• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, November 13, 2006

The California First Amendment Coalition has a plan to save newspapers from the perceived threat of Google, Yahoo and other portals. Newspapers should withhold their content from all but paying subscribers for at least 24 hours, proposes Peter Scheer, a lawyer, journalist and executive director of the nonprofit.

"A temporary embargo, by depriving the Internet of free, trustworthy news in real-time, would, I believe, quickly establish the true value of that information. Imagine the major Web portals--Yahoo, Google, AOL and MSN--with nothing to offer in the category of news except out of date articles from 'mainstream' media and blogosphere musings on yesterday's news. Digital fish wrap," he wrote in a column in Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle.

Scheer's argument stems from his belief that newspapers will never be able to garner enough ad revenue to support their operations. "Even the most popular newspaper Web sites are unable to sell advertising equal to more than 9 percent or 10 percent of their print-edition revenue; and this after years of investment online. It's not that newspapers can't sell advertising on the Internet; it's that ads must be sold on a scale that is vastly higher--think Yahoo or YouTube--than the levels newspapers can ever hope to achieve," he argued.

But, while Scheer declares that newspapers won't be able to scale their online ad sales, he offers no evidence to support this assertion. Yes, newspapers have invested in the Internet for years, but the recession and dot-com crash of the early part of the decade temporarily derailed efforts to increase online ad sales.

Still, who's to say that newspapers won't, in the future, be able to significantly boost online ad sales. And if newspapers need scale, distribution deals with the portals offer a powerful opportunity in that regard.

Scheer might view portals as the enemy of newspapers--and to some extent, the portals do compete with online newspapers for marketing dollars--but even rivals can form alliances that benefit both. Meantime, any plan that relies on embargoing free content seems more likely to hurt newspapers' growth than help.

It's that time of year again! You're invited to enter OMMA magazine's Agency of the Year awards for 2006. Click: https://www.mediapost.com/aoysub/ to submit your entry. Thank you.