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Thursday, May 24, 2007
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 Thursday, May 24, 2007
started 5/24/2007; 7:48:16 PM - last post 5/27/2007; 9:47:27 PM
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Doc Searls - Thursday, May 24, 2007 
5/24/2007; 7:48:16 PM (reads: 6398, responses: 8)
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Because paper is scarce. And so is time. 
| | Last I checked, the Star Trek Holodeck, despite a Wikipedia entry, is still fiction. No one is teleporting a newspaper to your home anytime soon. Unlike music which can be copied once and stolen a million times, newspapers live in the material world. Thankfully, as an author, it's the same for books. Even a 30-inch screen can't match the readability of what cheaply spits out of a printing press. I really believe that the copy protection mechanism for newspapers is their consumer interface, in the form of ink spurted on newsprint. |
| | Exact-a-mundo. Call me old-fashioned (or just old; you'd be right), but I hardly ever read a newspaper online. Or read online "content" like it was a newspaper. Getting news through a screen is like listening to Mozart on the phone. It ain't the same thing. Design matters. Form factor matters. Physicality matters. Paper is paper. Pixels aren't ink. |
| | Print is a huge advantage for newspapers. Always has been, always will be. (Unless, of course, the cost of dead trees becomes prohibitive, in which case lumber and other tree-dependent businesses are toast as well.) Friends in the newspaper business tell me the folks on Wall Street no longer like print. It's all gotta be online these days. To them it's all about "content" pumped through "pipes" like the one that's pouring text on your eyes right now. |
| | Advertisers don't entirely agree. They like the directness and inventory size of online advertising, but they still pay a premium for print. Just ask anybody wanting to start an online-only daily newspaper. Never mind if your readership is larger than the local print daily. You're not getting the same rates. |
| | Newspapers are scrambling to embrace the Web. Paid subscriptions, blogs, it's all a grand experiment on how to monetize their expensive news-gathering organization. But thanks to a form that's hard to duplicate, newspapers still have time. |
| | In the meantime, rather than just charge for content, I'd be licensing every type of newfangled software and Web service until I could come up with a tight community of interest around my newspaper, local or national. Don't just start the discussion, keep it. This means comments, reviews, personalized newsfeeds, social networks of like-minded readers, whatever. Give advertisers a little "link love" so they don't stray to generic search engines. Google, Microsoft and others dropped over $10 billion to buy online ad-delivery companies in the last few weeks alone. The value is there: Newspapers aren't in the printing business, they're in the ad business. |
| | They're also in the subscription and paid newsstand sales business (the old-fashioned ones, anyway). While the revenues from subscriptions might be small compared to advertising, the do drive up the rates advertisers pay. And they do increase the degree of loyalty and involvement by subscribers, which is also non-trivial. |
| | In addition to Andy's excellent suggestions, I'd add the ten I listed here in March (along with what Dave Winer added). The first of those was Stop giving away the news and charging for the olds. Sure, daily papers make advertising money by selling inventory on the free Web versions of the papers that subscribers pay for. But by doing that they're also dissing both those subscibers and their legacy franchise. Put more simply, they're competiting with themselves while cheapening their main product. |
| | So here's a challenge to the daily papers: stop giving away the franchise. Make daily editorial available online only for subscribers. Charge for the fresh stuff, online as well as off. |
| | But give away what's stale. Free the fishwrap. |
| | There is lots of advertising money to be gathered just by opening the archives, linking to them, showcasing them, letting Google's spiders index them, and watching as the AdSense ads start appearing on them and bringing in money from click-throughs. Most papers have enormous archives which, once exposed, will greatly raise their profiles on Google and other search engines. There's lots of good will to be had as well, from everybody who ever wants to know anything about a town or a city that only newspapers have kept up with, for decades. I can't think of a better way for a paper to expose vast legacy advantages than by opening its archives. |
| | I'll give the last word to Andy: Lots of painful restructuring is still ahead. But it's worth noting that Rupert Murdoch would bid to expand his newspaper empire. Perhaps he sees the same pipe-busting in the future of TV. |
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Sean Upton - Not giving away anything...
5/25/2007; 1:41:29 AM (reads: 1144, responses: 1)
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Hmm... giving away the franchise seems irrational until you look at the numbers. I just don't think that subscriber-only "fresh" editorial can scale in terms of numbers - you cannot sacrifice guaranteed CPMs (even at filler rates from national advertisers, ad networks or whatever) for page views. I've seen what this kind of mentality does within the internal politics of a newspaper, having worked on a subscriber premium product. The very existence of "premium" content puts the newspaper at war with their readers and themselves, making every determination of what goes free and what doesn't driven by politics and fear of losing subscribers, not by dollars. I think that premium content divides and conquers a newspaper needing to do everything it can to increase page views. Free, open archives are part of this, but any sort of walled garden seems to say, we are at "war with our readers" because they don't like our incumbent business. Smart newspapers will embrace all media, print and online, but online, they need to play like members of the community appropriate to the media they are delivering to. Online, if newspapers do not deliver archives for free, Google will largely do most of that for them (without need for permission); if newspapers do this to fresh local content, dozens of smaller community publishers online and in print will eat their lunch. The threat to newspapers is much less from Google and Yahoo, and more from disruptive innovations in local publishing from below (especially in metro markets).
