Slashdot Mirror
A Recipe for Newspaper Survival in the Internet Age
I've spent seven years working as a writer and editor for Slashdot's parent company. During this
time I've been to at least a dozen mainstream journalists' and editors'
conferences where the most-asked question was, "How do we adapt to the
Internet?" You'd think, with all the smart people working for
newspapers, that by now most of them would have figured out how to use
the Internet effectively enough that it would produce a significant
percentage of their profits. But they haven't. In this essay I will
tell you why they've failed to adapt, and what they must do if they want to survive in a world where the
Internet dominates the news business.
I'm going to use the Bradenton
Herald as an example, not because it's a bad
newspaper but because I live in the middle of its circulation area. The
Herald is a typical Knight
Ridder small-city newspaper in every way except one: it
serves Manatee
County, an area with a fast-growing
population where most new residents are old enough
that they grew up reading newspapers every day. Despite these favorable
factors, the Herald's circulation has declined by 3.5% in the last
year. Of course, newspaper circulation declines are now
normal rather than exceptional. Other newspapers have done far worse,
with the San Francisco Chronicle recording a 16.4% drop in the last six
months alone.
Readership vs. Circulation
Much of the Chron's circulation decrease was because it stopped giving away free papers. The Boston Globe also stopped a giveaway program and suffered a circulation decline as a result, although only about half as big a loss as the Chron's, but the Globe's marketing people have said that only half of the loss came from stopping the giveaways, and blamed the rest of it on the usual suspects, notably TV and the Internet.
These figures only measure paper newspaper circulation. They don't include Web readership, which generally seems to be trending (slowly) upwards on newspaper Web sites. Circulation figures can also be misleading because they only measure the total number of newspapers distributed, not the kind of people who read them. And readership quality can often be more important, in a business sense, than quantity. This is especially true for those newspapers (namely, just about all of them) that rely on advertising for the bulk of their income.
By definition, anyone who reads a newspaper online at home can afford a computer and an Internet connection, which means they aren't at the very bottom of the economic pile. Online readers are also likely to be more open to new experiences, products, and services than those who don't feel they need to use the Internet -- which by some estimates may be as many as half of all households within the Herald's circulation area, which has a higher percentage of retirees than all but a few other U.S. counties.
Journalism professor Douglas Fisher and media executive Alan Mutter have both talked about intentional circulation losses on their blogs. In his post, Fisher says, "The industry evolves to the point of small, expensive print publications and most of the 'mass' news on the Web somehow. Then, as we evolve toward paid content online will come issues such as whether a certain amount of 'base' information should be free for every person -- sort of like a public utility of information (perhaps presented as a social utility necessary in a functioning democratic society)."
Meanwhile, when newspapers talk about readership vs. circulation, they're typically trying to estimate how many people read each copy of their print product (pdf download) rather than come up with a total picture of their publication's readership, including its online presence. This is a mistake. Instead of treating their Web sites like unwelcome stepchildren, newspapers should turn them into their primary method of news delivery -- and teach their reporters, editors, and ad sales people how to work effectively with this new -- to them -- medium.
Slashdot Lessons
1. No matter how much I or any other reporter or editor may know about a subject, some of the readers know more. What's more, if you give those readers an easy way to contribute their knowledge to a story, they will.
Imagine a newspaper with a space for comments below each story on its Web site. This Slashdot story has comments directly attached to it, not tucked away from public view the way the Bradenton Herald's site hides reader comments on Bulletin Boards that aren't directly connected to any of the paper's articles or editorials. To make matters worse, the Herald's Bulletin Boards require a separate login to post. Even if you're a logged-in reader you must put in your username and password again to use them.
As a result of these posting barriers, you hardly see any reader comments on the Herald's site, and what few there are seem to come from a small group that posts over and over. Even the Herald's single (hard to find) blog, maintained by token hip-dude entertainment reporter Wade Tatangelo, draws so few daily comments that you could count them on the fingers of one hand -- and usually have four or five fingers left over.
By contrast, the Washington Post's Web site has two blogs, Achenblog and The Debate, prominently displayed on the Opinions page that almost always draw 100+ comments per post.
A truly Web-hip newspaper would not only allow but encourage reader comments on all of its stories, not just on a blog or two. With thousands of readers as fact-checkers, mistakes would rarely go uncorrected for long, and if there was any perceived bias in a controversial article, reader comments would make sure the other side got heard. Even better, a reader who witnessed an event the paper covered would be able to add his or her account of it to the reporter's, which would give other readers a richer and deeper view of it.
2. Not all readers know what they're talking about.
While some readers know more about any given topic than a professional journalist writing about it, most don't. Some, indeed, post anything about anything, including misleading or false information. This is why Slashdot has a moderation system, and why all newspaper Web sites need to have moderation systems in place before they allow reader posts attached directly to stories. Slashdot's, which is built into the code that runs the whole site, is probably too complicated for most newspapers, but everyone (including newspaper publishers) is free to download, use, and modify it. For those who don't want to use the code behind Slashdot, there are many other free (and proprietary) content management programs available that have similar -- and often simpler and less geeky -- moderation features built into them.
3. No matter what you do, some readers will post malicious and/or obscene comments
Slashdot removes posts only in response to Cease and Desist orders or legitimate copyright infringement complaints. We find that malicious or obscene posts are usually moderated into oblivion almost immediately, because our readers -- hundreds of whom have moderation power at any given moment -- have a sharp eye for stupid stuff.
A mainstream newspaper might choose to remove blatantly disgusting posts, which would take some staff time. There would also -- inevitably -- be second-guessing and complaints, including whines from readers who believed their posts were removed because they didn't follow the [fill in political party here] line, not because they used offensive language.
Moderation never makes everyone happy. Someone will always feel the rules are too loose, while someone else will believe they're too tight. And moderates -- I mean moderators -- will always get flak from ____-wingers who think they're biased. But these problems shouldn't stop grown-up newspaper people from soliciting and publishing readers' posts. They should already be accustomed to bias accusations.
4. What if readers post comments that advertisers don't like?
This is a problem, and one to which some newspapers are extremely sensitive --not just over readers' comments but sometimes over their own reporters' stories. A 1999 Washington Monthly article had some examples of how newspapers sometimes cater to advertisers instead of their readers. Allowing readers to comment on stories, and allowing them to post anything they want (other than obscenities, blatant hate speech, and personal attacks) increases readers' faith in the newspaper, which makes it a more effective advertising medium in the long run because some of that trust will rub off on advertisers that support it.
The Business Side of a Newspaper Web Site
Slashdot, like almost all other Web, broadcast, and print media outlets, depends on ad revenue for most of its income. For the first few years of its existence as a commercial entity, major advertisers were afraid to buy ads on Slashdot or other free-wheeling, community-driven sites. They worried that every time they touted a product, all the customers they'd ever irritated would post bad things about them. It's impossible to run a company of any scale without having at least a few dissatisfied customers, no matter how good your products and services are, so this was not an unjustified fear.
Luckily for Slashdot (and our parent company), many companies have learned that they are going to get criticized online whether they like it or not, so at the very worst, running ads on pages where they get slammed gives them a chance to tell their side of the story.
Keyword-based ad placement helps them do this. Imagine making software that's often knocked for its security vulnerabilities, while competing software is available that costs little or nothing and doesn't share your product's problems. You'd want to run a Get the FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) campaign on every Web page where the competing product was being discussed so that you could tell people who are (obviously) interested in the competing product how awful it is, and why they should buy yours instead.
On a local newspaper Web site, a developer intent on replacing pristine wilderness along a scenic river with ugly condominium towers in the face of opposition from local citizens' groups could run a keyword-targeted campaign explaining why their buildings would be better than a swampy, mosquito-ridden riverfront. They could stress the fact that they would reduce the population of turtles, spiders, alligators, shore birds, frogs, and other annoying wildlife, and that runoff from their chemically-fertilized landscaping would help keep local fish populations down by contributing to red tide, thereby reducing the number of smelly fishermen infesting the area.
Other, more sensible, businesses would use the same tactic -- keyword ad placement -- to sponsor discussions in a positive way. An obvious example here in Florida would be resort property owners linking ads to tourism-related stories and the discussions attached to them. With geotargeting becoming common on the Web, ads aimed at visitors could be visible to all of a Florida newspaper's online readers, while ads for a local business would only be shown to local residents -- unless the local advertiser was canny enough to realize that Florida has many thousands of seasonal residents, and that reaching these snowbirds through the local newspaper's Web site before they come South is a great way to get a leg up on competitors.
Some other ways to exploit the Web that newspapers don't seem to do well:
I believe the future of not only classified ads but of local news gathering and distribution is the "local-focused interactive community." According to this article, craigslist founder Craig Newmark agrees with me. So do plenty of other Web entrepreneurs and venture capitalists who are busily building and financing "community" sites.
Local newspapers should have dominated all of this interactivity from the beginning. They had the name recognition and -- through their print editions -- the promotional muscle to make their Web sites into unassailable community hubs. But they didn't, and now they're reduced to playing catch-up.
If the Sarasota Herald-Tribune had followed through on its plans to incorporate reader-written blogs into its site, Suncoastblog.com probably wouldn't exist. This group blog is an admittedly lame effort, barely begun, put together by several people in this area (including me) who thought it would be nice to have a local site that might eventually cover events and places that don't make their way into the local papers. We know the Herald-Tribune, whose circulation area overlaps the Bradenton Herald's, had thought about hosting reader blogs at one point, because they asked readers to submit blog ideas several months ago. I submitted one and never heard back.
I also submitted a local computer business column concept to the Herald. I came up with it because the Herald has a Sunday business page it calls "Digital Manatee," on which I have never seen anything other than out-of-town wire service material even though there is more than enough local computer and Internet business activity to fill a weekly column, and enough local computer and computer service vendors to surround that column with profitable advertising.
The Herald's editor didn't respond to my proposal. I've written three computer-oriented books, and thousands of articles that have run online and in print all over the world, but I am apparently not worth even a polite turndown from my local paper's editor. No problem. A week later I was having lunch with a couple of local entrepreneur buddies. I told them what had happened. They suggested an online computer business magazine instead of a Herald column, and offered to finance it on the spot, out of their pockets.
I don't have time to start a new publication. But I am in a position to help someone else start one, and to write a story or two for it now and then. Financing's in place. So is a domain name. So at some point the Herald and Herald-Tribune may have (yet) another niche publication competing with them. It won't be a big competitor, but its ad revenue will come from lucrative business-to-business accounts you'd think a local newspaper would be eager to lock up with a weekly (or more frequent) column for local computer-using business people.
This doesn't mean the Herald has a bad editor or that another small paper would have reacted differently. I use this anecdote only to point out that it is now easier to start an online publication than for even a highly-qualified outsider to get his or her work into a local paper. Is it any wonder that local blogs and other online niche publications are springing up like mad? And as a corollary, is it any wonder that newspaper circulation and influence continues to decline?
Newspapers need to open up more to the communities around them. They need to stop confining their interaction with readers to advisory board meetings and questionnaires, and allow readers' stories, opinions, and thoughts to become an integral part of the newspaper itself. They should not allow readers to alter the newspaper's own words, as the Los Angeles Times did back in June with their laughable wikitorial experiment. Moderated comments are a much better way to give readers a voice. So are journals that allow (logged-in) readers the same level of freedom they'd have with their own blogs, but also give them the cachet of being published on a "major brand" Web site.
'Local' is the Key Word
The Herald, Herald-Tribune, and many other (if not most) local newspapers seem to think that they are still their readers' primary source of national and international news, just as they were 20 years ago. So that's what fills their front pages most of the time, with local and regional news stuck in a "B" or "C" section.
Welcome to the Internet age, local newspaper (and TV) people. I can and do get my national and international news from the New York Times, The Washington Post, BBC, Al Jazeera, Fox News, CNN, and other online media that cover faraway events better and faster than you ever will. I turn to you for local news. You tell me more about last week's home invasion robbery on 11th Street East than they ever will.
It's time for local newspapers to become truly local; to feature local news on the front pages of both their Web sites and print editions, with only a few out-of-the-area stories up front, augmented by an above-the-fold story list that tells readers where to find national and international news on their inside pages.
Add readers' stories and comments to the mix and you suddenly have a local online community, not just a newspaper. This will not take work away from professional reporters, photographers, and editors, who will still be the foundation of local news-gathering. In fact, increased interaction with local community members will probably give them more work than ever, because they will find themselves inundated with news tips and story suggestions they never would have found on their own. Some of these story ideas will be dreck and some will be invaluable. It will be up to the newspaper's editors to find the (rare) nuggets in the huge pile of dross they will need to sort through every day, and up to the newspaper's reporters to follow up on them.
One important thing a community-oriented, Web-based newspaper must do is credit readers for their story leads unless they specifically request anonymity. Another good idea is to pay readers who submit news stories that are written well enough that they can run with only routine editing and fact-checking. Those readers are, in effect, doing a reporter's work, and they should get some sort of compensation for it. Some may even turn into stringers capable of covering government meetings and other events when staff reporters aren't available, and a few of those stringers eventually ought to become staff members. After all, if a newspaper is going to be about, by, and for its local community, shouldn't that community be its primary recruiting ground?
Newspapers Will Not Die
Some newspapers (and newspaper chains) will probably not survive the shift from news-as-monologue to news-as-dialog. Most will, although those that wait too long to adjust will have much of their audience, influence, and ad revenue taken away by more agile competitors.
The smartest newspapers will follow my survival recipe or come up with their own way to become an integral part of their community instead of a building full of people who have been sprinkled with Secret Journalism Powder that makes them better and smarter than their readers. These newspapers will not only survive, but prosper. They may even become the prime outlets for bloggers in their communities, which will increase their readership and ad revenue. Extreme ____-wing bloggers won't want their words associated with the hated Mainstream Media, but most others will be happy to have a widely-read, influential outlet for their work.
Eventually, I expect print newspapers to become "snapshots" of their Web editions taken at 1 a.m. or another arbitrary time, poured into page templates and massaged a little by layout people, then sent to the printing presses, a pattern that has potential for significant production cost reductions if handled adroitly. From that point on, their paper editions will be distributed the same way newspapers are now.
Senior citizens and others who can't afford (or don't want) computers are and will continue to be a viable market. So will commuters who use public transportation. Then there are those -- a substantial part of the population -- who simply prefer reading words and looking at pictures on paper to seeing them on a screen. They will still want physical newspapers, even if they are not as up-to-date or as complete as what they'd get on the Web.
