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 it really matter? Most newspapers offer much (if not all) of their content online. All that matters is ad revenue, and they can even get around the cost of printing and distribution if they publish to the web. I see a transition, not a death.
Oh please, the Internet has been commercialized and affordable for a decade. The newspapers are killing themselves. The depth of the reporting is horrid. Not that the majority of continuous cycle news channels and websites are much better, but they're more immediate and therefore, accessible.
Truly, it is the newspapers who are killing themselves. Why is that? Because the quality of the reporting has dropped off substantially.
Take the New York Times. Between that Blair guy and now Miller, they've been shown to be nothing but a hack paper. Any newspaper that did not immediately point out the numerous lies of so many British and American politicians with regards to the ongoing war in Iraq falls into the same boat.
Intelligent people aren't going to pay money for ads and bullshit stories. And it's intelligent people who tend to read newspapers.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
This is why the major papers in .au always give away "free" stuff with their weekend papers. The latest trend is Music CDs.
Here at Computerworld New Zealand we have both a paper edition (weekly) and a daily online service http://www.computerworld.co.nz/ and I like to think they serve different readers in different ways.
Take a breaking news story (HP buys Compaq is my favourite example). We ran a BREAKING NEWS thing on the site immediately. We ran a follow-up story later that day with industry reaction (such as it was) also online. The next morning we had the customer comments/expectations story online, while most daily newspapers here were only just running the equivalent of our first story.
By the time our weekly print edition came out we had a full round-up of comment locally plus international expectations etc for a more rounded view.
That's the best approach I feel. Break news online (with attendant email alerts, SMS alerts or whatever you've got going) with more detailed relfective stuff in print.
This isn't new - print had to cope with radio beating it to news and TV (film at eleven!) doing what we couldn't do. What print does well is take a step back and offer a critical analytical assessment. In depth stuff. Well, that's what print SHOULD do well.
The two aren't mutually exclusive - print and online can co-exist quite nicely thank you. You add immediacy to your print edition with online. You add depth to your online edition through print. Different readers are served in different ways.
I am a leaf on the wind
Maybe the biased & sensationalistic news organizations cause peoples apathy toward them. I'm sure rampant product placement within news stories isn't far off..
As they are, newspapers rely on two sources of revenue: direct sale and advertising sponsorship. With the advent of the Internet, information is free -- and newspapers, in order to remain relevant, must offer their articles for the same price or risk the certainty of readers going to a free competitor.
Unfortunately, doing so completely wipes out their subscription base. And I doubt advertising alone will be enough to sustain high-end staffs such as (despite an earlier criticism of the paper in this feedback) those on The New York Times. It'll be interesting to see if, or when, major papers shut down because they lose too much money investigating stories -- or if, more likely, they simply downgrade to the usual nonsense of hyping a murder trial or a missing white woman. Either way, however great a revolution the Internet may be for widespread communication and education, I mourn for what seems the eventual demise of professional journalism. Does anyone want a future of Fox News-caliber media?
Still, at least in my opinion, the good that is free and instant and widespread information weighs out the evil of such losses.
I would think stuff like Craig's List would slaughter it. So much more dynamic, so much easier to get the word out (and very effectively in large markets like the SF Bay Area -- not sure how good it is elsewhere)... and FREE.
There are times I think a newspaper is great -- on a train, on an airplane, or when I want to sit outside in the sun with a cup of coffee. So for relaxing news delivery. But most of the time, web sites (or, even better, RSS feeds) are just so much more timely. And with RSS, I can get the headlines from a few sources, so when one site cock-blocks me by invalidating my BugMeNot login (cough, FY NYT!), I can read the article elsewhere, or just be content with the title.
Newspapers can still be around, they just need to evolve. They've got the reporters and researchers, so they're in a good position for reporting detailed stories with more depth than TV can do in a 30 second blurb. Seeing a story in the conext of previous weeks or months of background articles is also easier with text than dozens of clips of newspeople reading short snippets on-air.
It's the dead tree versions that don't make as much sense. Lots of people don't want yesterday's news. But no reason that a well written newspaper can't write a web version just as well.
And the thick Sunday version with the sale ads and magazines are still popular. So they don't need to retire the presses. But basing your entire business model around delivering paper to porches, yeah, that'd dead.
On the flip side, a major disadvantage of the web is mutability. How do I know that link to the story on the 18th is actually the same text that ran on the 18th? Heck, how do I know that you and I are reading the same article today?
For an interesting, behind the scenes look at things, one company I worked for had a news site, and part of the content came from Reuters. Part of the tagging in the news stream indicated "updated" versions of the same articles, that you were REQUIRED to replace.
If you pay attention to breaking stories on Yahoo, you can see the articles morph and change during the day...
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
I think there needs to be some work on formatting and ads.
The formatting of news web sites seem to leave a lot to be desired. For one, look at CNN.com, for any given page, the actual article is less than 1/4th of the page, the rest is split between an asinine site navigation system and ads.
