Slashdot Mirror
Online Newspapers Turning a Profit
PCOL writes "The Asia Times reports that after years of losing money, online newspapers are starting to pay off. The New York Times has gone from losing $7.5M on their site in 2001 to an $8M profit in 2002. The new profitability is attributed to changes in the technology for delivering ads which make it possible to embed advertising in news stories and tie the ads to articles related to reader's interests without resorting to pop-ups and banners. As print newspaper readers age and die, no new readers are replacing them and one survey found that 46 percent of all journalists believe that within 15 years their publication will only be available online."
It's related to me not knowing how to block quicktime flash ads in mozilla more like.
Who are y oo ?
so is the asia times making a profit by having us read this story?
It makes sense that the most profitible orgainizations on the Internet are the ones that are serving the purpose for which it was created (information dissemination).
I would still like to see a buisiness model for the Net that is something other than the "Give stuff away for free but pop-up ads" model.
I think that once Micro-Payments roll around to being feasible, it will be alot easier for companies to get paid for what they do without having to crowd up the Internet with those fsking ads all over the place.
Flash delivered and java flashed out. I hate registering for everything. The spam mail keeps increasing everytime I give out the email address.
next thing you'll tell me is that /. is actually making money.
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
It seems to me as the main advantage of newspapers printed on papers is that it is much more comfortable to look at than a computer screen. It is also more comfortable to read in a favourite chair.
I can't imagine that large portions of the population will be willing to give these comforts up for less than a buck a day.
Of course, one day ultra-light laptops with revolutionary, easy-on-the-eyes screens may be commonplace; but until then I would not count out the printing press.
Tor
It'll be a shame if print newspapers die out.
I'll admit that I'm speaking a bit from nostalgia here, as I do enjoy sitting down with something physical in front of me. I also tend to think of the papers as having more substance, somehow, than their online counterparts-- as if seeing all the pages in front of me will give me a fuller story than clicking link-to-link.
But the real reason I see the death of print media as a shame is the historical record the papers provide. Any library can archive their old papers for reference for all. Electronic media, as we're all aware, is subject to technology shifts, media that decays considerably faster than paper, and so on. It takes a fire, or years of neglect, to do the same to the physical object. A mistaken click of a button in a database somewhere could lose years of information, and what then?
inquiring minds want to know.
The New York Times has even figured out a way around the Mozilla popup blocker.
keep dreaming if you think ads are going away if you pay for something.
And, as we all know, the television and print news are scripted (at least insofar as they only tell what they have space/time to tell). The Internet, on the other hand, has virtually infinite potential. Concentrating specifically on news, you can find news regarding just about anything online that you can't find in print or on television.
Finally, the absolute best way to find news on any topic: go to Google News and search for a topic in the same way you would typically use the standard Google search engine. The news search scans Internet newspapers from all over the world and delivers instant links to ANY reports containing the search words. Default sorts by relevance, but I prefer to sort by date for the most recent articles first...
I LOVE MY GOOGLE. And for those who were not aware of the wonderfulness of their news site, I hope you love it too. :-)
I'm 23 years old and I hardly ever read the paper. I get all my news online (not just from Slashdot :) and occasionally from television. A lot of the older people I know still read newspapers, but even my boss at work gets a lot of news online.
I have a question though - how do traditional newspapers make money? Is it mostly ad revenue or is it from actual sales? Whats the split? Why did it take so long for web news to catch up?
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
Oh, really? I often print off articles, and when I click on the "printer friendly format" button, which is supposed to take the page to text-only, still left banners and other advertizing on the screen.
Well, I guess you can't go against advertizing without going against Capitalism, and if you do that now, in a time of just-war, you get yourself flogged and beaten by men in white hoods...
Learn lisp today!
Online papers are great, and are my primary source for news(I quit TV a year and a half ago), but an online paper is not quite a substitute good for a real world paper. They are still easier on the eyes, than computer screens, they can be picked up in any convenience store, you can't roll up a computer and threaten stray dogs with it, etc. I'm sure readers can think of many more ways that online newspapers and physical media have their own advantages and disadbantages. They are to disimilar for some %46 of real papers to be eliminated.
Somebody better audit these guys. There is no way extending something you are doing in print to a website should cost 7.5 mil a year let alone have a loss of that size after figuring in advertising. The one time cost of setting up this system should not have even cost that much.