However it is delivered, text will not go away anytime soon. For a fast reader, it is the most efficient way to take in large quantities of information. Most people speak at a rate of between 130 and 200 words per minute. Most college students, according to a Virginia Tech student guide, can read non-technical material at 250 to 300 words per minute, and can increase that reading speed significantly with a little thought and practice. Listening to a city council meeting at 150 words per minute takes much longer than reading a meeting transcript at two, three, four or ten times that speed. Now have a skilled reporter -- whether a staff member, paid contributor or volunteer -- write an intelligent summary of that meeting, and even an average reader can learn what happened there in a few minutes instead of slogging through a two hour audio or video recording.
The Web version of that summary can be posted without waiting for the printing presses and delivery trucks to roll, and can have audio or video snippets embedded in it, but there is no reason not to make the text portion of it available on paper for those who prefer it in that form, unless the paper's editors decide so few people are interested in a city council meeting that it doesn't deserve a spot in the print version -- and tracking page readership on the Web version of the paper before the paper edition goes to press should give those editors a good idea of what they should and shouldn't put on paper.
Printed newspapers will have a significant following for many years to come. They may or may not become "expensive," as Professor Fisher predicts, but they will likely become smaller than they are now, and subscription sales efforts will probably be targeted more closely at groups unlikely to have Internet connections, especially senior citizens.
On the Web side, it's likely that newspapers will end up keeping most of their content free, with specialty sections (and posting privileges) reserved for logged-in users. Whether they'll be able to charge for some or all of their Web content is questionable. I paid $50 for a year's subscription to the NYT's Times Select program, and I don't think it's a good enough value that I'll renew my subscription when it runs out. I would be more likely to pay if I lived in New York and that subscription, in addition to what it gives me now, offered access to additional features like complete transcripts of government meetings. Indeed, I would happily pay at least $30 per year to the Bradenton Herald for a well-organized Web edition that gave me what I now get in the paper edition, plus government meeting transcripts and other useful subscriber-only features.
But if I paid for an online subscription to the Herald, I'd probably drop my subscription to the paper edition. I'd still be the same person, with the same interests, earning power and spending habits. The only thing that would change about me, from the newspaper's perspective, would be my news delivery preference.
The challenge for local newspapers that beef up their Web editions at the expense of their paper versions won't be to keep (or add) readers, but to teach advertisers that the Web, not paper, is the best way to reach their most lucrative potential customers.
This may not be easy, but it will be a lot easier than explaining to advertisers why they should keep spending money in a newspaper that has fewer readers, and less influence, every year.
Readership vs. Circulation
Much of the Chron's circulation decrease was because it stopped giving away free papers. The Boston Globe also stopped a giveaway program and suffered a circulation decline as a result, although only about half as big a loss as the Chron's, but the Globe's marketing people have said that only half of the loss came from stopping the giveaways, and blamed the rest of it on the usual suspects, notably TV and the Internet.
These figures only measure paper newspaper circulation. They don't include Web readership, which generally seems to be trending (slowly) upwards on newspaper Web sites. Circulation figures can also be misleading because they only measure the total number of newspapers distributed, not the kind of people who read them. And readership quality can often be more important, in a business sense, than quantity. This is especially true for those newspapers (namely, just about all of them) that rely on advertising for the bulk of their income.
By definition, anyone who reads a newspaper online at home can afford a computer and an Internet connection, which means they aren't at the very bottom of the economic pile. Online readers are also likely to be more open to new experiences, products, and services than those who don't feel they need to use the Internet -- which by some estimates may be as many as half of all households within the Herald's circulation area, which has a higher percentage of retirees than all but a few other U.S. counties.
Journalism professor Douglas Fisher and media executive Alan Mutter have both talked about intentional circulation losses on their blogs. In his post, Fisher says, "The industry evolves to the point of small, expensive print publications and most of the 'mass' news on the Web somehow. Then, as we evolve toward paid content online will come issues such as whether a certain amount of 'base' information should be free for every person -- sort of like a public utility of information (perhaps presented as a social utility necessary in a functioning democratic society)."
Meanwhile, when newspapers talk about readership vs. circulation, they're typically trying to estimate how many people read each copy of their print product (pdf download) rather than come up with a total picture of their publication's readership, including its online presence. This is a mistake. Instead of treating their Web sites like unwelcome stepchildren, newspapers should turn them into their primary method of news delivery -- and teach their reporters, editors, and ad sales people how to work effectively with this new -- to them -- medium.
Slashdot Lessons
1. No matter how much I or any other reporter or editor may know about a subject, some of the readers know more. What's more, if you give those readers an easy way to contribute their knowledge to a story, they will.
Imagine a newspaper with a space for comments below each story on its Web site. This Slashdot story has comments directly attached to it, not tucked away from public view the way the Bradenton Herald's site hides reader comments on Bulletin Boards that aren't directly connected to any of the paper's articles or editorials. To make matters worse, the Herald's Bulletin Boards require a separate login to post. Even if you're a logged-in reader you must put in your username and password again to use them.
As a result of these posting barriers, you hardly see any reader comments on the Herald's site, and what few there are seem to come from a small group that posts over and over. Even the Herald's single (hard to find) blog, maintained by token hip-dude entertainment reporter Wade Tatangelo, draws so few daily comments that you could count them on the fingers of one hand -- and usually have four or five fingers left over.
By contrast, the Washington Post's Web site has two blogs, Achenblog and The Debate, prominently displayed on the Opinions page that almost always draw 100+ comments per post.
A truly Web-hip newspaper would not only allow but encourage reader comments on all of its stories, not just on a blog or two. With thousands of readers as fact-checkers, mistakes would rarely go uncorrected for long, and if there was any perceived bias in a controversial article, reader comments would make sure the other side got heard. Even better, a reader who witnessed an event the paper covered would be able to add his or her account of it to the reporter's, which would give other readers a richer and deeper view of it.
2. Not all readers know what they're talking about.
While some readers know more about any given topic than a professional journalist writing about it, most don't. Some, indeed, post anything about anything, including misleading or false information. This is why Slashdot has a moderation system, and why all newspaper Web sites need to have moderation systems in place before they allow reader posts attached directly to stories. Slashdot's, which is built into the code that runs the whole site, is probably too complicated for most newspapers, but everyone (including newspaper publishers) is free to download, use, and modify it. For those who don't want to use the code behind Slashdot, there are many other free (and proprietary) content management programs available that have similar -- and often simpler and less geeky -- moderation features built into them.
3. No matter what you do, some readers will post malicious and/or obscene comments
Slashdot removes posts only in response to Cease and Desist orders or legitimate copyright infringement complaints. We find that malicious or obscene posts are usually moderated into oblivion almost immediately, because our readers -- hundreds of whom have moderation power at any given moment -- have a sharp eye for stupid stuff.
A mainstream newspaper might choose to remove blatantly disgusting posts, which would take some staff time. There would also -- inevitably -- be second-guessing and complaints, including whines from readers who believed their posts were removed because they didn't follow the [fill in political party here] line, not because they used offensive language.
Moderation never makes everyone happy. Someone will always feel the rules are too loose, while someone else will believe they're too tight. And moderates -- I mean moderators -- will always get flak from ____-wingers who think they're biased. But these problems shouldn't stop grown-up newspaper people from soliciting and publishing readers' posts. They should already be accustomed to bias accusations.
4. What if readers post comments that advertisers don't like?
This is a problem, and one to which some newspapers are extremely sensitive --not just over readers' comments but sometimes over their own reporters' stories. A 1999 Washington Monthly article had some examples of how newspapers sometimes cater to advertisers instead of their readers. Allowing readers to comment on stories, and allowing them to post anything they want (other than obscenities, blatant hate speech, and personal attacks) increases readers' faith in the newspaper, which makes it a more effective advertising medium in the long run because some of that trust will rub off on advertisers that support it.
The Business Side of a Newspaper Web Site
Slashdot, like almost all other Web, broadcast, and print media outlets, depends on ad revenue for most of its income. For the first few years of its existence as a commercial entity, major advertisers were afraid to buy ads on Slashdot or other free-wheeling, community-driven sites. They worried that every time they touted a product, all the customers they'd ever irritated would post bad things about them. It's impossible to run a company of any scale without having at least a few dissatisfied customers, no matter how good your products and services are, so this was not an unjustified fear.
Luckily for Slashdot (and our parent company), many companies have learned that they are going to get criticized online whether they like it or not, so at the very worst, running ads on pages where they get slammed gives them a chance to tell their side of the story.
Keyword-based ad placement helps them do this. Imagine making software that's often knocked for its security vulnerabilities, while competing software is available that costs little or nothing and doesn't share your product's problems. You'd want to run a Get the FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) campaign on every Web page where the competing product was being discussed so that you could tell people who are (obviously) interested in the competing product how awful it is, and why they should buy yours instead.
On a local newspaper Web site, a developer intent on replacing pristine wilderness along a scenic river with ugly condominium towers in the face of opposition from local citizens' groups could run a keyword-targeted campaign explaining why their buildings would be better than a swampy, mosquito-ridden riverfront. They could stress the fact that they would reduce the population of turtles, spiders, alligators, shore birds, frogs, and other annoying wildlife, and that runoff from their chemically-fertilized landscaping would help keep local fish populations down by contributing to red tide, thereby reducing the number of smelly fishermen infesting the area.
Other, more sensible, businesses would use the same tactic -- keyword ad placement -- to sponsor discussions in a positive way. An obvious example here in Florida would be resort property owners linking ads to tourism-related stories and the discussions attached to them. With geotargeting becoming common on the Web, ads aimed at visitors could be visible to all of a Florida newspaper's online readers, while ads for a local business would only be shown to local residents -- unless the local advertiser was canny enough to realize that Florida has many thousands of seasonal residents, and that reaching these snowbirds through the local newspaper's Web site before they come South is a great way to get a leg up on competitors.
Some other ways to exploit the Web that newspapers don't seem to do well:
- Print-them-yourself coupons. This is lots cheaper than putting coupons in a print newspaper. Many newspapers boast that today's paper contains $___ worth of coupon savings. Why don't more papers make this boast about their online editions? TV stations could do this on their sites, too. This would be an entirely new source of revenue for them, since there is no way to put a coupon in a TV spot.
- Online ad circulars, similar to the paper ones that pack print newspapers on Sundays and holidays. The print ones are expensive to produce and deliver, especially in color. Online circulars would be far less costly.
- Selling sponsorships for community calendars and other "public interest" sections that should be on every newspaper's Web site -- but often aren't or are produced in too scattered a manner to be useful for readers. C'mon, newspaper (and local TV) people! A well-organized, database-driven events calendar is easy to produce. If you don't have one (and sponsors for it), you should.
- Sponsored, "free to individuals and small businesses," local classifieds. craigslist and eBay are busily taking the classified ad market away from newspapers, with Google getting ready to help them with this effort. The Poynter Institute's Steve Outing suggests that the best way to beat back this threat is to "Turn newspaper classifieds into an active and interactive community, instead of just static, dull listings. A cold-hearted newspaper classifieds database could well be smothered by Google classifieds. A local-focused interactive community may be less vulnerable."
I believe the future of not only classified ads but of local news gathering and distribution is the "local-focused interactive community." According to this article, craigslist founder Craig Newmark agrees with me. So do plenty of other Web entrepreneurs and venture capitalists who are busily building and financing "community" sites.
Local newspapers should have dominated all of this interactivity from the beginning. They had the name recognition and -- through their print editions -- the promotional muscle to make their Web sites into unassailable community hubs. But they didn't, and now they're reduced to playing catch-up.
If the Sarasota Herald-Tribune had followed through on its plans to incorporate reader-written blogs into its site, Suncoastblog.com probably wouldn't exist. This group blog is an admittedly lame effort, barely begun, put together by several people in this area (including me) who thought it would be nice to have a local site that might eventually cover events and places that don't make their way into the local papers. We know the Herald-Tribune, whose circulation area overlaps the Bradenton Herald's, had thought about hosting reader blogs at one point, because they asked readers to submit blog ideas several months ago. I submitted one and never heard back.
I also submitted a local computer business column concept to the Herald. I came up with it because the Herald has a Sunday business page it calls "Digital Manatee," on which I have never seen anything other than out-of-town wire service material even though there is more than enough local computer and Internet business activity to fill a weekly column, and enough local computer and computer service vendors to surround that column with profitable advertising.
The Herald's editor didn't respond to my proposal. I've written three computer-oriented books, and thousands of articles that have run online and in print all over the world, but I am apparently not worth even a polite turndown from my local paper's editor. No problem. A week later I was having lunch with a couple of local entrepreneur buddies. I told them what had happened. They suggested an online computer business magazine instead of a Herald column, and offered to finance it on the spot, out of their pockets.
I don't have time to start a new publication. But I am in a position to help someone else start one, and to write a story or two for it now and then. Financing's in place. So is a domain name. So at some point the Herald and Herald-Tribune may have (yet) another niche publication competing with them. It won't be a big competitor, but its ad revenue will come from lucrative business-to-business accounts you'd think a local newspaper would be eager to lock up with a weekly (or more frequent) column for local computer-using business people.
This doesn't mean the Herald has a bad editor or that another small paper would have reacted differently. I use this anecdote only to point out that it is now easier to start an online publication than for even a highly-qualified outsider to get his or her work into a local paper. Is it any wonder that local blogs and other online niche publications are springing up like mad? And as a corollary, is it any wonder that newspaper circulation and influence continues to decline?
Newspapers need to open up more to the communities around them. They need to stop confining their interaction with readers to advisory board meetings and questionnaires, and allow readers' stories, opinions, and thoughts to become an integral part of the newspaper itself. They should not allow readers to alter the newspaper's own words, as the Los Angeles Times did back in June with their laughable wikitorial experiment. Moderated comments are a much better way to give readers a voice. So are journals that allow (logged-in) readers the same level of freedom they'd have with their own blogs, but also give them the cachet of being published on a "major brand" Web site.
'Local' is the Key Word
The Herald, Herald-Tribune, and many other (if not most) local newspapers seem to think that they are still their readers' primary source of national and international news, just as they were 20 years ago. So that's what fills their front pages most of the time, with local and regional news stuck in a "B" or "C" section.
