From The Crossroads, a new-media weblog based in my home market of Kansas City, has smart observations about the Kansas City Star’s new PDF subscription offer.

Travis has a lot to say, but his main point (greatly paraphrased) boils down to: PDF? WTF?

The one point I’d quibble with is this assertion:

… Any readership stats from the digital delivery is just a guess… What would really help them determine how well their stories are doing is to determine how many of those 6,000+ readers actually wanted to read the whole story. I guess big newspapers don’t care about pesky things like conversion stats.

Oh, they care … but they care more about advertising revenue — revenue that comes through content bundling. Read on…

Newspapers are in the same pickle record companies now face: A relatively small amount of the overall content drives sales, that content is going to vary from customer to customer and yet the vast majority of all customers will not pay a high premium for pre-filtered content in their areas of interest.

The result? The highest and best value capture for content companies comes from bundling. That it works very well for content companies stands to reason. But it also works well for journalists, though many might not realize it

Journalists are hard-pressed to give up their mantle of objectivity and independence — something many would say the Fourth Estate overvalues compared to the marketplace. Selling electronic newspaper subscriptions in the form of a highly customized RSS feed or similar content would give editors, advertisers and newspaper management an incredibly granular, real-time view of what readers did (and didn’t!) care about. Media Web sites do this now, but few are the primary source for local news — perhaps the last franchise that the venerable daily or weekly newspaper can lay claim to.

About 10 seconds after that granular, real-time data was available, you’d see market pressure to turn newspapers into something a lot more like magazines. You’d see journalists whine, um, protest that the duty of a newspaper was to report the news whether the reader base felt that news was worthwhile or not. And you’d see advertisers start to laugh at rate cards once they got over the shock of how much they’d overpaid throughout the years.

Marginal Revolutions, my favorite economics weblog, has a thoughtful post on why the micropayment model is destined to fail, and it touches upon an issue at the core of newspapers and customized electronic delivery:

Because information is hard to value in advance, for-fee content will almost invariably be sold on a subscription basis, rather than per piece, (emphasis mine — GB) to smooth out the variability in value. Individual bits of content that are even moderately close in quality to what is available free, but wrapped in the mental transaction costs of micropayments, are doomed to be both obscure and unprofitable.

So, will the Kansas City Star see a lot of success with their PDF offering? I doubt it. But from the corner office, it probably seems like doing something. These days, doing something — even if it’s not the smartest or most market-aware thing — is what passes for innovation among the biggest content conglomerates.

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