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The Fate of The Free Newspaper
jm92956n writes "We've all become accustomed to the wide availability of newspapers and other media online, almost all of which is available for free. Today, however, The New York Times (free registration required; how ironic!) is running an article that questions the long term viability of that business model. Interestingly, the Times now has more online readers than print readers. Is the era of free news content about to end?"
What about people who read the paper on the train or bus? I have no desire to get my laptop out or have to read articles on a tiny mobile phone screen just to get my dose of news in a morning. I think newspapers in print will be a round a while yet, just to serve the needs of the communter. I couldn't survive my journey into Manchester without the Metro, and the letters page is always hilarious!
As long as paper is cheaper than video screens there will be free papers. Case in point, Washing, DC just gained a new free daily The Washington Examiner in the last month, and within the last two year the Washington Post launched its own freebie paper, The Express.
They both seem to have viable business models and in fact the Express has already decimated small group of targetted suburban papers that had cost $.35 which have now either gone out print, or or free depending on the suburban county each served. And the Post is finding that its free paper is doing better than it is. Though I think that growth will slow because of the Examiner which seems closer to a real newspaers (if one only on par to the NY Post or NY News) than the Express which consists entirely of heavily cropped wire stories. The Examiner at least has unique features and few of its own writers - plus it runs in depth wire stories, especially in SPORTS - which with the launch of the Washington Nationals should 'sell' a lot of free papers.
Work for Change & GET PAID!
Is the era of free news content about to end?
No, here in Washington DC in the last year we have seen the launch of 2 free newspapers, dailies in fact. The Post's Express and the Examiner. Add that to the Citypaper and we have three.
We are quite saturated with free news.
Every time someone is trying to charge for a service on the internet, another provider will emerge and offer it for free. That free service will inevitably will be viewed more and gain credibility.
It's the same story. Nothing to see here, move along!
It's all about tactility, presence, something real, that you can have and hold and possess. I don't care what anyone says, tactility brings a measure of comfort and pleasure you're not going to get from a screen. Then there's the smell of a fresh paper. I'm not saying that it's up there with the smell of frying bacon in the morning, but it adds to the experience. That's it - a print paper is an experience, text on a screen is just, boring...
This reminds me of an interesting article I read a few weeks back on the debate at the NY Times about their online publication, and specifically whether to start charging a premium for the online content. The one side indicated that by charging for the content online, they are limiting viewership and people will simply go to alternative sites which are easily available. If they do not charge, and instead derive sole revenue from advertisers, they risk destroying one of the last remaining truly investigative news institutions and corrupting it by trying to keep the advertisers happy.
And on a side-note, the Boston Globe just bought an interest in the freely distributed Boston Metro daily newspaper, which derives its revenue from advertisers. Times owns the Globe.
Making you beleive that they rely on price you pay for a newspaper is a gimmick.
They make money from the ads inside and they charge more for adds by the amount of reader they have.
Same thing for magazine, 3/4 of a magazione are advertisement and they still charge you for it.
It's people's mentality to beleive that a newspaper that is free is not good and can't have good article, they rather read a newpaper that you pay for.
That's odd; the New York Times just bought half of the Boston Metro, a freely distributed paper.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
Pretty funny, considering the Boston Globe (which is owned by the group that owns the Times) just bought The Metro, a free newspaper distributed on the MBTA (aka the T) public transit system.
Please help metamoderate.
The newspapers adopt an Oracle-like pricing model for advertisers (since billions of people CAN see your ad online, we'll charge you $$$ for it to appear there) which hurts them. Their real problem is that newspaper management are old-school newpaper guys who think in terms of the circulation of folded 11x19 sheets.
That's BS. Papers are advertising-delivery mechanisms, always have been.
If the papers actually thought about finding ways of putting their "real" paper advertisements (ie. NOT click-thrus) in the online edition, they'd have more effective advertising.
Alot of people actually pay for papers just for the ads. I often buy the Sunday paper just for the supermarket flyers and department store ads.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
NYT makes money off ads. They are just moaning about this because their execs see a vast untapped source of more money (online subscribers) and want to make it seem like they just have to switch to a paid model. But it isn't about necessity; it's about money.