Welcome to the Internet age, local newspaper (and TV) people. I can and do get my national and international news from the New York Times, The Washington Post, BBC, Al Jazeera, Fox News, CNN, and other online media that cover faraway events better and faster than you ever will. I turn to you for local news. You tell me more about last week's home invasion robbery on 11th Street East than they ever will.
It's time for local newspapers to become truly local; to feature local news on the front pages of both their Web sites and print editions, with only a few out-of-the-area stories up front, augmented by an above-the-fold story list that tells readers where to find national and international news on their inside pages.
Add readers' stories and comments to the mix and you suddenly have a local online community, not just a newspaper. This will not take work away from professional reporters, photographers, and editors, who will still be the foundation of local news-gathering. In fact, increased interaction with local community members will probably give them more work than ever, because they will find themselves inundated with news tips and story suggestions they never would have found on their own. Some of these story ideas will be dreck and some will be invaluable. It will be up to the newspaper's editors to find the (rare) nuggets in the huge pile of dross they will need to sort through every day, and up to the newspaper's reporters to follow up on them.
One important thing a community-oriented, Web-based newspaper must do is credit readers for their story leads unless they specifically request anonymity. Another good idea is to pay readers who submit news stories that are written well enough that they can run with only routine editing and fact-checking. Those readers are, in effect, doing a reporter's work, and they should get some sort of compensation for it. Some may even turn into stringers capable of covering government meetings and other events when staff reporters aren't available, and a few of those stringers eventually ought to become staff members. After all, if a newspaper is going to be about, by, and for its local community, shouldn't that community be its primary recruiting ground?
Newspapers Will Not Die
Some newspapers (and newspaper chains) will probably not survive the shift from news-as-monologue to news-as-dialog. Most will, although those that wait too long to adjust will have much of their audience, influence, and ad revenue taken away by more agile competitors.
The smartest newspapers will follow my survival recipe or come up with their own way to become an integral part of their community instead of a building full of people who have been sprinkled with Secret Journalism Powder that makes them better and smarter than their readers. These newspapers will not only survive, but prosper. They may even become the prime outlets for bloggers in their communities, which will increase their readership and ad revenue. Extreme ____-wing bloggers won't want their words associated with the hated Mainstream Media, but most others will be happy to have a widely-read, influential outlet for their work.
Eventually, I expect print newspapers to become "snapshots" of their Web editions taken at 1 a.m. or another arbitrary time, poured into page templates and massaged a little by layout people, then sent to the printing presses, a pattern that has potential for significant production cost reductions if handled adroitly. From that point on, their paper editions will be distributed the same way newspapers are now.
Senior citizens and others who can't afford (or don't want) computers are and will continue to be a viable market. So will commuters who use public transportation. Then there are those -- a substantial part of the population -- who simply prefer reading words and looking at pictures on paper to seeing them on a screen. They will still want physical newspapers, even if they are not as up-to-date or as complete as what they'd get on the Web.
However it is delivered, text will not go away anytime soon. For a fast reader, it is the most efficient way to take in large quantities of information. Most people speak at a rate of between 130 and 200 words per minute. Most college students, according to a Virginia Tech student guide, can read non-technical material at 250 to 300 words per minute, and can increase that reading speed significantly with a little thought and practice. Listening to a city council meeting at 150 words per minute takes much longer than reading a meeting transcript at two, three, four or ten times that speed. Now have a skilled reporter -- whether a staff member, paid contributor or volunteer -- write an intelligent summary of that meeting, and even an average reader can learn what happened there in a few minutes instead of slogging through a two hour audio or video recording.
The Web version of that summary can be posted without waiting for the printing presses and delivery trucks to roll, and can have audio or video snippets embedded in it, but there is no reason not to make the text portion of it available on paper for those who prefer it in that form, unless the paper's editors decide so few people are interested in a city council meeting that it doesn't deserve a spot in the print version -- and tracking page readership on the Web version of the paper before the paper edition goes to press should give those editors a good idea of what they should and shouldn't put on paper.
Printed newspapers will have a significant following for many years to come. They may or may not become "expensive," as Professor Fisher predicts, but they will likely become smaller than they are now, and subscription sales efforts will probably be targeted more closely at groups unlikely to have Internet connections, especially senior citizens.
On the Web side, it's likely that newspapers will end up keeping most of their content free, with specialty sections (and posting privileges) reserved for logged-in users. Whether they'll be able to charge for some or all of their Web content is questionable. I paid $50 for a year's subscription to the NYT's Times Select program, and I don't think it's a good enough value that I'll renew my subscription when it runs out. I would be more likely to pay if I lived in New York and that subscription, in addition to what it gives me now, offered access to additional features like complete transcripts of government meetings. Indeed, I would happily pay at least $30 per year to the Bradenton Herald for a well-organized Web edition that gave me what I now get in the paper edition, plus government meeting transcripts and other useful subscriber-only features.
But if I paid for an online subscription to the Herald, I'd probably drop my subscription to the paper edition. I'd still be the same person, with the same interests, earning power and spending habits. The only thing that would change about me, from the newspaper's perspective, would be my news delivery preference.
The challenge for local newspapers that beef up their Web editions at the expense of their paper versions won't be to keep (or add) readers, but to teach advertisers that the Web, not paper, is the best way to reach their most lucrative potential customers.
This may not be easy, but it will be a lot easier than explaining to advertisers why they should keep spending money in a newspaper that has fewer readers, and less influence, every year.
that's one long recipe.
Print journalists should throw sway standards like searching for duplicate articles, insisting on proper spelling, or even writing coherent articles. If all print media matched Hemos' Yellow Box review, think of the savings!
You'd think, with all the smart people working for newspapers...
Ha ha, ha ha.!
As long as there are "old people" there will always be newspapers. It is a fact that people enjoy getting their paper, sitting down and reading. I have noticed that my technically sharp father has started reading less online and going back to the traditional paper. When I ask him why he says "it's relaxing."
I know when I fly (which seems to be every other day) I prefer to read a paper than fire up my computer to read a downloaded electronic format paper. Why? It is, interestingly enough, relaxing, even for me...a geek.
VERY interesting article Robin. Thanks for sharing.
I'm not a troll, but I play one on Slashdot.
"You'd think, with all the smart people working for newspapers," That assumption doesn't stand up. In college journalism students are taught how to write badly. Then they get jobs as political reporters without a poly sci degree, business reporters without business degrees, and technology reporters without being able to do basic math.
There's a hobby shop near where I grew up that has it's flyer and an internet coupon on their site in addition to having a print version of the flyer in newspapers.
I'm not sure how long they've been doing this, at least a couple of years now...
Actio personalis moritur cum persona. (Dead men don't sue)
If it is should money be made out of it. Or is the future in blogs and other free items. Should they all be made by journalists of just by ordaniary users like blogs and comments here.
Basic competence in English grammar and spelling are to be avoided at all costs.
Reading your own paper is to be avoided at all costs.
Posting the same stories again can make your site twice as newsy.
Posting incoherent rants always rates over sober journalism.
Your job isn't to inform, but to generate the highest number of page-views for your advertisers.
People who don't like ads can be fooled by hiding ads inside so-called news stories.
1. Have a newspaper, which has articles. 2. Sell this newspaper on streets, in washrooms, etc. 3. ??????????????? 4. Profit
(I just threw in the washroom part...cuz thats the only place I read a hardcopy of news anymore)
[I can picture a world without war, without hate. I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it]
Rags should make ad-free, for pay, RSS feeds of NY Times, Wall Street Journal, etc. Make it deliverd to Blackberries and cellphones. The cheap distribution costs make it financially possible to cut down on ads.
I read
Do not *dupe* your stories!
'Go for the eyes, Boo, go for the eyes, aaarrrrrrrr!' -- Minsc
So in short, you're saying
1) Newspapers should all have Web sites that run something like Slashcode.
Have you considered that Slashdot, where people come for the comments and not the stories, is the exception and not the rule?
2) Newspapers should run Slashvertisements.
One thing newspapers have which Slashdot does not is journalistic integrity.
3) Local newspapers should not ignore their audience.
Sure, I'll buy that. But this is just a way of saying that customer service is important to a business.
4) Rumors of the New York Times's death have been greatly exaggerated.
But times are tight. Layoffs at the Times and the Journal, KRT looking to sell itself -- yuck.
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Ego and arrogance. Newspapers need to let go of the idea that they are the harbinger and gateway of all information. The lofty self-appointed (and aritificial) perch they've created for themselves is obvious. What kind of self-respecting person would get news from any of these simpletons when they can get it from us. Blogs have been more successful as a news source exactly because of the print medias long and constant arrogant approach to them. Now, some are finally starting to catch up, but for the most part, vast and entire new media entities are taking huge market share from newspaper because of their elitism causing a massive delay in switching to web.
Your "recipe" assumes that newspaper editors are of the correct mindset, already. I think alot of them have a long way to go. The entire concept of an editorial, in print form, as the golden platonic representation of "opinion" is going to be nothing more than a quaint idea of yesteryear...
I used to have a subscription to the local newspaper, but after a while I cancelled it because I felt guilty for using so much paper and never really reading it, even though I recycled it.
You forgot dupes and lack of proofreading -- the secret to Slashdot's success, no?
There is no survival of defunct and obsolete media.
/. know others here than they do their own real life neighbors.
Television advertisers will return to product placement, billboards and bus advertisements. DVR's are becoming so prevalent that the TV ad is dead. I ran tens of thousands of dollars over advertising in TV and radio over the years and this year my ads cost almost $2000 per customer gained (versus $20 just a few years ago). My newspaper ads are never read any longer.
The "Everything" newspapers will be the first to die -- they are at least 6 hours and at most 18 hours late on the news. The TV news channels are dying as well as the information that is read is obviously of no concern to the talking heads, and the information is so generic that it likely affects no one.
I still see room for opinion media forms -- preaching to the choir is a great income source.
The commentary of the editor is interesting:
Much of the Chron's circulation decrease was because it stopped giving away free papers.
How do you give away a paper for free when the advertisers pull out en masse? I will never advertise in a newspaper or magazine or coupon clipper ever again. More and more advertisers are pulling out as well.
Achenblog and The Debate, prominently displayed on the Opinions page that almost always draw 100+ comments per post.
100 comments out of a paper that used to reach millions is piss-poor sorry. If I was an advertiser and saw only 100 comments, I'd dump that paper in seconds. No thanks.
With RSS feeds and the number of specific blogs with actually decent information growing every day, classic news on the web is as ancient as the newspaper idea. Consumers can now create their own content papers. I'd rather find a decent RSS-Newspaper portal that helps me formulate my own daily paper than go to Washpost.com.
Print-them-yourself coupons.
I like this idea, and I have tried it in many avenues and I have never seen a coupon come in that was generated online. Not one (and my customer is usually a 13-31 year old male). I've tried e-mail coupons, too, and I believe we received one customer out of it. Coupons are dead when you have Froogle and Amazon already telling your customer that your store is too expensive.
Online ad circulars
Again, dead. Froogle and Amazon make this idea bunk. "Hey I can save $5 on the Widget at Dada's Shop, oh but wait it's $15 cheaper at Amazon with free shipping!"
Selling sponsorships for community calendars and other "public interest" sections that should be on every newspaper's Web site
And as the web grows bigger, I see more people ignoring their communities of people dissimilar to them and gain respect for their web communities of people similar to themselves. More geeks on
Sponsored, "free to individuals and small businesses," local classifieds.
Great idea. Advertise to 500 readers for free, or sell it on ebay to 5M readers for $1. Hmm, I think I'll take option 2.
'Local' is the Key Word
I wish that was the case. When I attempted to create some local scenes over the years online, as more of my customer base jumped on the internet, more of the local scenes online fell way to the nationally-oriented scenes. The punks that used to stick to our punk rock forum (we sold punk music) dropped us for the national scene. The paintballers that used to frequent our paintball forum (we sell paintball equipment) dumped us for the national scene. The skateboards that used to frequent our skate spot forum (we sell skate equipment) did the same. Why? 5 messages a day from the same 100 people is boring compared to hundreds of opinions.
It's time for local newspapers to become truly local
And attempt to sell itself to 500 people? I think it is more important for newspaper to face reality -- you can't please all of the people all of the time if the group is small. It is bet
Well, journalism isn't concerned with knowing the industry you're writing about. That's like getting a comp sci degree and learning how to use Visual Studio. All of the subject matter can be learned pretty easily. What people (bloggers and their fans) don't understand is that journalism deals with being able to write coherently, using facts, and as little bias as possible. Journalism is a real skill/profession that people such as yourself just don't understand. That doesn't mean that they don't provide society a very valuable service.
Robin,
Pretty well written, and looking at papers like the NY Times that are distributed all over the damn world, you'd think they would know how to leverage the internet to augment the lack of interest by most people under the age of 50 who are not in the financial business.
I work for a company in the financial industry and we ge the NY Times and the Wall Street Journal every day. Oddly, its only read by one person... maybe two. For the most part, our staff goes to their web sites to read what is in the papers.
By far, the complaint i get the most is that a registration is required. this isn't a money problem, its a logistical one. My users are quite lazy and don't want to have to be bothered to log into another web site to read the news. Thankfully, they're finding that they can get the same articles, and often from those papers from Google News, and Yahoo Finance.
If these papers want to avoid the fate of the dinosaur, as you said, they need to focus on advertising are an income source, not charging the people that actually would like to read what they have to say.
Unless, like here, the editors don't read the comments (or the articles they greenlight).
I wonder how much the form factor affects newspapers.
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
The problem I see with Slashdot is that most of what I read is complete and udder crap. I'm not just talking about the comments. Have you read submissions lately? Just take a look at stuff that Zonk and Scuttlemonkey post as fact. Complete and udder crap, usually from a rumor site. And that's the editors!
Even with the moderation system, misinformation can become fact. A well written post of complete misinformation (especially if posted early on) gets modded up to Informative. The facts don't matter, just the style of writing. Setting up a "post now, moderate later" system is a threat to journalistic intergrity. How do you know that a person is posting an educated comment and should be modded up? How do you know that the moderators aren't biased towards a certain poster? Anonymous posting is definitely a threat, any yahoo can post anything they want to and if they write intelligibly, will probably be modded up.
Maybe it's just me, but the last place I'd look to find a posting model would be Slashdot.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
But I wonder how many mainstream journalists will read what you wrote ... or perhaps even more importantly, the business people associated with those operations.