Ads in a newspaper aren't anywhere nearly as intrusive as on the Internet. No newspaper ad bounces, flash, shake, spin, spawns popups or any crap like that. Newspaper ads don't try to leave cookies, tracks IP or otherwise grab and store information without telling me. I block all that stuff, but it's still a surprise when I use other computers.
Newspapers are cutting staff left and right. That means fewer reporters producing fewer stories, and that means fewer reasons for people to buy newspapers. Which will force even more downsizing.
What's worse is the effect this will have on all media. TV and radio stations already have very slim news staffs. They rely on newspaper stories as the starting point for many of their own stories. As do magazines. And this will affect blogs as well, as they usually write about what's been published elsewhere.
News starts with reporters, and most of them work for newspapers.
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.
I pay $40/year for my local Sunday paper, mostly for the ads. I buy enough gadgets through the year that the paper pays for itself a few times over. (I buy things when the price is good, and the occasional great sale means I can get a hard drive or whatever for less than I could online. Plus: no shipping, easier returns, see it in person before I buy it, get it the same day, etc etc etc.)
:-)
That said, I always end up finding a few things to read and usually wind up spending a couple hours with it. It's quiet and calm and a nice change not to be sitting up looking at a screen for another couple hours. Sure, it may not be great for up-to-the-second news, but I don't care about that anyway. There's always some neat articles about local stuff, vacations, homes, etc. Browsing slashdot and the rest gets old after a while and it's a nice change of pace to find some unexpected neat thing that *doesn't* have to do with technology, Google, MS, Apple, or My Rights Online--and to do it in a nice, quiet, analog fashion.
Oh yeah, one other great thing about newspapers: no animated ads.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
The last 5 years have seen all the media here become totally none critical of politicians. Prior to 9/11, the media would actually research and the print interesting news about the national and local politicians. Now, I have found that Al Jazeera/BBC does a better job of reporting on our national stuff than does Denver Post and Rocky mountain news (with Al Jazeera you have to treat it like Old Pravda/ Current fox news and be careful of propoganda). Sad state of affairs.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Like many here no doubt, concurrent with pouring my morning coffee I check several sites. bbc.co.uk, theweathernetwork.com and football365.com. This gives me the means to decide if I should leave the house - if there's nuclear war, a hurricane or if City have lost I may well not do.
That said, I read a paper newspaper daily. The Metro (metronews.ca) is a free (ad-supported) newspaper that offers me as much news as I can read daily - 45 minutes on the way to work - with less ads than the major (not-free) dailies. Ok the journalism may not be as highbrow and neutral as such publications as the WSJ (US), the Times (UK) or the Globe (CA) [/irony], but frankly I am capable of researching a story if something catches my eye. And it has a crossword and sudoku. It also focuses on the one aspect of news that is not well covered online which is my local (down to what happens on my street) news.
The paper is not dead, nor will it be for the forseeable future, but the industry is undergoing (albeit more quietly) the same changes as the other major media - music and tv/film, and they need to find a new business model that can compete with the technological and revenue changes of the day.
The metro has a readership of over 400,000 of Toronto's 20-35 (read disposable income) population. This is the kind of targeted marketing that Google is milking vast VC on right now. National bloatpapers may have had their day but the print-paper industry is far from dead. They just need to wake up.
Disclaimer: I have nothing to do with any news dissemination organ, be it online, tree-based or otherwise
in my case, I have a hard time watching/reading any political news, due to it PISSING ME OFF with all the BULLSHIT that occurs all the time, with nothing much I can do about it. Even though I still read/watch it every now and the, my point is that im not so much apathetic as frustrated with many world events, it stresses me out too much worrying about it, so i tend to avoid it. Even so, since im basically a net addict, I still know a lot more of whats going on than most other people I know (and definately more than anyone I know in the tech trend area).
watch "the money masters" on google video
Haven't seen this flash? You should... it's fun to watch.
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
I see a transition, not a death.
I live in Orlando, Florida. The local newspaper is called the Orlando Sentinel, a.k.a. the Slantinel. Their agenda-pushing sometimes makes our mud-slinging presidential candidates seem mild. In an internet full of freedom of choice, the Sentinel will most likely lose. People read it just because it's really the only local paper we've got.
When everyone gets all their written news online, it'll die because it's so bad. I doubt it will be the only paper like this, and I doubt it'll die willingly and quietly for that matter. I expect it'll be fairly ugly. Lots of "the internet can rape your children, steal your soul, and cause you to gain 50 pounds" type stories.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Like any number of administrations I can name, newspapers had a near monopoly on the reportage of news. For the longest time it was them or hearsay. Then TV came along and didn't really compete for the depth of serious reporting.
Yet today's newspapers are about litte more then poorly-disguised polemic and not-so-subtle agenda driven editorials masked as news reporting.
Know why Fox news and the talk radio stations are eating your lunch? Because when you become so self-satisfied and smug, people are revolted by it, and driven to other sources.
Welcome to capitalism, biatch.
-Styopa