Thanks to Simon Owens for pointing out the Bowling Green Daily News in Kentucky and its policy of web last. In an interview with MediaShift, the general manager of the Daily News, Mark Van Patten, explains why his paper chooses to use its website for breaking news only:

Right now, our readers aren’t particularly Internet savvy. Many still use dial-up for internet access. They generally only check their email a couple times a week. They don’t know much about what’s available online. They still depend heavily on the printed paper for their news

He continues:

But that’s not going to stay the case for long. When our readers discover the Internet, and the myriad websites that have local information, they will start migrating from print to online. If readers are going to trust a newspaper, it has to be first with news more often than any competitor. So if we are going to keep readers in an online world, they have to know that when an important story breaks, they can quickly find coverage on our website

Carry on reading and you’ll get the distinct impression that Mark wants to go web first. He talks about beating the local television station by hours. He talks about “owning the internet” in Bowling Green.

But it seems there’s a problem:

Our Managing Editor Mike Alexieff, has repeatedly said that he has only one concern about adopting a “web first” strategy: killing the print edition. “I don’t want to give our readers any more reasons to drop their subscription,” he said. “Our print edition pays the bills…our website only brings in 5% of our revenue and that is flat…what would happen to the newsroom if our print product goes away?”

Alexieff points out that there is no threat online that can compete with the Daily News. He sees no threat on the horizon because of the capital investment required to launch a site and get a staff in place. He cites the cost and lack of potential revenue as a reason to stick with print instead of adopting a “web first” strategy.

Mike - you may know your readers inside out. You may have a pile of market research in front of you which tells you that (hard as it is to believe), yes, your readers are only using the web a couple of times a week, that most of them haven’t migrated to broadband and that they aren’t particularly web savvy. You may truly believe that web first would kill the print edition.

But consider this - the cost to a rival, a group of bloggers or some other outfit to set a site up and get it running would be as close to zero as you could imagine. There may be no threat on the horizon right now, but how distant is that horizon? Imagine a rival publisher moving in with a guy on the ground, some citizen journalists being paid per click and some pretty smart open source software. How long do you think this would take? And how long would it be before your ”not particularly internet savvy” readers would migrate? How long would it take these guys to kill your print edition?

I’m sure the vista looks pretty good right now. But the guys in charge of the Bowling Green Daily News are killing their paper and journalism in their town as surely as if they took all their reporters outside and had them shot. It’s only a matter of time before somebody spots that several hundred thousand people are not being served by their local newspaper and does something about it.