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
I've been reading news "online" since 1984 when I received my first Hayes 300 baud full length internal ISA modem.
I am so accustomed to online news that I only read the news on my PDA phone (on the go, on the throne, in the plane). I will read zines and some opinion ed newsletters in paper form, but that's about it.
One of my businesses is a retail store with the customers being generally 13-31 year old males. The younger ones (under 25) don't read the paper at all, in fact, more news gets passed through SMS than even e-mail or web forum. I can't believe how many kids have AIM on their phones.
Old people are also transitioning to online and simple message information sharing. My father is legally blind yet he uses the Microsoft magnifying lens and his wife to read his news online rather than deal with the paper (he's retired).
Sorry...I am a speed reader. Have been for most of my life.
I'm not a troll, but I play one on Slashdot.
Despite the emergence of online papers, blogs, and TV content, advertisers persist. They have no other choice but to try. Things like bittorrent and Adblock have taken a chunk out of the effectiveness of advertising, yet these companies still need to tell the consumers that they exist. They are desperate. They can't email everyone without spamming and being looked negatively upon by savvy consumers for doing that.
My rural parents started to get the paper online in the 1990s, and stopped getting the print version because the soonest it could arrive was the afternoon of the same day. People like to read in-depth news, on paper just to give their backs and eyes a break from a computer chair and monitor, but they aren't happy to read the same weird news they read last week online, and the shabby clips from Reuters that are now 24 hours old with no details added.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
This was a very well thought-out essay with a lot of useful ideas that really should be implemented almost immediately by newapaper corporations on their web sites. I particularly liked the idea of TV stations putting printable coupons onto their web sites as a way to generate ad revenue. That's a great idea, and only begs the question of why they aren't doing it right now! Thanks for an insightful essay.
Regular Meta Moderators are not more likely to get mod points.
When I look at the big newpapers out there, I am reminded of the big auto makers of the past like GM, Ford, etc. They are so used to doing business the way they did decades ago and are hesitant to change. This is somewhat understandable because it worked for so long. Now look at GM, they are hurting bad because they haven't adapted to the changing times. Back in the 70's when gas was expensive for a period, America kept making gas guzzlers, while Japan focused on fuel efficient designs. Gas prices eased up and the American auto makers start cranking out minivans and SUVs that are just as bad as the cars in the 60's. Once again Japan comes through and put a lot of effort into hybrids and alternative energy sources. American auto companies are feeling the sting once again. Now as for newspapers, the tone is similar. Many smaller bloggers and independent reporters are gathering a large following because they give the public what they want... important news easily available online for free. The big papers like the New York Times still insist on stupid registration which pushed potential readers away. They should be focusing on getting as many readers as possible and the advertising revenue will flow. Just look at Google.
Lead, follow, or get out of the way.
gasmonso http://religiousfreaks.com/The newspaper in San Antonio Tx did not seem clueful the last time I checked, but of all places the "Arkansas Democrat Gazette" http://www.ardemgaz.com/ has had several high tech experiments, that look interesting, some looked like they spent more money than was needful, but still they were striving for something useful on the internet.
A.G. Russell IV Extreme Internet Solutions The wonderful thing about standards . there are so many to choose from! "W
"You'd think, with all the smart people working for newspapers, that by now most of them would have figured out how to use the Internet effectively enough that it would produce a significant percentage of their profits."
Well that's just it. There aren't allot of "smart people" working for newspapers. Don't get me wrong, the writers and editors (as we just saw) think they are smart, but they are the only ones who believe that. As the internet has developed society has started to hold them more accountable, and as it turns out they plagiarize continually, make up facts, or outright lie/misquote people. Jason Blaire anyone? Dan Rather?
I'd say the mainstream newspaper's biggest problem (e.g. new York Times) is they are reporting OPIOIN more then news (I'm talking about in the news section not just the op-ed). A bigger problem for them is that most people in the country disagree with those opinions.
Blogs have become so popular because people are getting to see some insightful commentary other then the dribble we get from the self proclaimed "smart people" in the media. The problem for the newspapers is their staff, not the internet.
It's called an "in depth" article. Actually, it is typical for the length of article you saw in a major newspaper on a regular basis before the days of the internet.
Compare this with common blogs, and other similar media since the dawn of the television age.
yes there is more information about more things, but I think you could make an argument that the breadth of content has expanded at the cost of depth. Much content has become more shallow, because of the length of time it takes to type up, say, as a comment to slashdot, when you are rushing to get your thoughts online early in the chain of comments.
it takes time to develop an in depth knowledge of something, time that people are less willing to develop, blaming it on ADHD or whatever, when a summer without electronic technology in a library of dead tree edition books would be a start to a good cure.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I can pay a buck for the Sunday paper and get a tree trunk's worth of printed ads.
Or, I can browse to a website for free and nuke the ads with Adblock.
I guess someone's definition of a "relaxing read" is purely generational.
Then again.. maybe this person is refering to the New York Times... 'cause we all know they've never screwed up a story...
/dev/random
Nice analysis, including one suggestion I hadn't thought of myself (geotargeting of news and ads), but my main gripe with newspaper websites is that most of them still do not hyperlink to the material they're reporting on. See my rant from a year and a half ago. Amazing that Yahoo! has been around for 11 years and most newspaper websites still do not hyperlink.
I would want to read all of these posts. Getting your information hand-fed or advocated by certain advertisers kills free speech and free thought.
If newspapers want to adapt, the first thing they need to do is write stories that are truly interesting as well as informative. Greater in-depth and investigative reporting will attract readers to their newspapers. Also, please avoid all stories about Paris Hilton, Nick & Jessica, Brad & Angelina, and pseudo-advertisments posing as 'news.'
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Some of your suggestions (like having knowledgeable readers contribute) would be counter to the interests of the advertisers. Remember that the vast majority of newspaper/tv/magazine revenue is not from sales of newspapers/mags, but from advertising. The newspapers are not only delivering an audience, they are also delivering MEMES, ideas about how the world is and should be. Advertisers will not advertise in a newspaper that distributes memes that are against the interests of the advertisers. For example, the advertisers' profits are enhanced by massive inflows of immigration into America. So therefore advertisers like newspapers to disseminate memes that favor mass immigration, especially illegal immigration, because mass illegal immigration provides a huge surplus of cheap labor, which drives down American wages, which drives up advertiser profits.
So if the newspaper just start giving voice to knowledgeable readers, then memes unfavorable to advertisers will be disseminated, which means the advertisers would shun that newspaper, and that newspaper would go broke.
Immigration is just one such meme. THere are many others.
If you saw a ten dollar bill in the mouth of a lion, would you put your hand in it to recover it?
eat shiat and bark at the moon
to the newspaper circulation crisis is the Slashdot model of news distribution?
Surely, the End Times are upon us.
"If god did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him" --Voltaire
Offer up a reader (think e-book) with the subscription for a set price. If need be, offer it up at half/price combined with subscription.
With that, offer up much more than is on the web. In particular, minimize the ads. One neat feature of this, is that ads can be very targeted (no sense selling MS windows ads to bill gates; Apple may decide to target Linux users (BTW, considering that browser ID themselves, I am amazed that nobody is doing that; The same ads that I get on MS are the same on Linux)).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
sPh
Bill Watterson had the right idea. I used to go straight for the comics when I had the newspaper. Not any more. They took the funny out of the funnies. Oh well, I'll just get my jollies online. It's so much more fun.
Autonomous Retard -- Is your camp safe? UnsafeCamp.com
They all seem to have some major backer that I don't feel I can trust to give me honest, unbiased news.
Oh, and before you start, I know that they aren't the most reliable source ever to get information but to be entirely honest with you, I would rather get my news from 100 blogs of different positions than from the New York Times, The Wallstreet Journal, or any of my local papers.
At least then I can pick through the crap, mix together the different points of view and come out with a fairly wellrounded understanding of things.
(That is also why I don't watch television news, but they have a whole other type of corruption going on there!!! *coughs..fox *coughs*)
We seldom regret saying too little but often regret saying too much.
You should submit this as a letter to the editor of a national paper (NYT or LA Times). The only way to get newspaper people to read it is to get it in a newspaper... and they should read it. This is the sort of good advice they need, and they're lucky to get it for free without having to pay for it. ...but then again, maybe you should offer a consulting service and charge them a hundred grand for the same opinions as in this article, then maybe they'd listen.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
I used to have a subscription to the local newspaper, but after a while I cancelled it because I felt guilty for using so much paper and never really reading it, even though I recycled it.
I don't feel too hostile towards our local paper even though they sold out to a souless conglomerate that brings in most of the reporters from out of town. I would still have a subscription if it wasn't for the fact that my paper always seemed to be missing, four hours late, or soaking wet.
Instead of charging $3.75 a week for that "service" why don't they charge $2.50 and make everything available on a subscriber version of the website? I would pay for that -- access to local news is something that people should have, imho.
The altruistic side of me also thinks that they should release all news that is no longer economically viable (older then three months?) into the public domain and keep archives on their website. Of course they don't have much incentive to do this because they can sell "archive access", but it would be a public service. Between the money they originally made and the advertising dollars on the website I doubt it would be a losing game for them.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
May be just may be we need to rethink what Newspapers are essentially meant for in this modern age. Certainly the "news" in newspapers is old by the time they go to print. So what is the benefit to the consumer to subscribe to a newspaper? Your reasoning could be valid - relaxing. But how many people feel that way? I do enjoy a lazy sunny afternoon break where I can catch my breath and get a cup of coffee and read newspaper. Its certainly relaxing, but at the same time I am not looking for "news". I already know it by then. In fact, by the time I am done reading the first paragraph I am bored. So may be newspapers need to shift focus.
Just telling me what happened might not be enough. It is all over the TV channels, online blogs and even if you missed all that, your know-it-all cubicle neighbor will make sure that you know about it. Now that means the obvious solution might be opinion or editorials etc. But there is already a section for that. But I think they should occupy front page headlines. How about editorials on the current events on front page? Since people already know what has happened, how about giving people an in-depth story about it. Going local is a key concept that the author discussed. How about editorials on local stuff? Forget about war on Iraq and ID. They are being beten to death on news channels and national newspapers.
I am not trying to provide a solution, I am just saying to that just "news" in newspaper will mean zero circulation eventually.
As long as there are "old people" there will always be newspapers.
Newspaper circulation is in decline. Evening newspapers (popular for closing stock information) have declined the fastest, but the overall trend is not encouraging. Since 1970 the number of us households has approximately doubled, but newspaper circulation has decreased slightly. This coupled with recent drops of 2.6 percent in the last six months paint a bleak picture.
It is naive to say that there will always be newspapers. It is like saying there will always be record players. Digital technology will eventually destroy newspapers. Even if someday they get replaced by high res flexible digital "paper", the traditional model of a printed paper that has to be distributed is doomed. It is simply too expensive.
The Globe and Mail already does this.
Carousel is a lie!
agreed. Movie critics who did not go to film school, et al.
/., are competent, and love it). My solution: so many people are retiring younger and healthier than ever before. These people should teach. They've already led successful lives, have loads of life experience and thus have loads of things to teach that aren't in textbooks. More importantly, they have nest eggs so the meager salary isn't an issue to them because they're secure financially. They can afford to do it and are the most suited to do it. It's actually a program here in NY - where the school system is actively recruiting young retirees. This way you dramatically increase the quality of the school system with marginal cost increases.
I have a similar problem with teachers. New teachers are usually in my age range, and don't have much real world experience, are probably not mature enough to teach, et al. But they teach because they were in the lower range of their graduating class with generic degrees and as thus are willing to take meager salaries (this is my general experience with my friends who teach; no offense to those of you who teach on
My experience is that many of my friends in journalism are similar. They face similar issues: meager salaries, low barriers to entry, etc. I propose a similar solution - young retirees move into the journalism space. They've worked in the industry - have decades of perspective. With telecommuting what it is - they can perpetually report from the field... which would be where they choose to retire, etc. They can take the meager salaries because they have nest eggs, etc.
The secondary issue is that modern journalism is vertically integrated with political agendas in large politically vested corporations. I can imagine that the general public often feels hoodwinked and manipulated by the media - coerced into groupthink. That mistrust and the ease with which a motivated individual can self publish will continue a dramatic shift in the power dynamic. There will no longer be a monopoly on information (unless you're google).
The only time I pick up a paper is because an enterprising drug dealer disguises ads for pot in the classified section of the village voice. And they deliver.
un burrito me trampeó.
I really enjoy the page turning in a "paper" newspaper. How come nobody has done that on a internet paper? I read many papers each morning on line and would like to have at least one I can "turn the pages" not knowing what is on the other side. Instead of picking the stories from a list.
Death of Newspapers Highly Exaggerated.
Last month's NY Review of Books had an article about how Newspapers are dying. Thing is, newspaper still bring in HUGE profits. They make 30% profit over operating costs. That's crazy in any publishing business. So, many newspapers get bought up by larger corporations to make the accounting look better, and being to bleed the newspapers of all their operating funds. That's been killing the newspapers.. not readership. Even with readership down they're making a generous profit. Are they making this profit becuase they are cowtowing to the advertisers? Maybe. But that doesn't matter. They making money, not doing a public service. Oh, wait, aren't they SUPPOSED to be doing a public service?
Ah, whatever.
-judd
...newpapers should all become like Slashdot.
I wonder if this is a case of "to a man with a hammer, every problem is a nail." This site's readership is not representative of the public at large. I don't believe what works at Slashdot applies to more general news sites.
The Challenge facing all legacy media is erosion of their revenues. What Papers need to recognize is there are many niche sevices like community callendars that ad value to customer's lives and will attract visitors to ad sponsored areas of a site. Where papers fall down is in driving traffic to new site features that cannot be replicated in a print version. Use the print medium to drive traffic to the electronic forum. The The Globe & Mail is a leading Canadian paper that offers comments on articles (albeit moderated) which adds depth and perspective to their stories.
Maybe the poster should consider the content and not the medium itself. There is a reason why FOX News now has a higher rating than CNN. There are obviously millions of Americans who don't agree with the left-wing slant in many of today's papers (especially the editorials). Just a thought...
A famous newspaper provided us with the easy recipe to survive in the internet (Subscription required).
One thing newspapers have which Slashdot does not is journalistic integrity.
