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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.
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