If the newspapers are only available online, it will be extremely easy to distribute the information without any sort of paid subscription. Case in point, the numerous posters who mirror / inform on how to circumvent the New York Times' registration. This is why DRM is going to be wide-spread: people want to do things online that they currently do in the real world. This requires real world limitations. DRM provides this.
no that would be arpanet. i believe the subject at hand was the internet. you're only a few decades late.
...since these days the internet is almost exclusively my source for news. I gave up subscribing to dead-tree newspapers years ago. I'd just wind up grabbing them off of the porch on the way out the door, tossing them in the car on the way to work, and having them accumulate until I got around to throwing them out. Just don't have the time to sit down and read 'em.
./, which collect items of interest to a specific audience from all over the world. Things I'd probably never see otherwise.
The great thing about getting news off the 'net is that you aren't constrained to the news your local publishers feel is relevant. Interestingly, I find that some of the most relevant news about the U.S. is published in foriegn papers, and ignored domesticly.
Ten years ago, my chances of ever seeing an article that originated in the Asia Times were pretty much zero.
And then, of course, you have sites like
I can't even imagine having to go back to being limited to what was published on paper. I'm glad publishers have developed a model that will make that unnecessary.
I've recently subscribed to Boston globe for delivery to my house. I basically have to stare at computer screen all day long as it is my job...even with Herman Miller Aeron chair, ergonomic keyboard, and trackball mouse, my body aches at the end of the day. So now, I try to do stuff OFFLINE if I can, evenif it costs me abit more money.
Plus, how am I ever going to read the Sporting news when I'm taking a dump???
Porn, I can see it now "Cum Inside to See the Sizzling Action in Iraq (Flash picture of Bush sucking finger)"
/etc/hosts
Buh-bye ads!
I have a hard time believing that the internet is the sole reason for declining readership. Other reasons may include the ever lower quality of the reporting, ie. the increasing coverage of the entertainment industry and the decreasing coverage of old fashioned "hard news" and investigative reporting. Diminishing faith in the objectivity of the coverage could be a reason also.
Although the internet is obviously partially to blame, I think most of the newspaper industries problems are self inflicted.
The problem with google news is twofold (not really their fault). One most newspapers move around/lock up their stories. Two most newspapers are moving to a subscription model even for current news (the shuttle accident for example).
The NY Times uses a system (unique, I belive) designed to match appropraite ad content to any story. The system is called "N.Y.T.E.S.," (according to a buddy who does IT there) Basically, each ad has positive keywords, and negative keywords attached to it. Each story has keywords attached as well. The system selects randomly from ads which have a high corelation between their positive keywords, and no negative keyword matches. This makes it so an ad for Delta, for example, would appear next to a travela rticle but not if the artle were about plane crashes. Publishers are givin 20 free negative keywords, and then they pay for each positive keyword - fractions of a penny per impression etc
Anyway, I still prefer google's ads.
Sheesh, I can copy-paste the whole thing without problems (something people often do when a site is getting slashdotted anyway). Their biggest problem are all the sites providing essentially the same news. With the group bookmark, I open the biggest 3 newspapers in my country + one online newspaper + one regional newspaper. Usually, they have basicly the same stories.
DRM works much better when you are providing exclusive content. Is artist X only availible through DRM-crippled service Y? Well, since I'm a great fan of X, I'll consider it. But if I want to read about the latest happenings in Palestine or Iraq, and you wrap that in DRM, forget it. Then I go somewhere else. The newspapers simply don't have a monopoly on news, even if they may have a few "Exclusive stories".
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
One problem I have with obtaining all of my news online is that editorial changes to the article can be made after publication without being noted.
This means that facts and 'controversial' ideas can be edited, modified and even deleted without notifying the public. I have several friends who insist on copying the articles they read directly to their hard drive because they have experience with articles 'disappearing' or changing without being noted.
Posting online allows news sources to get the news out much faster than was ever possible in the past. It seems to me, however, that it also requires a much more stringent approach to journalistic 'integrity'. In the neverending fight for readers and stories, papers can publish articles containing misinformation simply to get the story out first and then change the content later to reflect a more accurate portrayal of events.
If the only source of news is the web, how is the public supposed to know that things were ever changed? Human memory is questionable at best. Think 1984 (i know i know i know) for a second and consider Winston's job of rewriting news and, therefore, history.
Oops- forgot to remove my tinfoil hat...
