"We're digital first!" No you're not

This is the most irritating bullshit slogan from today's newspaper world after the ever-ongoing "We're learning to do more with less."

The New York Times may be "digital first." But you, small newspaper chain owners of some five-day and six-day dailies, are not.

You're not digital first if you don't have a separate subscription plan for online only readers, rather than a single forced buy combo of print and Net.

You're not digital first if you cut the AP wire to save money, but then invoke that "more with less" BS by refusing to cut pages even with the Trump paper tariffs.

You're not digital first if most of your online advertising is nothing other than your print section classifieds.

You're not digital first if you haven't done the paperwork to figure out if you're close to digital first on revenue vs overhead.

You're not digital first if you're part of a chain and you don't train your ad salespeople on selling digital ads.

You're not digital first if your graphics person(s) at a daily paper have no real experience or training in building quality digital ads.

You're not digital first just because you post a podcast and video on your website, if you're not getting anybody to sponsor that.

You're not digital first if you see being online as a way to fill print gaps.

Saying "we're digital first" as a self-hypnotic mantra doesn't make it so.

To be successfully digital first takes thought and strategy.

Beyond the advertising and circulation side I mentioned, that includes issues of whether you want to post every story online first, at least in full story format. Even with word-count delimited paywalls, if I can read a header and 50 words of text, that might be enough for me to not need to read more.