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."

Comments

The real question is...

[Enzo the Baker]

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?

Re:The real question is...

[letchhausen]

On the one hand I think that the idea that bad information can have good results is pretty rose-tinted to say the least. On the other hand the internet has consolidated access to alternative media which is a good thing and can lead to a more informed populace. Of course the internet is full of the same slanted and opinionated crap that you see everywhere else so it can lead to an utterly mis-informed populace. And your statements about the mainstream media are pretty spot on, of course since I would tend to read those online I don't really see a difference there in medium. Same lies different venue. In the end one can get the inside scoop from either Rush Limbaugh's blog or Al Franken's depending on the already formed predilections. Or better yet, CowboyNeal's.......

Re:The real question is...

[Rayonic]

Likewise, in America especially, if they question the administration they'll immediately lose their press access.

The New York Times and the Washington Post have lost their press access?

Or did you mean that both papers have never been critical of the current administration?

Immediate Access

[dduardo]

Why would I pay for yesterday's news? The internet and televsion are giving me immediate access to news which makes newspapers somewhat obsolete.

Re:Immediate Access

[CheshireCatCO]

Depth and medium.

Television is no substitute for a newspaper, at least not if the newpapers were doing their jobs correctly. TV news simply doesn't get you the depth that you get in a newspaper. Part of that is due to the nature of the medium and part of it is because the people producing news programs are more interested in flash than in content. (Yes, I know it's because that's what sells. Consumers are generally dumb and the TV folks are happy to go that route rather to trying to be decent journalists.)

The internet is a good substitute, provided you are smart enough to read reputable sources. (In other words, the same basic people as the ones who print newspapers, only putting the text online instead.) But that doesn't seem to be the draw away from the printed papers. Also, I (and many others) would much rather read a physical piece of paper than a computer screen. I work at a computer 9+ hours a day, typically, but I hate reading significant stretches of text off that screen. I prefer something solid. I can't really articulate why, but I just can't manage the computer screen well.

I still pay for the paper.

[rtphokie]

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.

Sure it's the Interenet?

[Cheapy]

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?

Efficiency

[Jesus IS the Devil]

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.

Re:Efficiency

[prockcore]

Instant delivery, little cost, up-to-date. How can newspapers compete?

Investigative reporting. That's still where the newspaper outpaces all other forms of news.

The hardcopy might go away, but newspapers have their own websites.

"Growth" is flat, so try innovating

[jbarr]

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.

Newspaper != news paper

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Traditionally, the newspapers were there to deliver news. Now by the time people read stuff in the papaers they have already been exposed to TV, radio and cnn.com. Therefor newspapers look more and more to providing alternative commentary. Essentially they're getting more and more like weekly womens' magazines but targeted towards a wider audience.

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.

Re:Newspaper != news paper

[DennyK]

The only chance newspapers have of surviving is to provide some sort of "alternative commentary". Open a typical newspaper today, and what do you see? A bunch of national news, most of it compiled or simply copied directly from the wire services, and maybe a couple of local interest articles. Much of their content just covers the four Ws (who, what, when, where) and stops there. That was a fine approach a decade ago when newspapers would be the most up-to-date news source that most people had access to, aside from television and radio newscasts which usually provide even less detail. However, it just doesn't work today. Why am I going to pay a good chunk of money every month for a newspaper that consists mostly of ads and stuff from the AP or Reuters that I already read word-for-word on CNN.com the day before?

Basically, newspapers are going to have to provide something besides stale wire reports and three-paragraph news articles. More focus on local news and issues would be a start. Forget the national news; most people already get that from other sources long before it's published in a newspaper. Stick with the local stuff, the things people won't find anywhere except their hometown paper. If you are going to cover a national news story, go beyond the four Ws. Have your reporters do some more in-depth analysis or investigation. Basically, give people something they can't find ten thousand identical copies of at news.google.com.

Re:Who cares?

[ShieldW0lf]

Why pay for info that I can get from my computer for free?

Simple. Because you can read it while you're waiting for or sitting on the bus. I wouldn't be suprised to discover public transit to be the number one motivation behind newspaper sales.

it's "old" by the time you read it

[p51d007]

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.

Internet is Killing the Newspaper

[MBCook]

No.

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.

Re:The two aren't mutually exclusive

[globalar]

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.

Can't trust the papers...

[sinewalker]

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!