That's ok, Jesus likes me anyway.
--have read several NYT articles today, zero popups. moz 1.3b on linux, no images or scripting turned on, and I even have "allow popups" turned on! So where are you seeing popups? Maybe it's because I am only going in through google news?
Here is an example. Consider "Poll: Hong Kong residents optimistic". I have been able to refer this article to several friends and acquaintances over the course of several years. Unlike an article from an old newspaper, the online article will not be lost or will not disappear with time. The article is shocking and dispels many of the myths about Chinese society. Before reading the article, most Americans believed that the Chinese are like, well, Americans. After reading the article, most Americans believe otherwise. The majority of Chinese in Hong Kong (to the shock of many Americans reading the article) actually cheered the Chinese government and supported the unification of Hong Kong and mainland China.
Anyhow, by ensuring that we all have an accurate picture of the world, as citizens of Western society, we can better ensure that Western governments enact legislation that best deals with other nations and peoples. Better immigration policy would be one result of the new online news.
The only reason we subscribe to the local paper is because I like to read the comics. If I could subscribe to a delivered paper that was nothing but comics (two or three times as many strips as the local paper prints, also printed larger) I'd pay as much as I do right now for the entire paper.
Unfortunately, nothing like that exists that I know of. Are there any online services that I can join which provide tons of (current) syndicated comics for a low fee?
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
How the hell am I supposed to read it in the john?
.
I know, I know, show me pictures of the iHole ( *iRoll* (read: eye-roll) ). Until I have a connected bathroom this paper is not going anywhere!
And I could read this too, ooo, fun fun.
And people will stop taking shits? or will there be kiosk commodes?
Let's face it, the pulp newspaper survives because of its laxitive effect on men!
I remember reading about a study a few years ago that found that participants reading computer monitors retained less information than people reading print outs. As in: the computer readers remembered fewer details about what they read after a few hours than paper readers. Has anyone else seen or heard this? Anyone know where I could find out more? Seems like an important thing to me.
I just posted a reply to the TiVo thread about how in the world did NYT figure out how to get around Mozilla's anti-popup settings. NYT is definitely using popups, and they are getting quite militant about it. Looks like "same 'ol, same 'ol" to me.
Second, I'd like to comment on the fact that the news media made the transition to the Internet without too much difficulty. They're now distributing online, without any form of copy protection, what used to be sold as a physical product. Perhaps as notable, the major comic syndicates have done likewise (although as I understand it, artists are not yet being compensated for people who read syndicated comics online). There are a lot of kinks left to iron out, but it looks like this is going to work, and that most of these companies that could have been wiped out by online competition will survive, even flourish, in an online environment. Perhaps the RIAA and MPAA members ought to look to the newspapers for ideas?
Finally, just one note I find amusing: sci-fi authors have been predicting some form of electronic news reader that gets continious or periodic updates for quite some time. I believe such a device was featured in 2001. Nice to see that some predictions do actually come true :)
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
Well, its hardly their fault if there's no demand for an intelligent, free-thinking news outlet in the US.
I'm using Mozilla 1.3 in both Linux and XP with the popup blocker turned on and the scripts and plugins options set to don't allow apps to raise windows.
Mozilla does stop most of the popups in the New York Times by the way but definitely not all of them. For other sites it does appear to work 100 percent of the time.
I see the popups when going in the first time through my bookmarks or typing www.nytimes.com in the url area. Sometimes it happens when it hit the "New York Times" text in the upper left hand corner to get back to the home page. I just tested it in a tab window while entering this response and it happened again. It was the Orbitz add that they always run. I don't recall seeing any add except for Orbitz doing this.
Newspapers might as well die (so long as TV news dies as well). American journalism is dead anyway. Not only are most major cities losing out to a single paper, but papers are mostly just official news (news taken from official press releases). There is indeed little to no investigative reporting done anymore, and this is sad.
Social Contract? I don't remember signing any Social Contract!
For myself I would like to get news on my palm compatable. Could be done through the hotsync line, then you could read at your leasure. But most desireable would be a wirless connection to a server, you could get instant updates, from one of the news services like reuters.
Many a long talk since then I have had with the man in the moon; he had my confidence on the voyage. Joshua Slocum
Intelligent and free thinking? One of their high level employees (you look it up) said just last week that they hoped the war would last longer, and didn't mine more US deaths because a Bush victory in 2004 would be a "moral negative", or something to that effect. Free thinking and intelligent... That's the defense liberals use for every criticism, and it's almost always bullshit. Come up with something new.
