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."
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.
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.
...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 am the opposite. I use the computer for hours every day without any problems at all. I also have my monitor set 17" at 1280*1024@85hz and sometimes a second 14" at 1024*768@60hz. I haven't had my eyes hurt at all. Yet, when I read a book my eyes go into shock as they begin to pool with blood from staring at the paper. The other notable thing is that when I read a book I always have my head at an awkward angle and end up with my neck hurting my seriously. If you do have eye problems with the computer, sit back from the screen atleast 2 feet and look away from the screen whenever you feel everything else in the room begin to zone out as you get tunnel vision. Anyways, I never read the never read the newspaper for the news, only the comics. For the news I read the source we all know and love, the almight: /.
Checking out my form of escapism.
I had a long conversation with my Aunt about this, who's a university lecturer who loves her books :)
;), since there are so many advantages to paper copies. They're nicer to hold, and easier/more comfortable to read. They're more intuitive to browse, and they give you a chance to just sit back and drift through the information, rather than whizzing through pages like you do on the web. Going to libraries and looking through newsPAPERS also helps you find stuff you might otherwise not have looked at.
It seems to me that print media won't die out for a while yet (never say never
That said, electronic media also have several advantages. They're quicker and easier to access, and so are ideal if you just want to find something out. Being able to word/phrase search, and use powerful tools is also a huge boon for research purposes.
Paper and electronic media both have their advantages. I think we'll just see a reduction in the scale of production of paper reference media, as that's primarily where electronic holds more advantages than paper.
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
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.
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