pages of general news topics that then provide links to various news articles.

"In addition to the typical series of links most newspapers use on their websites, there are still other ways newspapers make content available to their readers. For instances, some of Ohio's newspapers offer what they call an 'electronic edition' or 'digital edition,' which has an appearance and format very similar to the hard copy, printed edition, but is viewed and read electronically rather than in hard copy, and is accessed in a number of ways depending upon the newspaper. With the wide range of possibilities for offering newspapers online, the only trait common to all online newspaper editions is their accessibility through the Internet."

In Ohio, the legal ads must appear in publications with at least 50% of the readership as paying customers. They also have to have second class mailing privileges via the U.S. Postal Service. Dann said the Internet creates free distribution and online publications don't transmit content using snail mail. He said, "An online version of a newspaper at a minimum fails to meet these two requirements."

Bottomline: Old technology reaps the money from legal ads.

More Bad Newspaper News: Most Of Their Websites Are Stagnant And 'Losing Ground'

CINCINNATI (TDB) -- Harvard University has studied news site traffic on the Web and the findings are grim for most of the nation's big city newspapers, which appear to be attracting fewer visitors this year than last. They are losing audience share to blogs, aggregators, major national news sites such as the Wall Street Journal, Google and Yahoo. Local TV Websites also have rising trendlines. The report is by the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. It is called Creative Destruction, and it is must read because it covers the entire spread of Web-based news sources.

This part has the worst tidings for the metro dailies:

"The Websites of newspapers in mid-sized cities such as Baltimore, Denver, Seattle and Minneapolis attract considerable traffic. The traffic level is skewed, however, by the San Francisco Chronicle and Seattle Post-Intelligencer sites, each of which averages about 2 million unique monthly visitors. When the two sites are excluded, the average number of unique monthly visitors to mid-sized city newspaper sites falls to roughly 665,000.

"Midsized-city newspaper sites are not growing. On average, whether the San Francisco or Seattle newspapers are included or not, they attracted substantially fewer unique visitors in April 2007 than they did in April 2006. The decline is not attributable to a steep drop at one or two sites. Of the nine sites included in the average, two had modest growth, one had flat growth, and six had negative growth."

The report is 20 pages long. It has interesting information about blog traffic, and also TV station Websites, which are growing while the dailies fall. Obviously, even the biggest blogs don't yet get the traffic of a mid-sized daily's site. But the growth graphs are headed up.

Newspaper Biz Future: Grim At Best

CINCINNATI (TDB) -- Where will the shoe drop next? The Minneapolis Star-Tribune was sold off last week, and the predictions are that other big metro dailies are on the block. "Some publishers will simply get out of the game,'' says thestreet.com.

No argument here. The only question is: Who's next? Cleveland, Columbus, Toledo, Pittsburgh? The for sale signs are up in Chicago.