Just fucking uninstall that bloated closed source flash peice of donkeyshit and walla problem solved.
I'll believe that when I see it in print...
-- I care not for your foolish signatures.
If I did that I couldn't view zombo.com. Which would be a pity.
Who are y oo ?
This sounds a bit pesimistic to me. The cost cuts that could be made by going digital seem incredible. Competition will likely drive all but the biggest papers into the digital realm. 15 years seems a bit long though. The major obstacle will be portability, but with the cell phone explosion and the implementation of efficient hi-res full color screens and better batteries, this will no longer be an issue.
On a similar note, if bandwidth can ever outgrow demand, the papers will all be buying video cameras and we'll be seeing a blur between newspaper and news channel. In fact, it might not be a bad idea to buy stock in the newspaper companies now. They'll have the upper hand when it comes to delivering you news when they are more like TVmedia. Currently TV media relies on newspapers for finding the stories for them to report on. They could be high and dry when the newspapers are releasing the footage they would normally have grabbed.
ôó
for those that don't want to bother registering to read the article.
"Smoking helps you lose weight - one lung at a time" -- A. E. Neumann
best golfer is black
best rapper is white
and online newspapers are turning a profit
we live in a crazy fucked up world.
When I first read this I thought "Wow, 46 percent of newspapers are going to die?" But there's a very important misrepresentation here. The article does not say "46 percent of all journalists" believe their publications will turn web-only. It actually refers to "46 percent of all trade title journalists." That's much less shocking.
Personally, I'm glad to see the rise of online news. I want to get to the 10-25% of all news that really interests me. That's much easier online than with a physical newspaper. Although television news is the worst of all; you have to wait through everything you're not interested in due to the inherently linear format.
"TV is great! Every New Year's I make a resolution to watch more TV." - Ann Coulter
Here's one service I'm sure other /.'ers can point you to others advantgo
>
The DoD funded the Arpanet because big honking computers were expensive. It just wasn't worth the money to buy one for your group when another group a few hundred miles away already had a computer that would do the job. All that needed to happen was to hook them up.
Defense had nothing to do with it. "Surviving a nuclear attack" had nothing to do with it. Getting the most computer power from a limited and geographically-widespread number of computers had everything to do with it.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Consider what life was like 15 years ago.
Hmm, let's see. Back then I had an Apple IIsomething. It never gave me problems. Back then, a computer was like a lamp... you just turned it on and it worked, then when finished you turned it off. If you wanted news you turned on CNN, which hadn't started showing a lot of "big media" symptoms yet.
If you wanted an answer to a question you just called the library.
I traded tapes and floppies with my friends, and was blisfully free of the DMCA as I learned about and cracked the various "copy protection" schemes.
"Computer security" meant you had a server with a lock on it. Nothing smaller than a briefcase could be used to track your whereabouts. Calling a company meant you got to talk to a person who actually worked at that company.
Terrorism in the US meant people with beards hijacking airplanes and asking them to be put down someplace other than their intended destination. The constitution meant something and a decent man was president ("government IS the problem").
America was still shaking off fears of communism but was optimistic about the future. My parents weren't making a lot of money but we managed. Things we didn't like about the world were mercifully hidden from view. Sure, people couldn't communicate as easily, but hate-filled groups couldn't get in touch very easy either.
Yeah, that really sucked... but hey, today I can look up stuff on Google really fast.
46 percent of all journalists believe that within 15 years their publication will only be available online.
In that case, I hope the newspapers themselves are diligently archiving their electronic editions, hopefully in forms that would make an Orwellian rewriting of history impossible.
The coolest voice ever.
I never installed flash on this machine. I don't miss what I didn't use. I figured I could never trust sites that insist on using it for ads.
It's very annoying to visit a site, and get prompted to install it. But it's more annoying to have to see it.
I started being like this when my cable internet provider insisted on sending me huge graphic emailed newsletters that required me to visit their huge ugly flash-enabled web site in order to turn off receiving their unsolicited crap. This was on my old 120 mhz machine, which may explain why I won't tolerate it even on my current machine.
Some of those damn marketers need a few severe beatings.
Not bad in my book if you want to make sure that copies of your stuff are drifting around in the world for posterity.