I don't believe that anymore. There are 5 newspapers of various sizes in my area. Over time I have been had direct knowledge of various events that were then reported in the papers. Not one paper ever provided an accurate story without at least slant or blatent ommissions that amounted to a lie. If I find that every article describing events of which I have personal knowledge is wrong, how can I possibly trust any other article?
Nope, I don't subscribe to any of them. And when they call or come to the door, I tell them why I won't subscribe.
EOF
Either newspapers will adapt to attract new readers, or it will slowly die off like a dinosaur caught in a tar pit.
Dear print media,
To survive and thrive on the Internet, newspapers should remake themselves to include proximal space for readership commentary, moderation systems to rein in the flamethrowers/idiots/newbies while fostering meaningful dialog, real-time vox populi fact checking, national news and general interest stuff on the front page, local news and special interest stuff on dedicated subpages that people can access directly.
In other words, be like Slashdot.
Sincerely,
Roblimo
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. - Mark Twain
"The cheap distribution costs make it financially possible to cut down on ads."
OK all you Slashdot accountants out there. Which is the biggest expense of a newspaper? Distributing your product, or producing it? If the latter then may I make the observation that maybe the Internet has skewed people's thinking about the economics around everything, and that feasability isn't always about "cost of distribution".
Two words,
Add value.
As long as the newspaper (paper delivery, web page, mailing list, or text message service) can continue to provide a competative service at an appropriate price they will survive.
Sure if your purpose is to debate the articles go slashdot. (Although some other sites do the debate better)
But this isn't the be all end all of news. For many topics people just want an informed report by a professional. Sorting the news and summarizing it intelligently is a service people will pay for.
I'd settle for more citations of named sources, including references to other articles, especially across publications. The Web is killing print not just by convenience and cost, but by corroboration. Cross-referencing is half the battle in learning whether to trust a published report. The other half includes interactivity, between reader and author as well as among readers. When reporters quote anonymous sources, it's a dead end. And especially with the recent revelations of just how often reporters merely repeat conflicted interest sources, without skepticism, qualification or even a hint that they're not authoritative, those dead ends kill trust sooner or later.
Newspapers are mostly reprinters of others' writing. Standing alone, they've successfully hid the origins of their product, an artifact of the medium. Now people have gotten used to the Internet's exposure of the news reporting process. Newspapers can finally drop their pretense, now that they're forced, and leverage their accumulated wisdom, discipline, and internal communities. Or they can die as dead as the trees on which they're printed.
--
make install -not war
More often than not, newspapers are simply publishers of articles written and researched elsewhere.
Likewise, most news blogs are restatements of what the blogger read on some other page.
http://reuters.com/ is a fine web site. We now pay an ISP do to what we once payed the newspapers to do: deliver the news to us.
Slashdot has very little original content. It can be useful as a way to organize news from disparate sources, but the standards for review of submissions seem inconsistent.
Newspapers can be better than slashdot at filtering and organizing the news. Newspapers can survive in this way.
Too busy staying alive... ~ R.A.
Newspapers are filled with brilliance. I was laughing just last night about examples in the local rag. One was "overcame a stiff tailwind [to win the sprint]". Two days ago I read online that Ricky Ray, who had completed only one touchdown pass in his previous eight starts, now had "more detractors than touchdown passes". A valiant attempt at hyperbole, but I think the ball was dropped somewhere between the ears. Plus amazing leaps of mathematics: I remember one stat that boiled down to the claim that "such and such a goalie has remained undefeated in the last ten games where the other team fails to score a goal". The next step for search engine technology is the ability to filter on sentient thought.
I'm not sure the average local paper could overcome a stiff tailwind.
I can see registering to submit comments to articles, but I certainly can't see registering to view content in the first place. As a prolific news reader and part time editor, I read a LOT of online copy, when I go to a link that requires registration I just blow that site off, not worth the hassle. Not going to register at one thousand sites. These papers seem to think they are the only place on the web or something, it's nuts. I can find (usually) the same wire service copy elsewhere without the hassle. And I am *certainly* not going to pay serious folding money to read one single article, that's ludicrous, yet some news sites and journals insist on it. No sale, no thanks.
Second annoyance these online papers will have to overcome is their habit of using annoying visual ads and flash based or scripted navigation, again, a major turn off, to enough people that blocking ads in general has become common. And insisting your visitors need active scripting turned on or Flash to use your site is a serious security concern in this age of quickly opening multiple tabs. People surf *fast* now. When the first popup or endless stream of open windows happened because of scripting, it went downhill from there, IMO. People just don't want the abuse, and abuse it is. Tasteful and relevant text ads with normal linking are preferrable and most people don't mind them if they are relevant to the site and article. Google got that part so-o-o-o correct.
When I was young I was quite liberal. However, looking back it appears that a lot of my liberal views were the same as my rebelliousness, meaning that like many young folks, I knew everything and thought anybody over 30 was an idiot, because I knew so much better.
Now I'm almost 62. As I grew older, I found myself agreeing less and less with the newspapers. These days I've become quite conservative. (I've heard it said that older folks tend to have something to conserve; maybe that's it.)
I resigned from the AARP (American Assn of Retired Persons) when it became apparent that their publications seem to be mainly left-wing lobbying. Now my point is not whether or not I am correct to be a conservative. My point is that many, many people become more conservative with aging.
The San Francisco Bay Guardian (very liberal and quite fun as well) had a motto which was a quote. It said their purpose was to "print the news and Raise Hell." They've done a good job of it.
And perhaps this might explain why newspapers grew so liberal over time. Appealing to the young and liberal audience paid off. But now things have changed.
The young and rebellious audience has gone to computers. Perhaps the core audience that made liberal bias profitable has gone.
I don't raise this idea to quibble about whether left-wing or right-wing is 'correct,' but to suggest that perhaps these days the newspapers should stick to printing the news, and perhaps the time for Raising Hell has come and gone.
== buddha is as buddha does ==
I suspect that if these newspaper companies want to keep readership they should also quit editorializing news. Write a story fairly, present both sides without bias for either, tell the truth and let the readers think about what you wrote. You can editorialize in the "letters to the editor page." I know I go to the Net for my news because I can usually find a story or usually I have to find two (one for each side) so that I am informed. When I read a newspaper story I feel as though I'm being preached to or they think they're telling me what I should know, only to find that they are telling me what THEY think I should know.
For instance, here in the Seattle area there was a story about a girl (12 years old) who was apparently babysitting and the child she was watching died in the bathtub. The girl told authorities that while she was bathing the kid ( 3 year old I think ), the kid went unconcious. She said she shook the kid to wake her up, to no avail the kid was dead. Well, she was indicted for the death. The newspapers and TV made this girl out to be evil, only reporting that she was babysitting and shook the baby to death. When I did a little more research I got the (insert Paul Harvey voice here) rest of the story. It seems the girl was invited over by the neighbor to just visit, there was no mention of babysitting. And the girl had gone 'visiting' over there quite a lot. But the mother was just using this poor kid as free babysitting, leaving it to the girl to watch the kid while momma went to the neighborhood pub, or just sat on the porch with friends drinking and partying. The girl's parents did not know that this was happening and stated they would not have let the girl babysit at her age had they known. It also turns out, unreported by major media (newspapers/tv) that momma had another child who also died under mysterious circumstances. This girl watched the child because she felt sorry for it because the babies mother was so neglectful. So, yeah, newspapers in particular should actually investigate a story and report everything or they are going the way of the Dodo.
ASCII a stupid question, get a stupid ANSI!
to 5 keystrokes:
/.
cp
The decline percentage is misleading as well. The MORE important figure to go with (IMHO) is advertiser decline, which is not readily published.
In the last 6 months, I have received more phone calls from my ad people at the local radio station, cable network, newspaper, coupon clipper and movie theaters that I used to advertise in. One of the ladies earned mid 6 figures just 5 years ago, this year she's considering bankruptcy.
I feel a little responsible in hurting the ad industry in my region. When I found out that most of my ad sales people bought through the Internet the same items I sell, I thought twice about what they were selling me. I asked myself this basic question: What do I do with the product I am advertising through?
TV ADS: PVR skip. RADIO ADS: Change station. COUPON CLIPPER: Throw in trash. NEWSPAPER: Never buy. MOVIE THEATER ADS: Show up 10 minutes after start.
I started to tell this to other businesses in my area. Now, when new sales people come through the store, I tell my managers to tell the sales people we only buy advertising from sales people who shop at our store for at least a year. Guess how many ads we run now?
If you think newspapers are dying, try the periodicals industry. More and more periodicals I used to read seem to have become strictly advertising for one massive dotcom. One "trade" magazine I used to read had 70% of its ads from one megadistributer that owns about 100 brand names.
My wife continually gets a number of different virus and other malware on her computer - despite the fact she doesn't surf the web other than news/weather sites. When I complained to my ISP about it, the operator said/claimed that the worst sites for catching something are the news sites which will accept advertising from just about anybody and link stories from other sites. Going by my wife as a sample, this is definitely true. I admit the sample size is small, but there does seem to be
So, I would think that it is absolutely critical for a newspaper site to ensure that nothing can be downloaded into the users computer. Nothing will loose readers forever than if they have to reformat their hard files.
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
instead of a conduit for Corporate press releases and slanted political nonsense.
like it's going to happen.
banning blogs is probably their best bet. shows how screwed they are.
Some facts are wrong with the way adverts/coupons/circulars are placed.
The way that works is a big media company pays to have the their book of coupons inserted into many regional papers.
They sell pages in that book to corporations who can afford to pay. This works for the corporations many ways.
1. 1 buy covers many markets
2. This buy is probably cheaper than them trying to get a single insert in many papers.
3. It's easier to do than setting up buys at many papers.
A corporation-newspaper business model pretty much doesn't serve companies that can afford to pay for national media.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Our website (which uses the open-source Drupal CMS, a rarity for newspapers) actually gets the readers into conversations with one another. One of the things I felt the site has been lacking, actually, is a sort of cream-of-the-crop moderation system. That said, one of the things we've actually been able to do is ditch the wire and publish local news and features that let people know what's going on in the community.
While I disagree that a "snapshot" is the way that our site should go, I feel that many of these ideas are things that Bluffton Today is already pursuing and the things we aren't doing are things we should pursue. Our readership is through the roof because we print stuff way more useful to readers than wire they've been grabbing from Yahoo! all day anyway. (We do print two pages of wire a day, but it's very short and punch, much like the rest of the paper.)
Anyway, I'm going to forward this to a handful of other coworkers. They'll find this great.
That is because in K-12 They were taught History by a teacher without a History Degree, Math by a teacher without a degree in mathmatics, English...you get the picture.
- Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
If a journalist is constantly getting "shown up" by their readers... then maybe that journalist needs to do a better job preparing background & researching for his articles.
I'm not even sure what you mean by being "shown up." Unless you limit the discussion to topics the article writer has in-depth knowledge about... someone is always going to be able to contribute more information to the discussion.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I spend an hour sat on a train every morning and evening on my commute. I don't have a laptop or PDA, so if I want to spend the time reading my choices are either a book or a newspaper.
That said, I can't remember the last time I actually bought a newspaper; here in London there's a free one called the Metro that's just left at Tube stations, handed out outside major stations, etc. If I read a paper, that's it. (It's not particularly good, but it beats paying for one)
It's official. Most of you are morons.
The problem with newspapers is similar to broadcast television. They have gotten this idea in their head that their reports should never be challenged and what they decide to print will BE the truth.
The internet has allowed individuals to challenge the accuracy and fairness of the newspaper and broadcast television industry. No longer do people just blindly accept what they read in their local paper or see on the nightly news. They are now exposed to many views and many sources of information. This brings about higher scrutiny of what the newspaper or nightly news tells them.
Another problem with newspapers is they tend to be based in big cities and have a big city mindset which is does not always connect to those who might work in the city but live outside of it. Local small town papers are viable until the larger neighbor city buys it up and shuts it down (the Atlanta Journal Constitution has done this where I live). This action alone forces more people to look elsewhere for information.
Still I think the key is the egotistical outlook of papers and broadcast media that they control what the truth is has come to and end. They just don't accept it.
People now are much better picking out when a story is more opinion/editorial than factual compared to the editors of the same.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Slashdot, where people come for the comments and not the stories
/.'s visitors read or post comments.
I attended a presentation Taco gave last year in which he said that only about 25% of
Something like half only view the front page.
By which I mean, well written, meaningful articles that reach a wide target audience, whether that be local (the local newspaper), or the Wall Street Journal (international, but limited focus).
Why? because the better of these organizations tend to weed out poor writing, poor investigative and journalism techniques, and "grow" a network of trusted sources and strong investigators into the public well being. As opposed to the 'Net where there are millions of voices, but most of them untrusted and frankly untrustworthy in terms of fact checking, etc. What is happening is that the profitability of print as a mass marketing medium is declining, which means that the newspapers themselves may have to be "downsized" in terms of how much content is provided in print and how much is "upsized" online.
That said, great well thought out essay, Hemos, especially regarding moderation. FYI I have been a /.'er long enough to remember the bad-old-days (Pre-moderation, through the 400 moderator phase, to now) and what we have now is much much better, and I plan to incorporate something similar into my own CMS once it is ready to go.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
No matter how much I or any other reporter or editor may know about a subject, some of the readers know more. What's more, if you give those readers an easy way to contribute their knowledge to a story, they will.
This is not such a new concept. Back in the early days of the newspaper in the US, it was not commonplace to have a subscription and newspapers were not in as wide circulation, so people passed papers from household to household. The newspapers always contained blank pages at the end so that each reader could add a bit of local news that was unknown when the paper was printed. (Incidentally, it was not uncommon for a gentleman suitor to bring a newspaper to a woman's family as a gift so they could read about the latest Native American conflicts)
My other computer is a Jacquard loom.
Users suggest stories. We tell you what we want to read about, and you decide what you write about. This is the pefect mix. Newspapers are not built for this type of input and the head Editor will be unconfortable with any system where the readers decide what they want to read.
Well, journalism isn't concerned with knowing the industry you're writing about ... What people (bloggers and their fans) don't understand is that journalism deals with being able to write coherently, using facts, and as little bias as possible
...
... Journalism is a real skill/profession that people such as yourself just don't understand
If you don't have clue about the subject you are discussing (with experts and whatnot), if you don't understand what a particular fact means/implies, how do you expect to write an accurate (nevermind coherent) report?
