The first newspaper to go on the Internet in Australia began its venture last week, and it should pose some thought for the major newspapers. The Employment Post is to become the first newspaper to go on to the Internet, according to the newspaper’s founder Kosta Nikas. The paper has already lodged its jobs section _ of about 350 jobs _ on the Net. It will go on every Tuesday and will include a selection of Commonwealth Employment Service jobs that the paper usually carries. Editorial matter will follow in the next few weeks. Access is http://www.world.net/emp-post/ That gives you the home page and you can click through from there or do text searches. The paper version will continue as usual.
Mr Nikas hopes the jobs advertised on the Net would not only be in the science and computing fields. He says Net users would pass on information to family members and friends not on the Net. The nascent service may be a sign of things to come, but at present there are not enough Net users to make it competitive with the major newspapers. There are perhaps as many as 500,000 Internet users in Australia _ about 3 per cent of the population. Many of these would get access through work. About 6 per cent of households have computers with modems in Australia. It is hard to tell how many of those are on Internet. On the other hand, the typical metro Saturday newspaper gets into perhaps two-thirds of households, and presumably all of households where there are serious job-seekers. The access costs for receivers are not really an issue because the cover price of newspapers and the cost of a phone call and connection time to the Net are both very modest. The real question is the cost to advertisers and the effectiveness of the advertisements.
While the Net’s reach is small, advertisers will remain with paper. However, as the Net gets bigger in the next decade or so it may be that advertisers will seek tandem electronic and paper advertisements for greater reach. Mainstream newspapers are going to have to watch the Net and other electronic delivery methods carefully to choose the right time to go in so that, on one hand, they are not left with an obsolete, uneconomic technology and on the other, they do not launch an enterprise too small to justify the start-up costs _ which admittedly will be much lower than a new print newspaper. The mainstream newspapers will seek to protect their rivers of gold (as their classified market as been called) which in turn underwrite the provision of editorial matter that makes newspapers so cheap and attractive to a mass market.
It may mean that it will require a change of thinking from being newspaper companies to information companies and may require tandem provision of information services: both advertising and editorial. At present newspaper companies have the jump in that they are expert at collecting and disseminating information. But competition is a powerful force and that jump can be lost if alternative delivery methods are not monitored.