It probably wouldn't work for sites that allow unmoderated reader comments/submissions since there's no real way to predict database growth. Still, for any text site, 700 MB is a hell of a lot of space to work with.
Laws are for people with no friends.
If someone would make a Mozilla addon that even has only the first feature (button which saves the current webpage to an archive) that would be a great step.
Of course another tool you could have is something which would make a hash of all the webpage's content, and tell you if it has changed since the last time you loaded it.
you should have replied with your logged in name.
i would have loved to bestow karma on you for your post.
we are victims of ourselves.
However, bear in mind that not all news are kept that easily. Only if they are archived would they be kept indefinately. I know quite a lot of Asian sites that keep the news only until 30 days before they are deleted. And that's for members.
"Anyhow, by ensuring that we all have an accurate picture of the world, as citizens of Western society, we can better ensure that Western governments enact legislation that best deals with other nations and peoples. Better immigration policy would be one result of the new online news. "
While I would agree with this statement I think YOU are too naive. How do we know whether the news that is published online (or even on paper or radio) is accurate? They could be propoganda for all we know.
Furthermore, the Internet is not really known as a source of accuracy. Sure, sites with brick and mortar establishments like CNN and BBC would have SOME degree of respectablity, but what of the others?
In my experience (I'm NOT an American by the way), better immigration policy will only come about if there is pressure from the media who put it on the agenda of things PEOPLE need to think ABOUT.
Think about that.
1 + 1 = 3?
Actually, televised news has historically been the biggest scapegoat for declining newspaper readership. Given that TV is even worse than the newspaper for "human interest" stories, I think it's fairly likely that the Internet is just the final nail in the coffin. Big stacks of paper simply aren't an efficient means of distributing news anymore.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
They don't use javascript to raise this popup window. They use an image loading facility which mozilla apparently doesn't check for.
g if" onLoad="window.open('http://ad.doubleclick.net/adi /N2870.ny/B961809;sz=720x300;ord=2003.04.21.01.58. 39','MyWindow','toolbar=no,directories=no,status=y es,menubar=no,scrollbars=yes,resizable=yes,width=7 20,height=300, top=0');window.focus();" BORDER=0"
The code is as follows:
img src="http://graphics7.nytimes.com/ads/usga/blank.
Blocking doubleclick didn't stop it but produced a blank popup window. I was able to copy the page source listing and verify that removing this clause stopped the popup window.
Anybody have any ideas on how to turn this off with a mozilla macro ? I should email the mozilla team and see if they're aware of this.
I'm not against advertising by the way, just obnoxious stuff like unrequested popups.
On the internet, no one knows your a monkey. Even if you are the Millionth.
More than mere navel gazing.
I noticed this at work where I used mozilla all the time. So, I just installed Opera. Never once had a pop up come with Opera 6 or 7. Sometimes I prefer Mozilla because over all it IS more stable, even if it is slow... But this made me switch.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
...CNN has begun work on obits for New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe...
When will Slashdot have text ads available? I would buy one or two. This would be a great way for Slashdot to become profitable.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
I forget the name of the program but it serves ASP pages and compiles everything to an EXE.
Does it come with Wine?
No, seriously, this isn't a troll.
With a newspaper, all I need to read the content is my eyeballs (OK, I also need glasses, but that's a personal problem). With your ASP system, you need a computer, a media reader for the storage media, you apparently need Windows (gotta love those nice, proprietary systems), electricity...did I mention the proprietary system?
This is a real problem for a legitimate news site. Sure, a personal web site, or a niche magazine, or the like, isn't that critical, but a general news site should should be available to the masses. And for posterity...how many forty year old computer systems do you see in common use? Forty years is nothing in terms of "posterity." I was looking at some old pictures of my family, many of which dated back over a hundred years. Will your system be viewable in a century? Will people even know how to extract the data, let alone display it, in that time?
Bottom line is, ain't nobody improved on a good old pair of eyes for long-term data archival.
Moderate drunk! It's more fun that way!