All of the subject matter can be learned pretty easily
That's a false premise of journalism discipline. Many, probably most, things require a degree of background understanding to make sense of relevant issues being discussed, technical fields much more so.
No argument journalism is an important profession for the society, but I don't think your method to argue that point ( "people like you just don't understand" ) is very persuasive.
(1) Newspapers should be a factual source that can be counted on for as close to objectivity as can be. Dialog sites like /. are fine for what they do - but remember what they do: we've been told in recent weeks (most notably during the they-took-my-game-name-away episode) that this is essentially CmdrTaco's journal and we've been allowed to hang out and talk. I for one am not going to consider this a definitive source, as lively, diverse and rich as it may be. Yes, the contributors may now more than the editors, but when the Twin Towers fall down, I want to know what's happening, timely and accurate not wade thru threads of riveting but nonetheless tangential posts.
/., wiki, etc...
(2) Yes, I know there's bias and opinion in every news source, but their stated mission is to relate the news as clearly and accurately as possible. That's not so far true of blogs or this site whose purpose apparently is "New for Nerds. Stuff that matters." There's a lot of latitude there. More than I want to grant to what's supposed to be my eyes and ears when I need the truth or as close as I can get. I learn a lot and laugh with the Daily Show, I'm amused by Rush Limbaugh, and of course Matt Drudge Has Saved This Country From Secret Impending Doom Several Times, but I'll still watch a major news network if I hear the next wave of visigoths is reportedly marching up Sixth Avenue.
(3) Newpapers are businesses, and some are smarter than others at coping with eventual change. Diversification is key. Ask Berkshire Hathaway. Ask GE. Some papers diversified by sone smart buying. Some didn't. Scripps Howard bought the Food Network and HGTV. The New York Times bought another declining paper - The Boston Globe. This would be some evidence that the NYT is far more intelligent than bright. However as a news organization, they seem to be as self-correcting or responsive to outside information as the next bunch, which seems to be an argument for
Personally? I'd rather pick up a paper than read one online. Newspapers have been successful for so long because they are basically a decent way of dealing with information for a meat-based life form with hands, arms and unreliable short term memory. They are declining because they cost money. Online newspapers succeed because they are largely free to the user (though that is changing). They fail because there is nothing about the typical browser that allows you to tuck the paper under your arm to read when you have the next ten minutes to spare, or know by sight and kinesthetic sense where that article was that you need to show your boss or spouse. Seriously, the tools for browsing hypermedia are not up to snuff yet. And the ads they think will save them just make them worse. The load time for web pages has kept pace with the speed of networks and browsing - as the client speeds have risen, they've just filled that with more animated ads, flash, what-not.
And try swatting a fly with your iBook or Blackberry.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Er. As long as there is hot coffee and Sunday Mornings....and a tall cute Italian blonde to curl up with... geeks sheesh...
I think in some ways that's what the poster is saying about "local" content.
The _real_ reason I read the Print version of the Miami Herald every day is for those articles written by reporters that tell a story I can only get from them (usually a local story). It's not for the generic AP, UPI or other standard fare that any newspaper can get (or for that matter read on CNN.COM or MSNBC.COM). It's for the in depth investigative news that made newspapers what they are today. You just don't get very much of that, and quite frankly it's because it takes *WORK*, and usually sources.
That is why the local paper (and even national papers) will survive. Some of those stories I'm talking about changed things forever (think Woodward and Bernstien re: Watergate if you don't get it). The stock AP/UPI story about Christmas sales forcasts just don't cut it anymore.
There are just too many other ways to get the information a newspaper gives you. ESPECIALLY if you live in a major city.
And if you DON'T live in a major city, then the local newspaper probably sucks. There just isn't much news of interest to report in a small town. So the newspapers reprint national news, and then fill the rest of the paper with advertisements and boring local issues that few people care about.
Seriously, the newspaper market is going to end up existing solely to server that small percentage of the population who really follow local politics and write letters to the editor whenever a new stoplight is installed.
Is it always that slow, or did they just /. themselves?
If you think imaginary property and real property are the same, when does your house become public domain?
I still occasionally like to buy a hard copy newspaper. I would do it more often if not for the physical format of most newspapers, which I find to be a nuisance.
I hate the large sized paper. I hate having to pull it apart and refold it so I can I can read it in the same physical spaces as I read magazines in. I would buy more hard copy newspapers if they were of similar size and format as magazines( please no more plastic coated paper ).
One of the best teachers I had was a student teacher on a placement. He was teaching physics, although I believe his degree was in engineering of some kind. He'd done the whole being in industry thing, and decided to become a teacher to give something back (I got the impression that he'd been well enough paid in his previous job not to really need a job anymore). Everything he taught us about came with some kind of anectode as to why it had been useful to him in the Real World(tm).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
"Blogs have been more successful as a news source " How are you measuring success? Man, there are like 3 people outside of California who even know what a blog is - and I'm one of them. Ever heard of New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, Fox News, BBC? That's success. Would I even know a blogger ruined Dan Rather's story if I hadn't read it on nytimes.com? I like blogs, and I still think they are amateur, circular, and gimmicky. Kind of like USA Today.
In college journalism students are taught how to write badly.
Got any facts on your assumption? Doubt it.
You miss the whole point of reporting. They're not supposed to be experts. They're not supposed to put their own knowledge in the article at all. They're supposed to go out and find experts, and put their knowledge in the article. By your logic, a random guy who can write and knows some physics is more qualified to write than a person who can write well (and they can, despite what you seem to think), and gets their information from an expert in the field.
Not there are not problems with modern journalism...When everything is owned by a corporation, then they're priting stuff that they think will increase their sales, and not offend their subscribers. Not anywhere near as bad as TV, but still.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
'Local' is the Key Word
The Herald, Herald-Tribune, and many other (if not most) local newspapers seem to think that they are still their readers' primary source of national and international news, just as they were 20 years ago. So that's what fills their front pages most of the time, with local and regional news stuck in a "B" or "C" section.
This really resonated with me. It reminded me of all the times I wondered why in the world every major newspaper and TV station in the US felt compelled to send a reporter to the Super Bowl or the World Series, or to the White House for press conferences. How is it beneficial for there to be 200 sets of ears hearing Barry Bonds say his "knee is feeling better", rather than having one (or two for verification) sets of ears hearing it and reporting it? The engineer in me values efficiency, and given that, it makes much more sense for local reporters to gather local information and report it. When the Super Bowl comes to Chicago, the local Chicago reporters can adequately cover and report what's going on. Sure, the other 2 cities involved (this year it's Indy and Seattle) can send reporters as well since there may be a "local" angle. But why does the Boston Globe and the LA Times, etc need to send reporters? This would also seem to significantly reduce their costs, which will help with the reduced circulation a local emphasis will bring about.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
Liberals ruined newspapers? Liberals need to cheer up? Good god, you better take your blinders off, buddy boy. You have an extreme case of right wing glasses. FYI, stupidity knows no bounds, whether political, spiritual, moral, or any other type.
Infuriate left and right
Another thing online newspapers never think about: Links! So many times online newspaper articles refer to other articles, people, places, companies etc but don't bother with hotlinks. I wonder if this is just because coming up with decent links takes time and money or if they are afraid of making their online newspaper more valuable than their paper newspaper.
I spent a chunk of my life working in the newspaper industry, and it is by far the field with the greatest divergence between IQ and self-image I've ever seen.
It is naive to say that there will always be newspapers. It is like saying there will always be record players. Digital technology will eventually destroy newspapers. Even if someday they get replaced by high res flexible digital "paper", the traditional model of a printed paper that has to be distributed is doomed. It is simply too expensive.
There will always be written news, but the market for news is likely to shrink. Increased communication of information will destroy the market for printing Reuters press releases on paper and selling thos press releases at a ridiculous price. The customers have more choice, at lower costs. The future of newspapers is not what is at stake - they can profit from the name recognition they still have if they don't wait too long - but the jobs of many newspaper employees are.
Maybe they can delay the inevitable by hunting down the people who read their newspapers without a license and suing them?
If you rearrange the sentence as you suggest, then it is correct. But that's not what the poster wrote, now is it?
A simpler correction was given in my post. It involved replacing one word, whereas yours requires rearranging the word order.
The demise of newspapers would be a disaster for the British fish and chips trade. Imagine the humiliation of buying your supper only for your mates to see it's been wrapped in Hello! magazine or Home and Gardens.
Seriously, this is a very interesting piece. One pleasure you can get from a paper and not from the web is that of a really well-designed page or spread, and especially a layout of strong and impact-full photographs. Imagine how much would have been lost had the greats of Magnum had to publish only to the web. A really strong newspaper story can change public opinion overnight. I don't think the web can manage that, or at least not yet. Many newspapers have become so corporate that there is sometimes little connection left between the mind of a writer and those of his or her readers, and the mavericks of old aren't welcome any more. Original minds make interesting stories. If it's dull in the paper it won't be any less dull on the web.
Las qué passoun
tournoun pas maï
The Columbia Journalism Review covered this issue last week.
I abandoned three local newspaper web sites because they required me to log in to read the articles. You can have my ever-changing IP address but I'll be damned if I'm going to let you track what I choose to read or not read over time.
I now get my local news from TV, radio, the printed paper, and sometimes news-aggregator web sites like Yahoo or Google.
True Journalists are important, however they are extremely rare. Some would say they no longer exist. Newspapers push a particular (and currently unpopular) political point of view (hence declining sales). One recent example is that the possible releasing of the name of a former CIA agent is a crime worthy of a congressional investigation, but when a paper published a lie about Gitmo concerning the treatment of the Koran, people rioted and died. The newspaper simply said, "Ooops." Obviously, their own point of view was more important to them then the lives of a few dozen people. Papers make up stories all of the time. This means that true Journalists and real Editors no longer exist. They have been replaced by people who can (barely) string together a sentence embellishing "facts" they agree with (or fabricating them as needed) and ignoring those they do not want to admit. Most "newspapers" are essentially huge editorial pages. Respect follows Integrity. If you lie in print you should be subject to the same punishment of any professional who lies, otherwise you admit you are not a real professional. You have no Intergity, you have no Respect. You have no real reporters, you have no newspaper. The Internet "Journalists" may not be any better, but the Newspapers have taken their stand and ex-newspaper Readers have decided that "Internet Journalists" are worth a try.
Can't say about other colleges, but at the time I was in college, at either Universitiy that offered degrees Journalism in Canada, students must take 2 years of undergraduate work, and must take briefer versions of what students with majors in the subject take, similar to what, say, other students might take outside their Majors. They won't even let you in to the College of Journalism and Communications (you're a Pre-Journalism student).
Specific classes in subjects: PoliSci, History, Art, English, Engineering, Commerce, a second Language, and Agriculture [one University had Ag as mandatory, the other had Comp Sci] are mandatory. For electives as a Pre-Journalism student, you can take any class from any college and provided you either have prerequisites, have permission from the prof, or it's a 100-level class, they must admit you, even if that means some other student in that college has to wait a semester. At the University I went to, that meant choosing from:
Agriculture; Arts & Science; Commerce; Dentistry; Education; Engineering; Kinesiology; Law; Medicine; Physical Therapy; Nursing; Pharmacy & Nutrition; and Veterinary Medicine; with affiliated colleges (on campus, credits transfer automatically) of Theology (Catholic, Lutheran, Pentecostal), Metis Studies; and Biotechnology.
The emphasis is gathering as much general knowledge as possible. If you do that, and pass with Honors on every class (no exceptions; you have to beg to retake if you get a non-Honors grade) then it's two years of learning how to write badly, produce TV and radio shows, etc. However, you still have to pass all those classes with Honors, or else fish around for some other degree your prerequisites might make you eligible for.
I find my tastes have changed and I still get the paper. And since I get most my international news online, I stopped reading the Chronicle (and it's biased writing) and switched to the Sacramento Bee. It covers most the issues and if sparce their website fills in details. Plus when I'm reading a newspaper, I'm doing it to relax. So the Bee with it's two pages of comics, interesting articles and main news with the important parts covered in decent detail. Enough to perk my interest if I want to later research it. But not so much that the brain hurts.
So I'll scan the front page, go to business, Scene & Comics, and then the Fry's AD, and Region... and then if I have time I'll scan the other section... checking sports if there was something I missed or what not.
Don't even get me started on the Napa Valley Register with pages of retractions and corrections equaling the rest of the paper. I don't even get it to line the bird cage... don't want to upset the bird. Mind they have a website in which is better quality then the actual paper, but no freaking images. They'll comment on what the picture shows... but no picture. gah!
Obligatory Links:
SacBee -> http://wwww.sacbee.com
Chronicle -> http://www.sfgate.com
Napa Register -> http://www.napanews.com
Patrick Havens (Mr. 573333 to you.) Graphic Artist / Coder / Father / Journeler
Believe it or not, some of us actually enjoy our lives every now and then.
I'm glad your enjoying all of this.
Newspaper publishers seem to be making the same kind of errors as the record industry. They seem to be overvaluing their product and treating obvious benefits of digital distribution as something people have to pay extra for, if possible multiple times.
e will cost you £130 for a year. There's only a 2 week searchable archive available for the hefty cost.
Take the UK national papers, they want the same money for a years subscription than buying a physical product. E.g: http://www.guardian.co.uk/digitaledition/subscrib
Once again I bet they're all scratching their heads wondering why people aren't rushing to sign up.
The original article talked about local papers, which at least in the UK are of poor to laughable quality. A paper containing 90% advertising with a couple of articles making a mountain of some local molehill (with a heavy political bias) is no more appealing online than it is in print.
Ame
Newspapers -- especially local ones -- have all sorts of issues when it comes to the internet. They're slow changing beasts and the people who run these things often technically minded. I think all of them could learn a lot from your write-up, but you're ignoring the elepant in the room.
Rob, you mention my local paper [The Washington Post] as one that's doing it right, or at least "better," although I believe they still have lots to learn. I agree, not only do they have a great site, but they makes a "profit" off of it.
There's only one problem. That "profit" is largely the result of reporting that is hugely subsidized by the paper. WashingtonPost.com is not paying for the correspondents in Baghdad or the reporter in the schoolboard meetings. They just take ask the paper for it.