But you guys can't have it both ways-- if you block the ads through your browser or your host list, you can't expect free content forever. That's why i don't use anything (other than a popup blocker, of course) to prohibit ads. They are what allow us to consume "free" content.
;-)
And exactly how do they tell that you are blocking ads and I am not? Unless you are actively reading those ads, follwing the links and then buying something! then there is really not much difference between you and me as fas as the seller is concerned - except you just used some of his bandwidth
Besdies which, even if I do keep the ads on display, most sites advertise stuff which I can't buy outside the US anyway - so they're wasting their time with me and other non-USA-dwelling netizens.
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
It should work like the Economist.com. Most material is free excepting the business intelligence (Oxymoron? You decide.), but everything else is available for viewing. Like /. most newspapers could market timeliness, and make everything else available without a subscription.
I have been asking the NYTimes for years now to charge me for access to the online edition in exchange for eliminating the advertising. (Just like what Slashdot does.) I would be happy to pay a dollar a day (yes, $365 a year) for such a service.
The one reply I got from the NYTimes (supposedly from Martin Nisenholtz himself, the CEO of New York Times Digital at the time) seemed aimed at people who complain about ads but don't offer to pay to subscribe. I explained that I never "click through" on ads and that they would make a lot more from my visits if they charge me. He didn't seem convinced.
Oh well...I'm still reading the NYTimes on-line and I'm still annoyed by the advertising.
Interestingly enough.. the BBC is the *only* news organization in the world which is legally obligated to be unbiased.
It is part of their mission statement... How well they actually do at it is up for debate.. but at least they do have some sort of accountability on the matter, which is more than can be said for any American news organizations.
As always, the porn industry is leading the way in online commerce.
Very recently I've noticed "Adult Friend Finder" ads are doing this -- the ads say "find women in XXX", where X is a suburb near me ... after freaking for a moment I realised that's where my ISP was.
>I assure you the BBC is biased.
I am not sure that "unbiased" in a possibility. Any reporting always puts a slant on things.
>Most news in the U.S. skews to the left.
I am not sure that "most" is that meaningful, but it depends on where you compare to. My experience on US news is that it is fairly right wing. But this, in turn, is just reflective of US society, which is to the right on my own country (the UK). However, most of the national media outlets are on the coasts, which tend to be the most left wing parts of the US. So compared to the US population as a whole, it probably is slightly left slanted.
Incidentally, the Marxist assumption would not be that "owned by someone means conservative". It would be that because a news source is owned by someone, it will generally operate to the benefit of the owner, rather than society at large, whether that is conservative or otherwise. This is, I think, probably fair. The BBC has it's bias as well, but at least this is different from the prevailing news media, which is no bad thing.
Phil
And it's not just newspapers. While I agree that most magazines are fluff, I certainly love to have stacks of various journals (usually biology/science/astronomy related) around that I can peruse on a lazy Sunday afternoon and not have to worry about if the image server is down, the website address has changed, or the search is working on a particular site. I can't count the number of times when I've googled for something, gone to the site and get a glarin "Bandwidth exceeded", or 404 not found, or no pictures (just ugly red X's), etc.
I'd love if all journals/newspapers also did a complete "digitization" of their materials and released a yearly compendium on CD/DVD (just for quick searches), but nothing still quite beats the actual FEEL of reading a good paper-based product.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
I was under the impression that the great majority of Americans, and probably many other countries, get most of their news from TV. That's what's killing newspapers, not online competition.
Personally, I think TV news is a waste of time. I used to read a daily newspaper when I commuted, now I work from home mostly, I only buy the paper on Sundays. I get most of my news from the radio -- far more reliable and up to the minute than TV news, lots of anlysis if you want, especially if you get BBC World via shortwave, relay or online. I catch a news documentary on TV about once a week (mostly BBC again, sometimes PBS.)
I might consider paying for an "all you can eat" system that gave me access to vast quantities of premium content, but I am NOT going to be nickeled and dimed to death with "micropayments" to every Tom Dick and Harry who thinks his useless two cents worth should be billed to the reader at that rate. When's the last time you actually read some "news" online that required anything other than the most superficial fact gathering? Half these idiots can't get the easy facts right, let along getting to the bottom of a complex story. And the day Google starts routing me to pay-per-view pages without clearly notifying me in advance is the day I find another search engine. Some of you folks need to go back and reread the Cluetrain Manifesto.