Sean
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Ben Tremblay - Dead-tree reporting
5/25/2007; 3:18:09 AM (reads: 991, responses: 0)
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An author I respect on a radio show I respect (big radio fan here) put it this way: "My test is simple, can I drop it in the bathtub?"
But apart from the "newspaper and books as artifacts" argument (which I think is primordially correct) there's this ... which I think is under-valued: newspapers originate a huge proportion of news. That is, newspapers do reporting. If that don't count for much then we's in real trouble!
cheers
--bentrem
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Paul Ding - You're not seeing what's actually happening
5/25/2007; 5:01:56 AM (reads: 1269, responses: 0)
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About four years ago, I cancelled our local daily. I'm a former newspaper editor and publisher, and a newspaper junkie; at times, I've paid for - and read - subscriptions to as many as seven out-of-town dailies.
I'm still a news junkie. I follow newspaper or television websites in five cities I used to live near, and for a half-dozen hours daily, CNN or MSNTV is playing in the background. I found, though, that half the newspapers delivered were being put in the recycle bin, unopened.
When I leave the house, I often end up in a waiting room, or at a restaurant. I try to stop and buy a newspaper or two before that, so I can read while waiting for my food or my appointment. But I end up buying 7 newspapers per month, instead of 7 per day.
If you look at the circulation numbers, you'll find I'm not the only one who no longer finds newspapers essential. Think of it as the long tail: many of us are getting the news we're interested in, instead of the news a local publishing company thinks we ought to be interested in.
A half-hour news broadcast only gives you the words of one page of news - but since they can tell their stories with motion and sound, they don't need as many words. And if you take a look at the newspaper, most of it isn't news, anyway.
Advertisers love newspapers because they want to reach every home - but that's just an illusion. Some people only read the sports section. Others never read it. I love to read "Letters to the Editor", but many people never open to the editorial pages. Some people study the TV listings; others subscribe to favorite shows, and let TiVO record suggestions.
When an industry is in trouble, stronger companies buy up weaker ones, a process called "consolidation". Viewing Murdoch's activities as a positive sign is pretty silly. For every buyer, there's a seller. It isn't always true that for every seller, there's a buyer, though: Knight-Ridder had a terrible time trying to dump some of the newpapers they had, even at fire sale prices.
What do newspapers have, that other media does poorly? Legal ads, obits, engagement notices, high school sports. Within a couple of years, though, you're going to have local sites doing a good job with obits, engagements and weddings, and high school sports.
You're whistling in the dark, Doc. Radio siphoned off a lot of advertising revenue from newspapers, then television took more, and now the internet, and yet newspapers have been increasingly dependent on advertising. In the last 40 years, circulation has dropped from providing 25% of a newspaper's revenue, to less than 10%. What happens to the newspaper when the advertising dries up?
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phil shapiro - the first step is for newspaper to not be so clueless
5/25/2007; 7:56:30 AM (reads: 1276, responses: 0)
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Doc Searls - Re: Not giving away anything...
5/25/2007; 11:25:58 AM (reads: 1156, responses: 0)
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Maybe you're right.
So do you recommend that papers continue to charge a premium only for print, and make everything else free?
If so, I could live with that.
My main point in that post was that print continues to survive as an advantage, not a liability -- and that this advantage shouldn't be undermined.
I'm wondering... what is the evidence that papers (or magazines) are hurt or helped by exposing current print editorial on the Web? Time Magazine reveals all of it. So does the San Francisco Chronicle.
I'd like to see a long-term study of what exposed current and archival editorial (which I refuse to call "content") does both for the publications' bottom lines and for their reputations in general.
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Jim Bursch - Paper fetishists are dieing faster than they are being born
5/25/2007; 1:23:29 PM (reads: 1237, responses: 0)
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At 42, I sit on the cusp between baby boomers and the following generations (x, y, whatever). When I look in front of me, I see boomers who love their coffe and paper in the morning. When I look behind me, it's rare to see that behavior.
Personally, I have always hated the newspaper medium and loved newspaper journalism. I loved being a copy editor at the Ventura County Star, and online news editor at the L.A. Daily News. I hated working for such backward companies (although The Star wasn't as bad as the Daily News).
Ad-supported media is a third-party-payer system with all the attendant flaws and corruption. As people take control of media away from advertisers, matters will improve, but they will get worse for those who are dependent on the Madison Avenue teat.
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michael webster - Newspapers, Books and Advertising
5/27/2007; 7:27:22 PM (reads: 1111, responses: 1)
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1. Books are clearly a better technology than the e-book equivalent. But I am not sure whether this advantage adheres to newspapers.
2. The newspaper's advantage, online, is serve relevant advertising based on the reader's ip and "known" preference. I am always surprised and amused when the NY Times delivers up ads to me about Toronto -clearly not possible in the print edition.
3. The price for online newspapers should be based on, in part, a function of the reader's value as a consumer of the ads. I should get a life time subscription to the WSJ if I buy a BMW by clicking one of their ads. The initial barrier should be high, not constant, and decrease as my value of a consumer is known.
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Doc Searls - Re: Newspapers, Books and Advertising
5/27/2007; 9:47:27 PM (reads: 1136, responses: 0)
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I like building a system around my value as a customer. As long as all we do is fix advertising, we leave some far more essential problems unsolved.
Of course, by fixing advertising (that is, getting rid of its waste), we may finally kill off newspapers entirely.
Question: Will readers pay for good journalism after advertising won't?
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