Slashdot Mirror
Internet is Killing the Newspaper
jose parinas writes "MediaDailyNews is reporting that 2005 will go down as one of the worst newspaper years in history, and 2006 doesn't look promising. Online media is continuously generating more readership and ad dollars, but currently only accounts for 5% of total newspaper revenues."
does this result in people being more or less informed? Or are people fooling themselves if they believe that they are well informed by either source?
I may twist orthodoxy to partly justify a tyrant. But I can easily make up a German philosophy to justify him entirely.
Why would I pay for yesterday's news? The internet and televsion are giving me immediate access to news which makes newspapers somewhat obsolete.
Yet I read a lot more of them. I dont think I'm in the minority either. The local paper is the only way I get local news anymore. The local TV news is so inane I cant take it.
Maybe it's simply apathy for the news? I'm constantly amazed at how clueless people are towards the current events of the day. If the internet is to blame, surely SOME people would know of events going on?
Would you kindly mod me +1 insightful?
The only people who read newspapers regularly are those who have made a habit out of it their entire life. I still catch the paper once in a while if it looks like they might have an interesting article. But for all your current news, the newspaper is a day late and $0.50 too expensive. Why pay for info that I can get from my computer for free? Unless it is very locally specific news.
The world gravitates toward efficiency. Instant delivery, little cost, up-to-date. How can newspapers compete?
Yellow pages are dying horrible deaths too, and I'm loving every minute of it. Just look at how these online yellow pages are trying to force ads and sponsored listings on the first page, making it ridiculously difficult to get local results you really want. Then look at how quickly you can find something via a search engine.
eTrade SUCKS
If it kills the New York Times, then it's a good thing. They've been too full of themselves for far too long and I wouldn't miss them at all.
[/opinion]
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Video killed the radio star, etc.
OK, I'm certainly no economist, but so what? The article says that the growth is flat. Companies and industries that expect constant growth are kidding themselves. There are bound to be flat and negative growth periods in all industries. Maybe it's time that they start looking for better innovation like, oh, I don't know, real reporting instead of the biased, sensationalistic, editorial spin that has crept in over the last couple decades. It used to be that news was reported, not opinionated and editorialized at every chance. I would take printed news (or any news for that matter) a lot more seriously if it gave the facts instead of trying to sway me.
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
"The world gravitates toward efficiency. Instant delivery, little cost, up-to-date. How can newspapers compete?"
The NYTs certainly tries, and look at how we treat them. We DON"T want newspapers to succeed. No matter what. Free is our mantra, and we will slay anyone living in a capitalists world.
"Yellow pages are dying horrible deaths too, and I'm loving every minute of it. Just look at how these online yellow pages are trying to force ads and sponsored listings on the first page, making it ridiculously difficult to get local results you really want. Then look at how quickly you can find something via a search engine."
I've also found both inaccuracies, as well as numbers that never will show up. Besides yellow pages aren't as "dying" as you think (*looks over at the FREE yellow pages delivered last week*). Plus not everyone wants or has internet access, as well as all the advantages print has over reading off a screen. e.g. power failure, and yes phones do still work during such an event.
However, the lousy quality of the reporting isn't the only thing that's killing the newspapers. I think that they are in a death trap of reader selectivity. Since most people only believe what they want to believe, do you really expect them to pay to read other stuff, too? From that perspective, it's only natural for the Internet to slaughter the newspapers. Not just because the Web is faster and cheaper, but because search engines make it easy to find the stuff that agrees with what you want to believe. No cognitive dissonance there!
To give you a convenient concrete example, if you dislike Bush, just do a news search for "Dubya", and you're pretty sure to see plenty of disrespect. All you need is to learn the appropriate buzzwords for what you want to see, and voila, that's what you see.
Actually, I like to sample several of the extreme positions, because the truth is most often somewhere in the middle. However, that's another strike against newspapers, in my opinion, since most of them are pretty uniform. An enormous part of the content comes straight off the wire, and the rest of it tends to be whatever the publisher likes.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Most people don't have the time nor the resources to subscribe to multiple scientific/specialty journals, nor do they have time to attend parliament on a daily basis, or even to read the parliamentary transcripts.