"Is this Winkhorst a nova criminal?" "No just a technical sergeant wanted for interrogation."
Well, the way I see it, Google News is sort of dependent on these "Free" news sources.
I find it funny to hear folks talk about the demise of the old media and the rise of the new. Folks often point to Google News as an example of how it will all be in the future.
There's just one little problem with that. What does Google news aggregate, if not the mainstream news outlets?
Blogs?
I really don't think so.
Can you imagine how uninformitive the web would be if every major news outlet pulled its content off the web?
What's left then for Google News to aggragate?
Yes. There are some blogs that are quite good. But most of the blogs I've seen are just rubish. The signal to noise ratio is quite poor.
What does Drudge have to blog about if all the mainstream news sources are no longer available for him to link?
Sure, he can rage about whatever he hears about. But how much less useful is his site without the links to the actual stories (links that are from traditional news sources).
I don't think this is an either or proposition. The old media and the new media are going to merge.
Blogs, aren't going to replace traditional news outlets. (They may replace the editorial and opinion pages of traditional news outlets.)
Things about the old media will change. But don't kid yourself that the web would be nearly as interesting without the contributions of these print and broadcast publications.
- dj
I'm surprised that we haven't yet seen any DHTML techniques that counter ad blocking. I envision Alice clicking on a story and getting only the first paragraph because she has blocked the ads from that site while Bob gets the whole story because an ad that he is not blocking is rewriting the DOM to display or download the rest of the story. I think that coupled with a server side counter of the number of times the ad was actually displayed might be the basis for a better ad revenue model than pay per click.
I think innerHTML, HttpXmlRequest, and so on would be available on any browser with ad blocking capability. I think with something like this, and the user ability to turn ad blocking on and off by web site, we'd end up with marketplace forces determining what is acceptable in advertising.
Which is a Good Thing, so long as you don't throw the newspapers away.
Carbon sequestration.
So, the moral is to buy paper publications and a huge shed to keep them in:-).
More seriously, I wonder if anyone has done an environmental impact study comparing recycling with storage, taking into account the carbon removed from the atmosphere. Perhaps it would be a win to keep growing plants to make paper which we use once and then pule up somewhere where it won't rot.
Come to think of it, I remember reding about use of straw as a house building material. Perhaps bales of used newsprint could be used for that. Since the whole point is to do it in a way that prevents it from degrading, it should be a perfect form of sequestration with the resulting buildings being energy efficiant too (since they would be well insulated).
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
Indeed. That's the reason why i switched from the Irish Times to the Irish Independant. I usually read news online on weekdays and buy the paper edition on the weekend. The Independant having the courtesy of providing me free news on the web (yeah, still requires a free registration), i definitely prefer to buy *their* paper when i go for the physical media. Here's one lost reader of the Times thanks to their charging on the web...
This post is awesome.
Quite common for magazines. I think most newspapers don't assume their content has enough medium-term value to make the free online access a significant draw, so it's not worth using access to it to try and increase paper circulation, rather they use the online presence as advertising.
One interesting case is the BBC funded by UK TV licence payers. They have no real motivation for providing the free online news service, beyond the fact that they need to be seen to be providing services, and there is no reason to try and restrict it to UK readers even if there was a sensible way to do so. As a licence payer, I find it somewhat weird that I pay a TV licence fee yet watch almost no BBC TV, but more than get my money's worth from the internet and radio services.
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
1000 articles and counting!
I think another issue is: people already pay a lot of money for fast internet access. At least in the U.S., you pay anywhere from $30 to $50 monthly, depending on what services are available in the area.
Most people, after paying that amount of money, probably feel entitled to have a certain level of access to information. When you pay for a cable subscription, you get a bunch of channels as part of the deal. You then pay more for premium content without the ads. That seems to be the business model right now on the Internet: most ad-supported, the rest pay content.