"Anyhow, by ensuring that we all have an accurate picture of the world, as citizens of Western society, we can better ensure that Western governments enact legislation that best deals with other nations and peoples." --Really now, the Second Gulf War was the most reported war ever reported on the internet and the citizens of the Western nations couldn't be more divided over this event. Clearly an accurate picture of the world which is delivered by money making internet news services does not insure everyone sees the same 'accurately reported' events the same way. The way that we are all dealing with each other is with unofficial boycotts and invectives. A better way that what? The 'Better immigration' policy you speak of is just silly. Whose immigration policy? What country? Japan has a policy where basically you can't immigrate to their country- and if you are there it takes generations to become a citizen-like maybe your children might be able to be japanese citizens someday. The United States has quotas for various groups for various regions of the world and pourous borders. Personally I think a better immigration policy would be no immigration. Is that the 'better immigration policy' you were thinking about?
Enjoy your Karma, after all you earned it. Feel your Karma Joe, feel it burn.
As memory gets cheaper and cheaper, and as spiders get better and more intrusive, that's also changing as well. For instance, I still have a seven-year old version of my resume still floating around on the Way Back Machine. Don't ask me why it's there, I don't know. It was recorded through my personal web page and at the time, it didn't even seem like people were reading my web page.
These days, some robots are even caching content purposefully labeled not to be spidered. Some others are recording content dynamically generated. And some others still are recording privately intented content (emails and password protected web pages).
So for all we know, the content you speak of could still be floating around somewhere.
Since ASP can be executed with Apache, the implicit complaint of "Windows" web pages is misplaced.
That said, you are completely correct. Posterity is a bit of a joke. Considering the relative staying power of jpeg and text, I believe that my particular system and many others will be viewable over time.
Text hasn't changed in a long, long, long time. Has it changed at all? The key here is server side execution. When was the last time that TCP/IP changed? When will it change? Seems pretty durable so far.
As I mentioned in the beginning, ASP can execute on a Linux server as well as a Windows server. Microsoft can die and the only way any particular online magazine would die is from administrator incompetence or simply moving on.
What is worth keeping will be kept.
Laws are for people with no friends.
They don't use banners, or use pop ups... Maybe they 'embed' ads the way eFront did.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
how you can lose 7.5 million dollars on a web site.. I thought 5 dollars a month for hosting was bad.. but I find it hard to even grasp the concept of a 7.5 million dollar web site.
--
|-_-| . o O ( bEef!)
He found a Mozilla bug.
atleast he's not french! whatever!
I just saw some sad news on CNN - popular childrens' figure Easter Bunny was found dead on a Georgia road this evening. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
You can't read an online paper on the 'Throne'.
(unless you take your WiFi-enabled device into the John with you.)
Having worked for a newspaper for 18 years, I have heard the 15 year time line for 17 of those years. What people don't understand is the basic economics of the situation. Newspapers cost alot of money to produce - most of it has nothing to with gathering the news. Lionshare of the cost is personel and then delivery and consumables - newsprint. It also takes alot of capital to produce what is a persishible product. All this investment yields product that is cheap to the end user - provided there are alot of end users.
Moving to internet takes the major costs of production from the newspaper and places it on the consumer - must have computer and internet connection.
Until we reach the day of disposal computers, newspapers will continue to exist in print.
As John Prine wrote:
We are living in the future
I'll tell you how I know
I read it in the paper
Fifteen years ago
We're all driving rocket ships
And talking with our minds
And wearing turquoise jewelry
And standing in soup lines
We are standing in soup lines
Sure, there might be three big news web sites in 15 years. But do you really think Joe's Barber shop will advertise on them? Fastest growing newspapers are the weeklies that are ultra-local newspapers. They deliever the right audience to the adverstiser.
I find it hard to imagine how it is possible to segregate the online and offline channels, and talk about onine-only performance. The players that have failed have separated their offline and online businesses (they are the ones that have entered the WEb half -heartedly). There are two reasons why they cant be separated: 1. Everyone in the business will tell you that the key driver for a succesful online newspaper is managing editorial workflow and integrating closely with your regular print job. This means sharing budgets between departments. 2. The customer needs to experience consistent communication between the web version and the print version. That can't happen if the two channels are managed by different divisions!
I think, perhaps obviously, the term online and print will become synomymous. When an 'online' piece is just as accesssible in a mobile piece of equipment, and information/text is universally formattable on that device, then you'll easiliy move from large text being in digital print form the same as a simple, small online text article.
There were fears of anthrax in the mail, so the Internet saw more use for paying bills and such. Sort of like having your computer be your food taster-- not nearly as big a deal if it catches a virus instead of you.
You bring up an important point.
The Internet is also a great way to spread bad or biased information.