That said, that's no excuse for newspapers to report blatantly false information. Going back to the example of the Iraqi invasion, every newspaper of any credibility should have torn Powell's UN presentation to pieces. It has nothing to do with politics. It just has to do with the fact that they're there to report fact, and thus the correct thing for them to do when presented with lies is to point out those lies for what they are.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Already TV news is less about news and more about entertainment. The paper is getting more like that too. There are so many media channels etc competing for peoples free time (== entertainment time) that the news has to be entertaining and gripping rather than factual.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Printed media is a needless waste of resources. How much paper do we waste every day on newspapers? How many tons?
I think one of the reasons for the downfall of the newspaper, is that for the "daily" morning paper to make it to your door by the time you get up in the morning, it has to be put to bed by midnight, so it can be delivered to the areas. If the "breaking news" or headlines are different by say 7am, the internet will have up to date "news", making the print version obsolete.
Radio threatened the Newspaper and took it's lunch money.
Broadcast TV beat it up.
Cable News kicked it while it was down (and then beat it up some more)
The internet is just finishing the job. The Newspaper has been killed by 3 previous mediums, and now a fourth is doing it. Newspapers will never go away, but they will never be what they were in before the 1950s again. As others have pointed out, Newspapers aren't what they used to be as the quality has declined and they are trying to more and more like gossip rags and 24 hour news channels which get printed once per day. Solid investigative reporting would keep them alive easily, instead we get AP wire reprints (which I already heard summarized on the radio and saw analyzed on TV). Now I can cut out the middle man and read these things off the wire online. Why do I need the paper for that.
And with wire stories like "New flash: President says he will name a new supreme court nominee at some point in the future" (there was one somewhat like that recently), I can't say much for their reporting.
Papers need to reorganize themselves and the kind of things they write/print if they want to become anything more than another local magazine. I'm sorry, but Newspapers are not in a good state right not (then again, neither is TV news).
The NYT is not "the paper of record" anymore, Edward R. Morrow and Walter Cronkite are gone from the in front of the camera. The entire news industry seems to be in a major crisis. They lost sight of reporting by realizing that they could just be the first to tell you something. 24 hour news channels hastened that problem. The internet and cell phones have taken it to it's logical conclusion.
I hope this all turns out well in a few years. I was getting mad at many of the magazines I used to love (gamer and computer magazines including GamePro, Nintendo Power, EGM, PC World, etc.) have fallen into the same trap so I've stopped reading most of them (I can get that info online for free, faster). I recently started reading a good magazine full of intelligent, insightful, and well researched articles: Forbes (yeah, different genre of magazines, but still). Newspapers (and TV news) need to go back to the same thing. They are all in a format of "Let's take that 1 minute news summary we did at the top of the hour and try to stretch it to 30 minutes" kind of "journalism", merged with "infotaiment" like Entertainment Tonight into one large affront to the intelligence of everyone.
I hope things turn out well. In the mean time, I will just continue to avoid more and more news sources as they get worse and worse. Some are still good. NPR had FANTASTIC, JOURNALISTIC coverage and analysis of Justice Robert's hearings. I learned a TON about the process and many other things by listening to their clips of the questioning with intelligent analysis and explanations. They're not always perfect, but they are one of the few left who even seem to try.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
In other news, whale-oil lamp makers reported another year of disappointing revenues.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Exactly. The key is editing, summary, and analysis. We should also add investigation, when that still happens.
The Internet is great for instant information, opinions, and huge amounts of both. But it is very spotty when it comes to analysis, SNR, and summary. Typically, it takes a little time for information to be properly filtered and recommunicated. This delay allows print publications time to catch up and this material can still be placed on the web later. Fundamentally, the act of publication forces information to be cut down, crap to be thrown out, and resources to be focused. There are papers that do this well and some that do it very poorly.
