Think of the time and cost of establishing a successful restaurant. Then picture yourself as a regular customer who goes to your favourite table, enjoys the meal, settles the bill and then spots on the way out a notice that if you'd eaten on the terrace everything would have been for free. The assumption must be that the restaurateur has gone mad.
Yet that was the analogy drawn by multimedia journalist students at Bournemouth University when setting out to analyse the reciprocity between national newspapers and their websites. Because they established that there is no such thing.
In their frenzy to embrace the digital age newspapers are heaping virtually the whole of their content on the web and vying with each other in the profusion of signposts directing readers where and why to click on their computers or switch on their mobile phones. Don't miss all of the goodies on offer. And everything is free!
The Times will often carry a front-page banner sell for timesonline.co.uk - boasting it's available for all to Watch, to Read and Listen to. And what of those old newspapers that you cannot watch or listen to but only read and have to pay for? What do they get from their websites in return? Other than an occasional backward glance, nothing.
In the bundle of sections that make up a Saturday edition of The Times, students found no fewer than 101 directions to timesonline. Other than a 19-word plug for a collection of Michael Palin giveaway DVDs, the website provided not a single exhortation for anyone to buy the paper.
Weekends are value-added days for nationals, providing something extra to pull in new customers. So The Daily Telegraph (39 references to the website) will top its front page with the offer of free tickets at 16 cinemas around the country. Cross-selling from the website: nil.
The Guardian (34 web references) devotes resources to producing a Six Nations pull-out. Since computers can hardly churn out a Berliner-sized pullout, the newspaper would appear to be offering sporting browsers a strong reason to buy a copy. And yet, promotional support from the website: nil.
Similarly, The Sun website enjoys 21 plugs from its print parent but chooses to ignore the day's special reason to buy: a 12-page motoring supplement. The Daily Mail newspaper (12 web cross-refs) majors on a CD of relaxing dolphin music but it won't sell a single extra copy for want of anyone deigning to compose a compulsive blurb on the web. The examples are endless.
Print proprietors justify the current obsession with their websites on the grounds that they are having to follow the surge of advertising to the web. The one kind of advertising which is not following suit is compelling house ads for the newspaper itself. All of which left the Bournemouth University study posing the question: why is there no such thing as cross-marketing from the web? Is self-promotion all that matters in the electronic medium?
Writing in The Observer recently, Peter Preston highlighted the contradiction of newspapers trying to fill two buckets at the same time - pouring millions into one to make their websites ever more attractive and then pouring more millions into the other providing DVDs and wall charts to mitigate the loss of their own sales to the net.
DVDs, CDs, wall charts and pull-out extras are products that cannot be delivered digitally. They are a positive reason for non-readers to go out and buy an actual newspaper and perhaps become regular customers. So in return for the priceless stream of content they get from the parent title why cannot web operatives display some enthusiasm for selling these promotions to the hundreds of thousands of browsers they claim to attract to their sites?
Three-quarters of the visitors to the Telegraph website do not currently buy the paper. They tend to be very desirably 15 years younger than all those ageing faithful readers. Shouldn't a major objective of websites be to achieve conversion?
"Afraid it never enters their heads," I'm told by a veteran of the Financial Times's commitment to total convergence. "The minute a journalist moves to the website he doesn't want to know about ink on dead trees. That belongs to the age of the steam engine and he's now in the world of the search engine."
Discussing the imaginary case of the profligate restaurateur, the students suggested that if his intention was to attract increased trade it would make more sense to serve simpler dishes and house wine for free on the terrace while highlighting the delights available to the paying customers inside.
Lord Northcliffe is alleged to have declared: "News grabs, features hold." So why, when the miracle of electronic transmission came along, did we not let the website grab the instant drama of breaking news, revel in the joys of interactivity, dazzle with video, bombard with audio? Which would have allowed print to hold back at least some of the features that might persuade people it's a good idea to buy an actual newspaper - comment, analysis, reflection, human interest and, above all, great writing to be read and enjoyed at leisure.
Did no one at the start of the revolution examine the difference in mindset between settling down with a newspaper and staring at a screen? Do restless, busy-busy web-users really switch on to absorb a profound leader or weighty profile? But that would have implied constructing a rationale in deciding which parts of the overall package best go where and thus complement each other. That has clearly never taken place.
"It's rather late for a rethink," said a reluctant convert to The Daily Telegraph's eager surrender to the digital universe. "If you have chosen to throw your contents to the wind it is going to be pretty impossible to try to get any of it back in the bottle."
Peter Jackson is a lecturer in multimedia journalism at Bournemouth University. He is a former editor of the Sunday Times magazine, the News of the World's magazine Sunday and TV Times