How do you know CNN is to be trusted? That the conclusions from the poll are corrected?
Personally I don't trust CNN's content. They very often don't have a clue about what they're talking about, and often push an agenda outright.
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
With always on broadband, people check their favorite content sites 50 times a day, instead of just once or twice a day. I am sure that this will increase, once the profliferation of small wifi enabled devices becomes more common... pda's, telephones.
It's strange, but, the ease with which information is made available to us makes a huge difference. If accessing the content is effortless, then I am far more inclined to make use of it, than if it requires clunking around with a slow and clunky mobile phone browser.
Targeted adwords are a very elegant solution. In the way that they are supplied by google, I actually find them quite helpful. I do click these ads quite frequently, and have made purchases as a result.
I work for a newspaper (actually, two, since it's a JOA) and as I watch the presses whir in the next room over, it's easy to see just what a behemoth the entire newspaper printing industry is. I see firsthand how much newsprint is used in a matter of a few hours, and it's staggering. When you think about how many newspapers there are in this country, it's amazing that there's enough trees to supply all of them and still leave a few forests standing. The press outside the door is over three stories high and one hundred fifty feet long. Some operations have many multiples of presses like this. It requires constant maintanence and repair to keep running and printing a million or two pages an hour. All of this costs money. A LOT of money. You would think that newspapers would be eager to chuck all of this, go online, and save millions per year.
But it's not quite that easy. First, the majority of revenues for a newspaper are by far from advertising. More than half the available space in the paper is for ads. And these ads are not cheap, especially when you see color or full page ads. And, like it or not, ads do drive a significant portion of readership. If you're looking to buy a car, or maybe a house, the odds are you've been looking in the paper. You can't read ads as fast online as you can when you've got a whole page of classifieds in front of you. How many newspapers did you pick up when you were looking for your last job? There are more and more job opportunities online, and many companies aggressively recruit online, but a classified "help wanted" ad is extremely effective. Place one and see the applications and resumes flow in. Another point about ads driving readership - grocery ads, coupons, ads for your local electronics store, the weekly Target ad... these all often lead people to buy a paper. It's why the Sunday paper has the largest circulation.
Next, there's the whole easy portability thing. The majority of people don't have a laptop or PDA with them when they're out somewhere, and most of those that do don't have internet access readily available. A newspaper, on the other hand, is easy to take anywhere. Buy it and go. When you're done, you can leave it for the next reader if you want. Or maybe you are the next reader. On the not-too-distant horizon is electronic ink, and that has a greater potential to replace printed newspapers than the web does, for many of the same reasons mentioned here. Although I don't think too many people will be eager to clip the coupons from their e-ink paper. Might get messy.
And last, while the web has made it easier to find news, there is still the cultural mindset that goes with the newspaper. See a story you like, or a photo? Cut it out and stick it on the fridge. Historical front page? Doesn't have the same oomph when you save a web page as it does when you save a paper with a huge headline. We were cleaning Grandma's house after she died a couple of years ago, and came across a copy of the local paper from when Kennedy was assassinated.
Web papers are here to stay, and they're gonna do nothing but grow. Just don't count out print media yet.
I use Opera almost exclusively and read the New York Times online every day. When I read this series of posts I was thinking Popups?... the New York Times has Popups!?
I've used both Mozilla and Opera. And while both browsers block most of the popups and popunders, I've found that the best way to rid my self of page trash is to use a Proxy Blocker.
I favor Proxomitron, a W32 "Shonenware" local proxy package. To register, you need to send them a pic of you holding a Shonen Knife CD. Proxomitron dosn't stop working or anything, even if you never "register." All of the features are still there even if you never get a Shonen Knife CD. They're hot, though. You should get one! Shonen Knife is ok.
Proxomitron is a powerful package. It does not require an installation program or diddle with the registry. No nags, no splashscreens. It's good, solid software. Many language translation are available, too.
Using Proxomitron, I can even rid stop that annoying personals box on the Boston Globe. I can block anything I want.
Proxomitron
"There is no way extending something you are doing in print to a website should cost 7.5 mil a year let alone have a loss of that size after figuring in advertising."
You're in over your head.
Have you ever had to rent office space in New York city? Run an editorial, sales, administrative and technical operation with several hundred employees? Do you know what a fully loaded editorial, sales or technical FTE costs these days? Do you even know what "fully loaded FTE" means?