People want to read lots for on the web, but the "concentration of advertising value" doesn't support paying a reporter to live in Baghdad and it sure doesn't buy him/her a security team, a bullet proof vest, a translator and the the sattelite link to file his 400 words story that will be largely summarized by 10,000 blogs in 10 minutes.
[See: Slashdot.org]
I don't particularly care if newspapers surivive, although I love newspapers and read the Post or NYT every day and it would be a shame to see them die. What I'm scared by is that the reporting they do will die with them because the internet so dilutes the advertising dollar that no one can afford to do real reporting.
Think you can turn to TV or radio? Well their real reporting is almost completly based off of newspapers. Think the blogs will take it up? Sure, in 200 word tidbits, but say goodbye to the investigative report on the local schools.
If you don't like newspapers, maybe you're not concerned. But they're the base of our news system. They're not perfect, but if all the newspapers went black today -- we'd lose a huge source of information.
As an aside, you mention keyword targeting as the basic solution to the profit problem. And this could be an answer, but expect to start reading a lot about Mesothelioma and Ipods or whatever keywords pay. Don't think newspapers aren't aware of this, they're just also aware of huge ethical consideration that also come along with them. In fact most newspapers go to great pains to do reverse keyword advertising and try to airline ads away from stories about airlines.
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
I can't speak for anyone else, but I know why I stopped reading the paper and listening to the radio.
1) Internet -- news is a lot more timely and a lot better customized for me. I can customize my content so that topics which interest me are readily available on a single page. I don't have to wade through dozens of pages of advertisement and tear-stained human interest stories that are irrelevant to me.
2) Credibility -- My local newspaper (the Miami Herald) has often run glowing articles when some big company is in the area. E.g., when Microsoft visited some local schools, the Herald ran front page articles full of press releases from Microsoft, yet ignored stories about the issues they were having with schools and donated computers. Not to mention the tech reporter's parroting of Microsoft press releases.
3) Irrelevance -- the newspapers have added to so many special-interest sections that it's largely irrelevant to me, a typical geek who was once a multi-newspaper subscriber.
4) Bland -- They try to appeal to everyone and end up making themselves bland. In some cases it's because they write to a 5th grade level. In others, it's that they are so afraid of alienating a portion of their readership that they won't print anything edgy. I'm not saying that they should become a bigger "New Times" (an alternative area newspaper), but at least cover something else besides the same pseudo-controversial topics... There's an old adage that you're doing a bad job as a journalist if the readership on one side of an issue thinks you're biased. You're doing a great job if people on both sides think you're biased.
I don't have time to be part of a local online community. I'd rather be in the real one. And when I want to read the news, I'll sit down with a copy of the paper.
And despite its other faults, the Minneapolis Star Tribune does a great job of keeping local news to the forefront, alongside national stories.
I'm not sure if I should mod you + funny, or if you are really serious.
Technical articles in papers have consistent factual flaws. War articles consistently focus thru the soda-straw lens of Vietnam (isn't it time to Move On, already? sheesh!) and ignore any progress in order to focus on the latest body count.
Walter Cronkite may have gotten away with that back when Ted Kennedy was learning how to walk away from drowning victims, but nowdays people can go directly to the source to get information. Abandoning any pretense of objectivity, Wally actually came on the TV news and told us he opposed Vietnam and that we were doomed (that helped us win, huh?)
People can only be made to believe bullshit when they have no competing source of information. Those days are coming to an end, fortunately, and the partisan lies and manipulation of MSM are now too obvious to miss.
Here is a really ugly link giving an example.
http://216.239.51.104/search?q=cache:h-9Rckh2DTYJ: sirhumphreys.blogspot.com/2005/10/bbc-uses-propaga nda-video-to-claim.html++BBC+uses+propaganda+video +to+claim+rebels+have+taken+control+of+several+wes tern+Iraqi+towns&hl=en
I assume this is because circulation ($) is based entirely on number of hard copies delivered.
I don't mind paying full price for the electronic edition but I don't have the patience to deal with some kid that only shows up on collection day expecting to be paid for papers that were never delivered.
Have not subscribed to a paper in over ten years. On line is the only way to go for me.
If you don't have clue about the subject you are discussing (with experts and whatnot), if you don't understand what a particular fact means/implies, how do you expect to write an accurate (nevermind coherent) report?
By listening to what people say and writing it down. You know, reporting. Or do you really think that people who write, say, home theater feature articles for Vogue are home theater experts? Or that someone who's going to write an article on buying a house must first buy a house? Or that only someone who has lost weight can write a weight-loss article?
Sure, if you're going to write an article on advances in particle acceleration for a technical journal, you'd need more in-depth knowledge, but the fact is that for the kind of reporting you see done by freelancers in newspapers and magazines, all you need is to be reasonably intelligent and be able to string words together into sentences. You do not need to be a firefighter, or have been trapped in a house fire, to write an article about a house burning down.
Moderation systems may fail for any political issue, where the readership seeks to pursuade or 'win' the argument, regardless of facts. I think it would be more like Crossfire, with loud, partisan but meaningless arguments getting moderated up.
Slashdot mostly discusses technical issues and much of the readership seems to seek information and analysis. Even for political issues, most share the same libertarian / anti-authoritarian / liberal views.
Imagine the NY Times using a moderation system, and the topic was something political, like Supreme Court nominee Alito: Left-wing moderators would mod their partisan comments up and right-wing partisan comments down, and visa-versa. Actual meaningful posts and analysis would get little attention.
If the forum affected public opinion, you can be sure that political operatives would game the system to get moderator points (e.g. using multiple logins from multiple IPs), increasing partisan moderation.
I'm not sure how it could work, without a benevolent dictator assigning mod points to perceived non-partisans.
Maybe the partisan nuts would balance each other out. Or maybe all readers could be assigned one "-1 Partisan Quackery" mod point per day.
After reading Rob's article, I'm left with the inescapable conclusion that he's trying to sell Slashcode to newspapers. Well, maybe not sell in the traditional sense — his pitch is more along the lines of "do what Slashdot does", and it comes off sounding a bit like someone trying to convince others to replace their failing religion with a new belief system.
Slashdot is not a good example of quality information on the web — and expecting readers to correct errors is simply laziness. The Slashdot moderation system is highly biased toward people who already have good karma, keeping the moderation scores low for new people who may have valuable contributions.
Nor are wikis the answer. I do not accept Wikipedia as a primary information source for my home-schooled children; they can use it as a guide to finding verifiable resources, but Wikipedia is prone to biases both subtle and gross. Furthermore, Wikipedia and Slashdot exhibit the inherent biases of the Internet, where it is easier to find quality information on "geekish" topics than it is on more mundane subjects. Separating the wheat from the chaff is onerous at times.
Newspapers need to be relevent by providing accuirate, reliable information, rather than trying to compete with the Internet for immediacy and quantity. As Rob correctly points out, they need to be more concerned with the quality of information, as opposed to its quantity.
All about me
FTA:
"Most people speak at a rate of between 130 and 200 words per minute. Most college students, according to a Virginia Tech student guide, can read non-technical material at 250 to 300 words per minute, and can increase that reading speed significantly with a little thought and practice. Listening to a city council meeting at 150 words per minute takes much longer than reading a meeting transcript at two, three, four or ten times that speed."
The article looked quite interesting for me but a bit too long. I copied and pasted the text from the web browser, converted it to pdf and used Adobe Reader text-to-speach feature (at 190 words per minute) while still looking at the article on screen. I'm not a native english speaker and the audiotory input helped me to quickly and completely read the article without my mind wandering into other tasks.
I wish that my morning (real dead tree) newspaper information was that easy to absorb. Or maybe I'm just clinging to my subscription and should move on into paperless streaming of news...
The way opinionated, blocks of posters/moderators hijack the discussion? This is more like something the nazis would pull of in the Berlin papers in the 1930's.
> By definition, anyone who reads a newspaper online at home can afford a
> computer and an Internet connection, which means they aren't at the
> very bottom of the economic pile
Or they are at school, library, work, etc.
I love reading my local newspaper. It lets me read the important news with more depth than the TV news has, and I can read it while having lunch or riding in a car.
My local newspper has a cover price of 50 cents daily. Recently, I discovered that the blank paper alone costs 45 cents per issue. The remaining nickel and the advertising pays for all of the other costs at the newspaper.
While I don't mind reading the news online, I still prefer the printed word. I've long thought that the newspaper could reduce expenses if only there was a product similar to a bunch of e-ink sheets bound in book or tabloid form that could be updated once a day. It could use the same layout as the print edition. While there would be some upfront cost involved in buying the bound sheets, probably paid by the subscriber, the product would pay for itself eventually in lower costs for both the newspaper and the subscriber. Ideally, you wouldn't be limited to using it just for your newspaper - you could download books and magazines as well. Frankly, I would prefer something like this rather than the old palm-style ebooks. Inventors, get busy!
Truth.
The saddest comment on this fact, is that even back at the turn of the 19th century, Thomas Jefferson wrote about this saying:
"The only truth to found in the newspapers is in the advertising."
As long as there is an agenda in your reporting, I will not pay for it.
on globeandmail.com - they call it "join the conversation".
:D
Rego required though
Example: today's most commented on story -
http://tinyurl.com/dee93
Are you talking about the power applied at American Media, Inc. in Boca? Yowsir, you insensitive.... And right there in Florida, too!
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Thanks!
Robin,
Slashdot is successful because people in the fast-changing field of computers need a huge amount of computer news.
I thought the article you wrote was interesting and well-written, but I feel uncomfortable with someone from such a sloppy organization giving advice.
Jim Lileks has been touting the solution for a couple of years now - and it's not (as the slashdot article proposes) by attempting to compete where your strengths are not. (We have a newish local paper that's been following that advice for a couple of years now... And it's circulation is growing, at the current rates of growth in that paper and decline of the 'traditional' paper, they'll cross in another few years.) The author of the slashdot article eventually gets around to this point but again confuses newspapers and web boards.
Smart people at newspapers. All of my experence has been that when kids can't seem to find the brains to pass anything else at school they go into Journalism or education. As messed up as that is....
I just have to say that this whole article is flame bait. Just exactly why does having years of experience on the internet give you the credibility to say that you know how things work and the old school print papers, with college educated career people running them, don't know wassup???
I mean, lets get real here. 30 million americans probably have more experience writing stuff on the internet than you do. This whole article is laughable. Its like my 12 year old little brother giving me advice on investing in the stock market. Its laughable.
My solution: so many people are retiring younger and healthier than ever before. These people should teach.
You are not alone in your idea. I know two different engineers who I have worked with at start-ups that have planned their lives around just such an idea. One even acquired an advanced education degree that he does not currently use. It gives me some hope for the future.
I too prefer a printed paper to its online counterpart. I agree that an online paper can provide way more content. However, I get tired of clicking a link, reading the article, going back, clicking another link, reading an article...I feel like I am missing articles when I read a paper online.
The biggest challenge for an online paper is to try and mimic a hardcopy reader's ability to survery the headlines, first paragraphs, and pictures of several articles and flip through a section very rapidly. In short, computer screens are too small to compare to the size of a newspaper to give you the overall view of the section. I think Yahoo is on to something with its showing a few sentences when you mouse over a headline. The online paper that solves this dilemma will be well on their way to having a viable online edition.
Nothing quite so satisfying as taking a dump while reading the Sunday paper. Online news will never be able to duplicate that kind of happiness.
Having worked for newspapers and other media groups for 15+ years, I've had a bit of experience dealing with the inner workings of such businesses.
Studies run by local newspapers I've worked for, indicate that people subscribe mostly for the local ads and coupons. Interesting point isn't it? Local papers are preceived by the consumer, as being a primary information vehicle for their shopping needs, *not* for local news, sports and business information.
So, you're right about the online circulars and coupons, but fear of canabalizing their print product, along with company inertia, have prevented them from executing this type of online business effectively. Thus, companies have done it for themselves. (i.e. www.shoprite.com). Now, we consumers have become accustomed to going directly to the source, as opposed to dealing with the newspaper middleman. So, we can peruse current product catalogs, specials and rebates directly from the manufacturer or their national, regional or local dealer's website. So, if the studies are accurate, this has knocked out the primary reason for subscribing to them in the first place.
For technically challeneged or those averse to computers and the Internet, companies again have cut out the newspaper middleman. Adding insult to injury, many companies (such has large home improvement and department store chains) have switched from delivering their circulars and coupons from newspapers' broader reach to direct mailing. The good old USPS. They buy a bit of consumar demographic info and then are able to more effectively target households, than they can with limited zones that newspapers break the market into. Thus, achieving greater results for their money.
Finally, as you've stated, they missed the online classifieds bandwagon and targeted Google-like text ads. So, profits have slipped and they have less money and incentive to try new "web" vehicles as you've suggested. They've lost their subscriptions, their classifieds, their circulars and their coupons. The downward spiral continues.
So, articles and related online dialogs you're proposing (an obviously good idea), aren't really what it's all about for the local papers. Even if management *could* will themselves into doing something like this, it takes a combination of championing, time, smarts, money, patience and articles that are interesting and relate to the consumer, to generate a culture / community that will maintain such a beast. Given newspaper managment mentality, it is highly unlikely that most local newspapers will ever have Slashdot-like success (even on a smaller local scale).
As you might imagine from reading this post, I personally don't see a long term future for larger, local newspapers. They've lost their caché in the public's eyes. There's no point when the ads, coupons, articles and info are available on demand from the net and directly from the source. In order to survive, they will need to again prove themselves viable by aggregating news and information, not as they've done in the past for the slow moving printed product, but for the fast paced, highly searchable, online world.
I think the chances are slim to none.
fyi.. the 'Move On' in moveon.org comes from the Clinton debacle.
I don't mind paying full price for the electronic edition but I don't have the patience to deal with some kid that only shows up on collection day expecting to be paid for papers that were never delivered.
I had that problem with them too. The other problem I had was that even when my dead tree paper was being delivered they wouldn't let me pay the paperboy or send them a check. They insisted on setting up automatic billing. I have a problem with automatic billing for _any_ vendor.
Have not subscribed to a paper in over ten years. On line is the only way to go for me.