If the majority of the internet switched to micro-payments, the situation would be reversed: most content would be 'premium' with a small majority free. That would be like paying a monthly fee for cable and then paying again for each channel, including local stuff you could have gotten with rabbit ears. I think most people would not like to be billed twice.
In a way, I think media companies and corporations are hurting themselves here. Let municipalities provide low-cost access to the Internet; that just frees capital to pay for really good services like video-on-demand or quality newspaper content.
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In X-Windows the client serves YOU!
Let's look at the business model. Where do newpaper revenues come from? Subscribers? No. Advertisers. The only reason that newspapers charge for their paper editions is protect against the age old assumption that if it's free, it must be worthless.
Every newspaper in the country could give away their print editions and still make money.
The "news business" is not now, nor has it ever been, about bringing you the news. It has always been about selling advertisements.
Just because a business provides something that is of use to one set of customers does not mean that that customer base is their primary concern.
The big reason that papers want to keep you, the reader happy, is so they can sell you to more advertisers.
I want all of the power and none of the responsibility.
And the day Google starts routing me to pay-per-view pages without clearly notifying me in advance is the day I find another search engine.
This already happens when you type a linguistic term into Google. You will typically get a lot of results from journal articles in PubMed, where abstracts are free but most full text costs at least 20 USD. You can identify these pay-per-view articles by looking for evidence of NOCACHE instructions, namely the absence of a "Cached" link (for HTML) or the absence of a "View as HTML" link (for PDF). Does this count as "clearly notifying" you?
Great point "drooling-dog"! I would just like to ad that there were a lot of bad assumptions about the online ad revenue model made from the get-go during the dot.com boom. News outlets cannot put a lot of money into web development and servers and expect to get paid for that. They need to spend less on the electronics than the print (which, by now, most I'm sure are). But the next step in cost cutting should be architecture-sharing. I hate to mention this, since I'm in web development, but a lot of newspapers do a lot of similiar things. You could set up the infrastructure for dozens of papers on a template run with a few web masters rather than each newspaper needing to have an in-house web development team.
What newspapers need to do is spend their money on reporters who provide unique content. Period. They can't pull the same article that 80 others are off the AP newswire and add any value in the e-era.
What newspapers need is to lower their expectations and provide better journalism.
But there is one other issue that should be addressed; namely re-linking. A lot of articles are do not provide revenue for a website because someone has made a synopsis elsewhere that is more or less the article. There ought to be a standard of no more than a certain number of words being allowed in a synopsis. I think it is a terrible burden on journalists who provide unique content to have another web site merely report; "Jornalist X at The YZ Times reported..."
But I think that news cartels will probably follow the model of Clear Channel on the radio. More's the shame. Also, I think that media companies are going to go after Blog sites in the courtroom if they get too successful. Possibly trying to make them liable for what gets posted (just use your imagination). This, of course will backfire, but not at first.
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
If the 'Net as a whole gravitates towards pay content, it will not happen overnight. People have gotten used to getting all kinds of stuff for free for so long (email, web hosting, image hosting, personal portals, et cetera) that it causes an unholy uproar every time you dare to put a price tag on something. Speaking as someone who writes for a news outlet with a little under 100k subscriptions, I can tell you that this is why the online subscription model has been so slow to evolve.
And not only do you create an uproar, but there's always someone on the 'Net who's (1) willing to survive on a threadbare advertising-based margin for the sake of indie glory, or (2) a freebie-dishing moron who will crash and burn in a blaze of glory, but not before he's induldged the masses with months of Free Stuff that a sustainable business could not hope to afford.
The more fundamental problem here is that the 'Net is inherently an information resource with a deep basis in the belief of freedom of information and a right to privacy. It began as a network of universities exchanging research data, and it continues as a global village of topics ad nauseum. Good luck trying to make people pay for something when they can get a reasonly close approximation by simply entering a different URL. This is the beauty and the curse of online business. You're easily accessible, but so is everyone else, forcing the provider to make a huge content proposition just to get their foot in the door with the customer. For a news outlet, it's the amount and quality of stories you can put up. For a reseller, it's the size of your inventory and the ease of navigation. For a search engine, it's the speed and accuracy of your results, among other things. And so forth.