[mean_jean]

It is truly a desperate situation and we need every revenue stream we can ethically tolerate. If we could afford not to do it we would (also "no extra work" is not trivial - we'd rather spend our precious dollars on reporters than lead generation). Serving spammy sponsored content (which everybody understands to be such, it's not masquerading as journalism) is better than not reporting on the terrible thing a major advertiser did to the detriment of our community in order to keep that advertiser. Most daily newspapers are struggling to pay the bills - pretty much nobody but the giant national/international papers have "healthy profit numbers", even large-ish regional papers. Which is why you see so many doing massive layoffs to the point where the majority of the paper is wire stories. Or going digital-only or closing their doors. Print advertising used to be lucrative; we had a monopoly on eyeballs and ad space. Digital advertising is cheap and ubiquitous, and quality journalism takes time and money to produce but doesn't deliver nearly the kind of page views that tabloid-type stuff does. Most of our revenue still comes from print ads, but those are much cheaper now that there are other places to advertise and circulation keeps dropping. We don't like the chum either - it's a huge point of contention in the newsroom - but we can't do work that matters if we can't figure out how to fund it.

[troyvit]

I wish I could upvote your comment more than once. We need to find new revenue models or else help remind readers that advertising does not (or at least should not) affect editorial except as a means to fund it. Like I said in another post, the chum at the bottom of a news story is no worse than the garbage in the back of pop-sci.

[sizzle]

I would gladly pay for quality journalism, what is the cost of having your readers pay the salaries instead of these scummy ad networks? Are executives just trying to turn a big profit off journalism and extract maximum value from their readership via clickbait ads? I wish there was a simple solution for supporting our hard working journalist friends who truly love the job and are passionate about their craft.

[mean_jean]

I appreciate that, it's encouraging to hear. But the cost has proven to be more than the current market will bare. Or maybe we just haven't figured out how to ask people for money the right way, but attempts have been made. As one would expect, subscriptions go down every time the price goes up. And it's very hard to get people to pay for digital-only subscriptions at all, even with metering, paywalls or friendly suggestions to subscribe - people are used to getting information online for free, and there is a surplus of free commodity information to be had.

My paper tried having a separate site for subscribers with very few ads (an occasional shallow sponsor banner or sidebar spot with no junk ads), a clean, print-inspired design and a focus on hard news. We tried a paywall and then a meter (3 to 5 articles before paywall). Print subscribers had free access. We launched that in 2013 and iterated on it until it was deemed a failure and abandoned early this year. During that time we maintained a free, ad-supported site as well, because we couldn't afford to lose that revenue. That site continued to thrive with mostly wire/commodity content and "stubbed" versions of our bylined work (basically teasers) encouraging people to subscribe for the good stuff.

It's not about big profits these days, it's about keeping the lights on, the presses running and hopefully having enough left to invest in the future. Margins are tiny if they exist. The fat has been cut - optimizations have been optimized, consultants have been consulted. We've all been through rounds of layoffs, buyouts, hiring freezes, salary freezes, reorganizations, consolidations, etc. Our goal is to keep our staff the size it is now, which is less than half the size it was in 2006. The big conglomerates are getting by on economies of scale (which comes with its own tradeoffs - a shared copy desk may sound ok until you realize knowledge of a place is pretty relevant to accuracy for stuff like which neighborhood or part of town something happened in, or when the web team is maintaining 50+ sites so everyone needs to have the same templates/CMS and your editorial objectives/concerns might not be a priority or worth adding complexity to the system).

Honestly I don't see how the publicly traded operations can be successful long term - they are serving too many masters, the product is suffering and diminishing returns are inevitable. Investigative journalism is magnitudes more expensive than the low hanging fruit, so when your objective is profit over mission and you're squeezing pennies, something's got to give. But it's not just profit-focused papers struggling. Those of us who have the luxury of some budgetary flexibility have, for the most part, been profit neutral or running at a deficit for upwards of ten years; we've maxed out our revenue (and it's declining) so our only option is to cut costs. We're so lean at this point that anything else we cut is to the detriment of our product (see: chum). I'm not sure the way forward but I think our best bet for a sustainable future is non-profit, or in some instances private ownership by benevolent patrons/ civic-minded companies.