An excellent example is the Economist. I can find virtually every piece of information from that publication through some other channel before the print edition hits a stand. I do not, however, have the time to summarize, anaylze, and edit as the Economist does. Nothing in that publication is revolutionary or, in fact, beyond what I could generate. But it saves me countless hours of research.
Between Jayson Blair, The Hutton Report, Rathergate, Mike Wallace at the gun control rally, etc. etc. and their willful omissions (to cite merely one of many omissions) I have stopped believing what the MSM is reporting. It is clear that the MSM has a not-so-hidden agenda. They used to be called "reporters." Now they aren't willing to simply report, they must champion a cause.
Lessons from Vietnam: The Credibility Gap
The MSM* was permanently changed by the Vietnam war and its aftermath, including the Watergate scandal and the Nixon impeachment. [As commenter Jon Ravin points out in the interest of accuracy, Nixon was never actually impeached, but resigned when his impeachment became inevitable.] The experiences of that time explain much of the agenda journalism of the MSM today, but I would submit that they have not only forgotten the most crucial lesson from Vietnam, but their failure to remember will ultimately destroy them as a uniquely important and powerful force in our society.
First some history; During the years of the troop escalation in Vietnam, ultimately topping out at over 550,000 American military personal, the Pentagon and the White House, still fighting the last war in terms of Public Relations, continually measured our success in the war by pointing to "body counts". Using an outdated model of war in which the media play the role of conveyors of information controlled by the Pentagon and the administration, daily body counts of enemy combatants were touted as evidence, in the infamous words of General Westmoreland, that we could see "the light at the end of the tunnel." From 1965 on, we were, according to the daily body counts, winning the Vietnam war. When the Tet offensive took place in January of 1968, the reason the public was so shocked and ready to see our military victory as a defeat was that the expectations of victory "right around the corner" were crushed. We never knew that the North Vietnamese, post-Tet, were ready to sue for peace; all we knew was that an enemy who was supposedly being decimated was able to launch a major offensive. The conclusion was that either our military and the administration were incompetent, or that they had been lying to us all along. This lead to the "Credibility Gap". No longer would our press, feeling with some justification that they had been used and lied to, allow themselves to be so gullible. From this point on , the press almost universally saw themselves in an adversarial role against the military and the Executive branch of government.
It is important to note that the Pentagon and White House were only doing what had always been done in war time. The purpose of news in war time is to support the morale of the home front and to that end, propaganda has always been an important aspect of warfare. Unfortunately for the Johnson and Nixon administrations, while the nature of war hadn't really changed, the nature of our media had. We had close to real time news emanating from the battlefields of Vietnam. Reporters could see that there were attacks not being reported, injuries and deaths of Americans being swept under the rug, and constant reports of impending victory which were easily refuted.
This is extremely relevant to our war effort today. The military realizes that we are fighting a new kind of war, which includes a significant public relations aspect on the home front. The MSM does not yet recognize that fact; they are still fighting the last war.
We are winning in Iraq and have been for some time. When
All things change. I think the Internet is a better medium for large scale information. At any rate, on a large scale, information is moving across the world. If anything embodies globalization, its the internet, and what better way to get news about the globe? However, I think that local newspaper may still survive. While they could certainly go to an online medium as well to save on distribution costs, they don't stand to gain as much as a larger scale news society.
Can you imagine receiving a daily Slashdot mailing in your mailbox at home? Ridiculous
-Da3vid-
Why does "mainstream media" think blogging is such a huge hit? It's not that Internet is immediate, or that anyone can do it (which has big down-sides as well as it's egalitarian advantages). It is simply that people everywhere are fed-up with WWII-era propagandists telling us what to believe and have started researching it for themselves.
This is the Information Revolution: the Revolution is greatly improved access to the information. People are more educated now than they were 50 or even 20 years ago and can make informed judgements. They don't need some "journalist" to do it for them. This is quite appart form the fact that today's journalism is extremely poor compared to yester-year's.
I don't buy papers because I know that I can't trust them to bring me news in an unbiased, non-politically or commercially influenced fashion, or full of Tabloid rubbish like British newspapers. I accept the risk that the news I learn via the Net can be from the "uninformed" masses and mitigate this by using many sources so I can judge for myself where the "truth" may lay.
