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.
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.
...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.
Porn, I can see it now "Cum Inside to See the Sizzling Action in Iraq (Flash picture of Bush sucking finger)"
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 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.
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.
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.
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
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!
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
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
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.
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
Are there any online services that I can join which provide tons of (current) syndicated comics for a low fee?
www.comics.com
www.ucomics.com
www.kingfeatures.com
www.creators.com
There may be more, but these are the ones I use.
John Roth
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.
...CNN has begun work on obits for New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe...
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
I'm in the business, and it's more complicated than that.
First off, you're wrong that the companies that set up separate online/offline business have "entered the Web half-heartedly." On the contrary: The companies that set up separate structures (Cox, Newhouse, KnightRidder) invested far more than average to do so. Often the impetus for separation was a (1998-era) dream of cashing in on the stock market. On the whole, that model has not worked well.
Secondly, the key driver for success in this space is unified/integrated ad sales, not integrated editorial workflow. Effective deployment of Internet "upsells" in the classified advertising process and integration of Web offerings into special campaigns is the key. These do require tight coupling of Internet and print processes.
On the editorial side, tight coupling actually works against quality; a new site that is run by print editors is likely to be dull, slow, and non-interactive. The best news sites in terms of quality have their own dedicated editorial staffs that are capable of collaborating with print.
Sharing budgets is not a requirement of any of this. While it may be difficult to track expenses by product, most of us make a very serious attempt to do so, because we need accurate information in order to make sound management decisions.
Most newspaper companies do a fair job of tracking incremental expenses and incremental revenues that are Internet-related, on that score, most of the major newspaper companies were significantly profitable on the Internet last year.