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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.
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.
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.
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
... sucks. What sort of reading is it if I cant even grep.
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
I get all of my news from blogs, and I haven't looked at a single thing in print since Web 2.0 came out.
1. Look smart in airport
2. Cover head in rain
3. It's better than nothing when you run out of TP.
**stop cutting down trees for what ammounts to voyeurism and blatant stupidity!***
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Video killed the radio star, etc.
A more creative title might have been, "Internet killed the Daily Star".
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
"Internet Killed the Newspaper" doesn't have quite the same ring as "Video Killed the Radio Star." Of course newspaper will always have one advantage the Internet does not. You can always wipe your ass with it when you run out of toilet paper. Try that with a monitor.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
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.
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!
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
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!
What The Washington Post did was create a co-publication called "Express" that's targeted at subway commuters:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/express/
It's a small free newspaper, containing only brief news stories. It's got all the sections of a normal paper Top Stories, World, Local, Classifieds, Entertainment, and puzzles. But it's a mini-newspaper about half the physical size of a normal one so it's more suitable for reading on a crowded train. I can usually read everything on my way to work, and solve the Sudoku on my way back (unless I screw up). They have people at every metro stop giving them out to everybody, and I mean everybody. Express papers outnumber all other regular papers in any subway car by at least 20 to 1. They must make more than enough money off ads to cover all the costs because of the high readership. They don't have to compete with online services anytime soon, and it gives WP an audience that wouldn't normally buy a newspaper for their ride to work. There's even a few copycats in the area now so they must be on to something.
It's this kind of adaptation that will make newspapers survive.