In the past five years, the transition from print to digital has been accelerating. Old-school news magazines like Newsweek, and others, have given up the print ghost and have opted for digital only.

It’s enormously expensive to publish a print product. Of course, there are the printing and delivery costs. It’s particularly costly when you pay contributors—writers, editors and photographer—for the content they produce (some local publications and broadcast entities get away with unpaid volunteers to produce content. IMHO there’s a discernable decrease in quality in the product when you don’t compensate your content providers.)

Moreover, there are significant distribution expenses (delivery of our free edition locally and postage and mailing costs to deliver to our subscribers). Print is a very expensive proposition, but despite naysayers, there are a lot of readers who prefer print. It’s easier to navigate, much more pleasant to read, offers a much richer range of visual (albeit static) design options, and gives readers the feeling that they’re consuming something more meaningful.

Okay, so print comes at a substantial cost because it’s printed. But the content is another issue entirely.

Both of these pieces of a quality media puzzle—print and digital—have to be supported by some revenue. For all print publications, that means advertising.

To my knowledge, there’s only one local digital media that could potentially survive solely on digital advertising, and that’s Nola.com.

But keep in mind that in its affiliation with the Times-Picayune offers the addition of print advertising revenue and the fact that the TP and Nola.com staff are paid from the same pot. Nola.com would not exist if it hadn’t been started on the backs (and with the writing and photography) of TP staffers—many of whom were laid off when the paper transitioned to a non-daily newspaper.

Other local media—and national media—are struggling with the transition from print to digital. What is the tipping point for all media to go digital? At OffBeat, we’ve been involved with the web for almost 20 years, and while we know our print edition is our base content, our editors, writers and photographers work very hard to post interesting content to our web site and to social media every day to keep our readers informed and interested.

We’ve already partnered with a company called Magzter that allows you to subscribe digitally to OffBeat, so even if you don’t live here you can still get a taste of New Orleans every month in a “digital” magazine flip-book style. One thing we’re working on is a transition of a lot of our older editorial to the web, and in doing so, we’ll be creating an opportunity to entertain and educate possibly a whole new generation of readers on New Orleans and Louisiana music and culture. It’s interesting to look back at what an artist like Dr. John or George Porter, Jr. was doing 10 or 20 years ago, and to see how music like theirs has influenced people like Trombone Shorty or the Generations (we’ve started featuring a new type of “review”—called Rewind—in our reviews section that gives musicians the ability to consider an old recording, what was going on at the time, what they’d do differently, etc.).

We always welcome input from our current readers, but we‘re actively encouraging new readers to let us know what we could be doing better, so please let us know. OffBeat is never going to be the “headline news” of the music scene: we’re more an in-depth look at a cultural phenomenon. But we’d like to know how you feel about it.

For example, what’s your opinion on how we do our music club listings? Should we cut them out entirely in the print magazine? Or should we include the “express” version in print and continue to improve our digital product? If we remove print listings, would you still want to see the calendars of local music clubs so you could get plan your month based on calendars in one place? These are questions only you, our readers, can help us to answer.

 

Please, if you would, take our weekly poll to give us some ideas of what you, our readers, actually want.