Do know what Web sites NYTD operates? (Hint: It's more than NYT.com.)
Do you know what NYTD pays for content? From the NYT? From the Associated Press? From Reuters? This stuff is not free.
Somewhat OT but I wonder how profit/loss numbers look for local tv sites. Having the ability to promote their sites, at no cost, gives them an advantage over other local internet businesses and startups that is basically insurmountable. Furthermore, one could argue the advantage is unfair, since they are a licensed oligopoly.
Looking forward, as more (ultimately all) local stations are allowed by the FCC to be purchased by the networks, the virtual iron-grip of big business on the dissimination of even local news becomes apparent.
Not a good trend in my opinion.
"Don't Follow Leaders." Bob Dylan
> Do we have lower accuracy expectations for TV news?
Yes, I do expect less accuracy from TV news. TV news values getting the story out quickly. It values a good picture.
TV news values sensationalism over all other factors. Get people to watch and keep watching. That's the prime objective.
Take a major event, like 9/11. TV news will talk, talk, talk, before anyone knows any facts about what is happening.
TV news reported that Reagan was dead, and the results of the 2000 U.S. Presidential election on election night.
Just remember, you heard it here first.
What I get from newspapers is detailed, long-form analysis -- and you really can only do that AFTER the news has had a chance to "settle" a little bit. CNN is interesting if I want to see what is happening now, but the Post or the Times is what I want if I am interested in figuring out the meaning of what has been happening over the last few days.
What is really special about print newspapers is that they are the most economically efficient means of providing long-format, detailed analysis.
It really comes down to the old "what's the fastest way to transfer a terabyte of data between two points 50 miles apart? A station wagon filled with DLT tapes."
I read the sunday paper from beginning to end every week (and skim the classifieds), which is a couple hundred pages of information, and I pay $1.50 for it. There is no breaking news, and all of this information could be gotten from the website, but I can't imagine trying to read that much copy on a computer screen -- especially with blinking animated ads all over the place. I certainly wouldn't want to print out all of those pages -- counting ink I think we're talking about 2 or 3 cents per page.
And this all comes down to why the Times online paper hasn't been very successful. Paying 50 cents for a print copy of a serious newspaper is a better deal than free registration to read the same information in a less convenient format.
Yeah, online newspapers are nice...but...
I hope they don't stop making the printed ones. I really don't want to have to bring my laptop into the bathroom...
The following accusation indicates discomfort with the results of a report.
Well, too bad. I trust the CNN reporter more than I trust your groundless accusation.The report by the CNN reporter is consistent with other behavior by the Chinese in Hong Kong. During 10 years prior to 1997, the Chinese were totally silent on the matter of creating an independent Republic of Hong Kong. No group held a demonstration demanding independence. You will not find even 1 news article (from a reputable Western source) indicating that a large group of Chinese in Hong Kong held a demonstration clamoring for independence. Surprised? Most Americans are surprised.
For a long time, Americans mistakenly believed that the Chinese in Hong Kong want to be independent of China. Now, we have both a poll (by CNN/Time) and an observation (that there were no demonstrations clamoring for independence) to prove that the Chinese in Hong Kong cheered the Chinese government and supported unification.
By contrast in Europe, most news outlets are quite up front about their bias (e.g. the Manchester Guardian), an attitude which encourages readers to consult multiple new sources.
You will not drink with us, but you would taste our steel? - Walter Matthau, The Pirates
I and a couple of other laid off people with some cash saved up are thinking of starting a regional weekly or bi-weekly. I am interested in your thoughts on the economics of them.
Our plan would be to print something about 4 sheets (8 pages) total. Our advertising niche would be garage sales; we would not allow you to place a garage sale ad unless you filled up 2 inches listing specific items. Also, all ads would be repeated on the left hand side in spanish.
Using a small town's newspaper presses about 40 miles from here, we might have enough money to fund ourselves for 1 year. That's if a few more people join.
We figure 5 pages of highly local oriented classifieds, and 2 pages of "other" shit, being columns or reprints of blog articles with local interest.
My feeling about the plan is that we need more capital than we have and we need people who really want to run a newspaper, not people who think it's cool and don't have another job right now.
I'd be interested in any thoughts.
who Spam Gourmet sells my address to?
fucking fat loser moron bitch cuntcasket closet fag.
shut your fucking cakehole.