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

What do you expect?

[rscoggin]

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.

Re:What do you expect?

[plover]

It's all pulpwood, grown expressly for the purpose of becoming newsprint. It's a farm crop, like corn or beans. And much of the newsprint is recycled, making it even less of an issue.

I'm not saying electronic delivery isn't much less of an expense (both in terms of resources and energy to make and deliver them), I'm just saying that it's not like anyone is denuding virgin forests of 200-year-old trees just to make a few bird cage liners.

Re:What do you expect?

[Daxster]

It's all pulpwood, grown expressly for the purpose of becoming newsprint. It's a farm crop, like corn or beans.

I won't deny that you have a point of newspapers using recycled paper, but I live in an area that has most profits generated from pulp mills and logging. Simply put - the trees are not on a farm, they're first-growth temperate rainforest trees. Although selective logging has been introduced, the logging companies and pulp mills are interested in profits, so many areas are clearcut when they can't be seen by the public (remote areas behind mountains, etc).
Newspapers do use a lot of resources :-(

Re:What do you expect?

[ctr2sprt]

They won't all die, just the bad ones. Which is, frankly, fine by me. After ten years of reading nothing but The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe (sports section), and The New York Times, I can't stand anything else. The writing is just so abysmally poor that I throw the paper down in disgust ten seconds after picking it up.

Quality stuff will always survive in some form. I'm least worried about the WSJ, which is probably the smallest of the three papers I read. As you'd expect from a business-oriented newspaper, they got their business model straight from the get-go, and they've done very well with it - as of 2002, they were the most popular subscription service on the Internet.

- Obviously a happy subscriber to WSJ.com, but nothing more.

Re:What do you expect?

[tlyons]

I think there are a few reasons newspapers' decline does matter: 1) Sure, the paper editions are being replaced by websites run by the same publishers. But the ad rates are way, way lower online, and no paper has yet shown how to create enough of a revenue stream from online ads to fund the operations of the newspaper. I can't see any developments on the horizon that will make online ads pay all that much more than they do now. The Wall Street Journal is making it work, but with a (pricy) subscription. 2) Many online-only news operations don't really do very much, or any, original reporting (Slashdot included, of course). Much of the online news world depends on the basic facts (and many times, analysis) provided by people in the print media. If the Washington Post has to scale down because its circulation dries up, there'll be a lot less info for online sources covering national politics to work with.

Re:What do you expect?

[bm_luethke]

I live in an area (I live near Clahoun, Tennessee) that creates a large amount of pulpwood for newspapers and is farmed. In fact, I believe the company is the largest producer of newspaper pulp in the US (at least it was a few years back - I don't really neep up with it or anything).

The company is called bowaters and owns several million acres of property. It is some of the best hunting lands in the state for pretty much all our local wildlife (and feral wildlife also). While yes, they clear cut if they aquire new property, and always clear cut when they harvest, the replanting of the trees is about as dense as can be sustained and is GREAT for wildlife - again one of the top hunting areas in the state with both large mature animals taken and a large yearly bag limit (and it's quite expensive to hunt as well).

They allow independant and govt forresters to view thier managment and make suggestions - they even usually follow them also.

I don't know what company you are near, but it is insane to purchase old growth forrest for wood pulp. It takes specific types of trees to make and old growth forrests are not very dense. Pulp manufacturers only purchase them if they need more land, and in many cases what they do with the land is beneficial for the local wildlife in the long term. Basically old growth is horrid for paper pulp - though it is generally good for expensive lumber because of the size of boards that can be harvested.

About the worst that can be said is that the place stinks real bad when you are not used to it and the gasses released, while not damaging, make a fog so thick that you can not see past the end of the hood on your car (literally). When conditions are right it can creep out over the interstate and has caused some of the largest wrecks in US history.

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...

[CyricZ]

I'd say people end up being far more informed. Major newspapers will never present worthwhile news, because it is too costly for them. They most likely will not report on the misdeeds of major advertisers. Likewise, in America especially, if they question the administration they'll immediately lose their press access. Thus all they can do is put out bullshit, and hope that people continue to buy their papers. But it looks like people are catching on, and thus people aren't buying their papers.

Then again, many news websites are not as tied up. They can offer viewpoints that the major papers could never think of presenting. Even if their news is incorrect, it still may provoke thought in its readers, perhaps enough for them to investigate other news sources, and hence to make up their own mind based on the information they can obtain.

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?

Re:The real question is...

[SnarfQuest]

They most likely will not report on the misdeeds of major advertisers. Likewise, in America especially, if they question the administration they'll immediately lose their press access.

Quick, replace your tin foil hat! The foil taped over the window is coming loose! The spy satellites are going for your rectal implants!

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

[gardyloo]

Why would I pay for yesterday's news?

      Yeah! And on some special websites, you can read the same news several days in a row! Sometimes after months!

Re:Immediate Access

[lukewarmfusion]

Still, I do enjoy sitting on the back porch in the morning with a newspaper in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. The Internet is way too heavy to read on the back porch.

Re:Immediate Access

[Jeff DeMaagd]

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.

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.

Re:Immediate Access

[sootman]

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. :-)

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?

Newspaper is killing the newspaper.

[CyricZ]

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.

Re:Newspaper is killing the newspaper.

[sinewalker]

it's a mistake to rely on any one source of news

I agree whole-heartedly!

Of course, this is an observation that is new to the "mainstream" of our generation. Many people in my parent's generation would only "trust" one source. Indeed, most television news programs and newspapers still advertise themselves today as "your most trusted news source" as if it is a good thing to only focus on one!

I feel this is a reflection on our increased education, more than it is about the internet, or even the quality of newspapers (which has declined markedly in the last 10 years). More people with university education (completed or not) means that more people understand your observation of the importance of a varied news source.

It means more people recognise that present-day journalist are either hacks, or payed-for schills of whichever "cause" the story is supporting (it used to be that papers reported facts, not "stories").

This is compounded by the Internet, because people are finding it easier to get alternate views from sources besides their "trusted" newspapers. And as they learn that, in fact, you can't trust your newspapers, they turn to whatever source that they feel they can trust.

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.

The two aren't mutually exclusive

[Audent]

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.

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.

"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.

Dead Tree Edition

[MDMurphy]

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.

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.

Re:Newspaper is killing the newspaper

[shmlco]

"In the story that we ran on 18th.."

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...

Bad news for everybody

[codemangler]

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.

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.

Does this include account Free (as in beer) papers

[pseudosocrates]

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

Re:Making Excuses

[pete6677]

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.

Re:Death for some...

[plover]

The thing is, with the loss of local diversity the world will end up with just a few giant news organizations, and there won't be anyone left to investigate the local news. Sure, much of their news is already syndicated so you're already reading a lot of national feeds, but if the Slantinel goes away, who is going to report any local news at all? Do you think Reuters will hire a full-time Orlando reporter? The Associated Press?

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.)

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!