I won't even read over people's shoulders anymore.
For at least the last 10 years, newspapers have been good for only one thing: the ink used in newspaper presses is fantastic for removing streaks and smudges from my computer monitor!
“Our opponent is an alien starship packed with nuclear bombs. We have a protractor.” — Neal Stepnenso
Short answer: yes it does matter.
Long answer: the only reason why we have free online news is that everybody is offering it for free. Everybody is doing that because they have other sources of revenue. What this article is saying is that those sources of revenue are under attack from free online news. If the economics don't work out, they'll start charging for reading online.
If the economics don't work for the industry, the industry will start to move towards charging for reading the news. That will be the effect so you will not have online free online news as you do right now and then it *will* matter.
We are already seeing that in the NY Times. I think that this will be the trend.
Quality stuff will always survive in some form. I'm least worried about the WSJ, which is probably the smallest of the three papers I read. As you'd expect from a business-oriented newspaper, they got their business model straight from the get-go, and they've done very well with it - as of 2002, they were the most popular subscription service on the Internet.
- Obviously a happy subscriber to WSJ.com, but nothing more.
I think there are a few reasons newspapers' decline does matter: 1) Sure, the paper editions are being replaced by websites run by the same publishers. But the ad rates are way, way lower online, and no paper has yet shown how to create enough of a revenue stream from online ads to fund the operations of the newspaper. I can't see any developments on the horizon that will make online ads pay all that much more than they do now. The Wall Street Journal is making it work, but with a (pricy) subscription. 2) Many online-only news operations don't really do very much, or any, original reporting (Slashdot included, of course). Much of the online news world depends on the basic facts (and many times, analysis) provided by people in the print media. If the Washington Post has to scale down because its circulation dries up, there'll be a lot less info for online sources covering national politics to work with.
Then some new wave of local news bloggers will form a syndicate that borrows from blogging and wiki technologies. There will be a demand for a single site that can link you to people reporting on news in your area and that demand will be filled.
It's not hard to imagine that someone would report local news as a hobby and as a community service and even make some money by having their local hardware store sponsor them. The golden rule in blogging is to find a niche and dominate it, so this news form would actually be quite attractive to many bloggers. Local news won't die, not as long as hosting is cheap and ads are easy to come by.
World Changing - News for Humans, Stuff about our planet
Come to that, the internet is trumping *every* other media source when it comes to raw news. I can't Google search for related terms on my cable box. I can't run a Truth-or-Fiction fact check on a radio. People will tell me something they saw in the paper, and I'll say, "Oh, yeah, that was on [insert one of 20 news-sites here] yesterday!" In the age of RSS-feeds, plus a shell script I wrote to scrape them all, it's getting to be the next best thing to being psychic. In fact, even my library card usage is down - but I've downloaded and hoarded a slew of E-books!
More people might prefer to read their news on the Internet, but with newspapers declining, there simply won't be as many stories to read.
Do you seriously believe that people all of a sudden lose interest in what's going on in the world and in their community just because some highly paid NYT reporter is laid off from his cushy job? Because photographs are made with $200 digicams by amateurs, instead of $8000 SLR cameras wielded by Pulitzer-prize hungry press photographers trying to find the artistically most compelling composition and most disturbing photograph? I don't think so.
What this will do is give a larger audience to non-traditional media and reporting, and I think that's a good thing. In the pre Internet days, the press was important and far better than nothing at all, but nowadays, newspapers and newspaper staff are an anachronism and should be abolished. The market is doing just that.
The thing is, with the loss of local diversity the world will end up with just a few giant news organizations, and there won't be anyone left to investigate the local news.
Here's a newsflash. This has already happened. Many newspapers in the US are owned by big companies that own multiple papers. Same thing with radio stations. I live in Colorado and even the two big Denver papers, The Denver Post and The Rocky Mountain News, are owned by the same company. I hope that the death of the newspaper will result in the creation of some local news websites that will increase the diversity of our news.
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