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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.
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.
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
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.
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
Newspapers have been fat and happy for a long time. Most towns have 1 or 2 main papers which have never had a shortage of business. The money rolled in as long as they kept cranking out a paper each day; it didn't much matter what they put in it. Now that people have more options, they expect more. Not everybody needs a daily paper subscription to be informed about the news. In fact, as other posters have mentioned, printed news is stale by the time you read it.
Any paper who wants to survive in the future needs to invest heavily in online content and NOT just make their website exactly like the printed paper. If news is presented online in a convenient format, they will have no shortage of page views and ad revenue. Otherwise they will shrivel up and die. I suspect most papers will survive but those that are stubbornly resistant to progress will die in the next 10 years or so.
They may be slanted but at least they're focused on news that's important to you. (And while they exist, you can at least pretend that someday they might investigate Hollings for his Mouske-ties.)
John