I get most of my news from Google News now. What's annoying about that though is I miss out on all the local news. Short of dealing with the stupidity of the paperboy my only choice is to TiVo the local 6:00 news (I'm never home) and/or read the paper at work. We actually have a halfway decent locally owned CBS affiliate in these parts so that's where I get all of my local news. Sometimes they even give an interesting (read: local) perspective on national and international news too.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Requiring me to register to read the news on any website almost gaurantees with certanty that I will not actively return to your website. Require registration for active participation such as posting comments. but just to read, now way. Every time I try to read an article that requires me to register, I use a throwaway nonsense registration that will not be used more than once. I won't remember which editor's name I choose for my screen name and what explitive I choose for my password the next time I come back.
It is naive to say that there will always be newspapers. It is like saying there will always be record players.
That isn't a good comparison even though I do know what you mean from the context.
Actually, it would be like saying that there will always be books.
This is not a dream, not a dream...we are transmitting from the year 1-9-9-9.
As for the "contributing comments" suggestion, it's silly. Take a look at the kinds of comments put in at www.wjla.com - instead of being helpful, they're just people posting opinions and getting into flamewars. Without careful moderation, that's all anyone will get.
"What happened today that didn't happen yesterday. That's what news is. Start typing."
Raymond R. Coffey, Tribune Washington bureau chief, 1983
For a long time, Ray Coffey's definition, crystal clear and well stated as was everything the complete news pro uttered or wrote, served the business well. It was the kind of measure you could take to the bank because it was unerringly correct and dependable.
But the veteran Chicago newsman's definition doesn't work so well anymore. What happened today is generally old news by the time tomorrow arrives. It's what happened a few minutes ago, maybe an hour ago, that is news now.
This has created a lot of problems.
In the glory days, reporters could whittle away for five, six, seven hours at an event, parse it out, look for the contradictions and try to present an accurate, compelling account that would be published the next day.
The electronic world has now seized the turf of news immediacy.
On the Internet, on radio, on cable TV, news is "presented" as it happens, or just after it happens. That period of measurement, consideration, reporting, writing, cautious editing has generally disappeared from the context of the "breaking news" event.
He goes on to say that that's a bad thing.
Generally, opinion, in the form of lots of blogging, will be slathered all over it, like peanut butter so heavily spread you can't see the toast anymore.
If you drop back out, you might well lose the crucial context or be left with a set of "facts" that are, ultimately, not facts at all, but changeable parts of an ongoing story.
I am bringing this up because of a brace of e-mails that flowed from the coverage of Hurricane Katrina. A lot of people apparently have decided the "media" got the story all wrong, starting with reports that there could be 10,000 dead Katrina victims in New Orleans.
Well, first, Ray Nagin, mayor of New Orleans, actually said that. It became instant news, without reflection, without questioning, without much editing, in the world of electronic news reporting. Much, much later, the record was corrected.
Those following things closely understood that. Those who didn't were stuck with a wrong version of events.
When Katrina struck, most meteorologists and wannabe bloggers knew what intensity and ferocity of hurricane was going to strike. I'm sure there are people up and down the Mississippi coast that never knew what was coming, for one reason or another. What sort of information, if any, were they getting? When Katrina was downgraded to a Category 4, did people think, "Oh, it's not going to be so bad?"
This is a rambling post containing mere quotes from the editorial -- I encourage you to read the whole thing -- so I'll leave with what I liked the most.
You are deluding yourself if you think you know what actually happened by dropping in for a few minutes of the latest. It's not enough.
These media are serving very different purposes, and the sooner everyone recognizes that, the stronger the individual components of media will become.
You can grind up a great stewpot of developing events on a Web site. But you are going to be eating it one quick bite at a time, which doesn't lead to a very satisfying meal.
And for anyone who cared, no, the guy isn't a conservative Big Paper shill. Quite the contrary.
-Rob
Biblical fiscal responsibility
You're partially right. Remember the discussion we had about the death of books (The Death of...is a favourite "hammer/nail" theme around here)? The advantages of print still hold in different proportions when applied to newspapers. The main reason Internet delivery of the news works is that it brings some advantages over print, and we're quite tolerant of it's disadvantages to the point that we think the Internet should be the solutions to all problems that vex us (read a slashdot "content provider" article sometime).
BTW all the talk about newspapers editorial shortcomings are a bit pointless. That's a people problem and the Internet isn't going to magically solve that.
I read this with an arched eyebrow as /. (and much of the web-based/blog journalism) is one thing above all else: not a content provider. In fact they can be considered content-parasitic as /. makes advertising dollars over people reading content from somewhere else and comments provided for free by unpaid users. If one were to work in the hyperlinking of mainstream media providers by blogs or aggregators like /. we'd probably get a different picture: MSM readership has probably grown but has now been forced into a long-tail economy. Of course the problem is that they are shouldering the bulk of the cost (i.e. the actual reporting and maintenance of foreign bureaus) while sites like /. pay only for basic bandwidth and site-costs and use their content for free.
In the old 80/20 economy newspapers could offset this by having control of the market: to get any news, consumers had to pay for all of the news they deemed to print. Now users are just as able to find their news elsewhere, specialized down to just what they're looking for (the sport's score, the stock-tip, the local police blotter).
And the long-tail doesn't meant he death of the newspaper either, it just means a change in scope. A short, intelligent article on the East Flagstaff Chronicle might get linked up by thousands of blogs and register hundreds of thousand hits from an international audience that might have never read the paper (and probably won't ever again). Smart advertising (Google Ads, Slashvertisements) could customize to the suddenly exponentially larger (and divergent) readership. Local content and editorial that is easily aggregatable and paid via micropayment (or by targetted advertisement) would satisfy the consistent local demand and the papers would thrive (i.e. I'm not going to read the Baltimore Sun for analysis of my Cleveland Browns). This is how the wire services have always been (the only difference being that the papers would no longer be middlemen between wire reports and the readers).
There will always be a demand for international news/editorial and the well-worn names (NYT, WaPo, WSJ) can provide a similar service for news of national and international content. And as much as we like to think our opinions are ours alone, most of them are driven by these very MSM sources we read. Remove that and the content quality of these blog/web communities would drop off savagely from its already debateable level of quality. The only lethal fallacy would be to assume things have never changed, that they can still charge for the whole cow when we just want the milk.
What is music when you despise all sound?
Not all newspapers are behind the times. I'm fortunate to have worked for the Web sites of two news companies that really "get it" -- the Lawrence Journal-World in Lawrence, Kansas, and the Washington Post.
_ hughes/). FWIW, the operation has been covered by the New York Times and NPR.
The Journal-World's Web sites (including http://www.ljworld.com/ and http://www.lawrence.com/ allow comments on every story. Readers can have their own weblogs, and the site makes intensive database apps, on deadline, for all sorts of stuff -- like a database of every little-league game (e.g. http://www2.ljworld.com/game/2005/fields/langston
Similarly, washingtonpost.com is quite good. We just launched Post Remix, which encourages developers to put together apps with our RSS feeds. Check it out.
This whole discussion seems to be couched in terms of how newspapers can go about finagling their way into profitability in the information age. That's all well and good, if you happen to be a newspaper, but I myself am on the contrary a citizen, so I have a rather different set of priorities. For me the question is not whether newspapers can find some way to survive, but whether they are still good for society. If they are worthwhile, then I should seek to support their continued existence (even against forces which would render them obsolete). If on the other hand they are now on the whole a negative force in society, then I should seek to abolish them (even against their attempts to remain in business).
So let's consider for a moment the pros and cons of perpetuating newspapers into the modern era.
Pro: Some people prefer the aesthetic experience of reading from a printed page. (Theoretically, there's nothing stopping electronic text from being as readable, but technical challenges will remain for the next few years.)
Con: Printing on dead trees uses a lot of resources, and so is likely to be either environmentally unsustainable or expensive.
Pro: Here's an interesting one: Newspapers provide a free public service of displaying headlines that are easily visible when newspapers are stacked in a rack or displayed in a box. This may add some to the general awareness of world events, e.g. you may not pay careful attention to the papers, but if you go to the store one day and the paper says "WORLD WAR III DECLARED" then you'll probably notice.
Con: The headlines on papers are chosen not primarily to inform, but rather to sell papers. Often they're fairly uninformative teases.
Pro: Newspapers provide a human-edited view of the world, meaning that they may tell people about things that they wouldn't have thought to learn about on their own.
Con: The humans who do the editing are human, meaning that they are subject to biases: Personal political opinions, advertiser pressure, whim.
Pro: Like anything usual & familiar, newspapers have an inherent conservative (not in the political sense) force. Familiar things are often emotionally reassuring. They remind people of their childhoods, and give us a collective sense that everything is safe and taken care of.
Con: Anything conservative can restrain positive change. In the worst cases, conspiracies (often informal) between newspapers and corrupt leaders maintain power arrangements which would be better abolished. But even when the papers are honorable and independent, their inherent inertia may resist healthy social transformations.
Pro: Holding up a broadsheet newspaper in front of you in a public place is one way to establish a boundary and give yourself more personal space.
Con: Newspapers are a major source of litter.
On the whole, it's my opinion that newspapers are well on the way toward being rendered obsolete by technology-- but they're not there yet. There are a lot of subtle cultural roles played by newspapers which we would be well advised to carefully examine.
For instance, the role of creating public awareness of events through splashing dramatic headlines. I believe that this role could be served much more effectively through modern technology, such as screens or LED tickers in public places displaying the latest news. It could be, but so far it hasn't been. So we ought to look at things like that closely, and see what lessons we can learn before closing off this chapter of our history.
<3
If you were my sig, you'd be reading yourself right now.
I prefer to curl up on the sofa in winter with the weekend newspaper and a cup of tea. I hate reading articles on my PC. But my local newspaper is fairly poor (IMO) so I find myself buying a copy less and less as time goes by. They recently moved their TV guide from saturday to sunday, which meant I had a choice to make. So I stopped buying the sunday paper, as 90% of its content was just a waste of time and held no interest for me.
Newspapers are becoming irrelevant but I think personally, that can change by improving quality. I don't care about the Style section or the home decorating section. I enjoy local and international news, business, technology, arts & entertainment and the car section. But overall the quality will keep me coming back. Though it's odd to think that I'm happy paying CAN$45 a month for internet access but I won't pay a buck every sunday to buy the paper. Ah well!
But there are times when you will also seek out those same ads. End of year sales, buying a car, art festivals. The point is that add carriers must focus on creating virtual market places, without being obnoxious. I think this is the key to Google's success.
Papers already have local add placement orginizations. That have unique potential to create high quality local advertizing.
Dupe! I just wanted to be the first one to say it so that when this article is posted again in a few hours I can be sure to be the first to have said it!
Dupe!
And the first to say it a second time!
The issue isn't journalists...it's businesspeople. Journalists cover news; they don't strategize on how to reach new audiences or increase circulation. It's the business side of the newspaper that's managed to miss the rise of the Internet.
Penny - plain text accounting
A truly Web-hip newspaper would not only allow but encourage reader comments on all of its stories, not just on a blog or two. With thousands of readers as fact-checkers, mistakes would rarely go uncorrected for long, and if there was any perceived bias in a controversial article, reader comments would make sure the other side got heard. Even better, a reader who witnessed an event the paper covered would be able to add his or her account of it to the reporter's, which would give other readers a richer and deeper view of it.
Print newspapers don't WANT the corrections.
Readers pointing out errors are the last thing people like Paul Krugman want. And what about Mary Mapes and Dan Rather (granted, TV media, but still, the point remains)? Look at their reaction when they made a whole story based on fake documents.
The current media THRIVES on their biases. They don't want other opinions out there.
-john
Slashdot: you'll not find a more wretched collection of villainy and disreputable types...
The issue, ultimately, was a corporate parent that pursued a broad "Internet strategy" that completely pissed away any chance for its individual newspapers to build their own web sites and learn the lessons Robin has just summarized so well. Instead, they jammed content from numerous papers into a single web portal they believed might have enough critical mass and page views to attract national advertisers.
Now those local papers have no Internet infrastructure of their own, no dedicated Internet staff, and no way to build a web site that focuses on their own community. Even if they read and understood what RobLimo has shared, I don't believe they're in any position to act on that knowledge.
I think history will view the consolidation of the news business into chain ownership as a fundamental mistake that moved key decisions further away from the readers and advertisers - the customers - who used the product and paid the bills.
RichM
Data Center Knowledge
"Intellectually consistent"
What people (bloggers and their fans) don't understand is that journalism deals with being able to write coherently, using facts, and as little bias as possible.
I think you *want* to believe this, but I just don't see that from many journalists I've been exposed to. In fact, I think the primary difference between a journalist and a movie maker is that the former doesn't have to pay his/her actors. In both instances, the end product is a *creative* act.
I became aware of this after watching my brother (who's a grad student in film) doing what he called "editing". "Editing" is a gross misnomer for what this process actually is: a highly creative act. Basically, the shots are the building blocks that are then highly and severely manipulated and coerced into a final product that causes the audience to suspend disbelief.
And journalists are somehow immune from this kick-ass power? The shots that are the building blocks of "journalism" are also "edited" into a final product, particularly for highly-produced, pulpit-like "news" programs such as "60 Minutes". I think journalists are keenly aware of the hold that they have over an audience staring blankly into a television screen at a super-polished, expertly-"edited" product.
Journalism is a real skill/profession that people such as yourself just don't understand.
On the contrary. I think I understand this peculiar institution quite well, and that's why I distrust it so highly. I think your elitist attitude comes from an individual whose losing his monopoly on being able to create alternative (and preferred) "realities". Then again, maybe you're not in the "journalism" business, in which case the reason behind your snobbery eludes me.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
Blogs are editorial, not reporting. How many bloggers actually go out and gather news--hard facts that were not know previously? Hardly. The basis for the vast majority of blog posts is a link to a news story, and then the commentary begins.
BTW you've somehow missed the most essential architecture element of any newspaper--the wall between reporting and editorial. I agree that a blogger's editorial is not inherently any better or worse than a newspaper editors. But as I said above, pretty much no bloggers compete with the reporting side of newspapers. And reporting is the lifeblood and essence of newspapers, not editorial. Without reporting there is not editorial or blogging. That's not arrogance, that's a fact.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Providing an Internet site is a mistake because, even if it is an incomplete copy of the paper publication, reading the Internet site lulls individuals into believing that they've read all the relevant parts of the paper publication - they will not buy the paper that day.
It's a simple formula and easy to adhere to.
You mean the arrogance of a Slashdot editor telling editors of more professional and more successful sites how to do their jobs?
:)
If Slashdot really is as unimportant as you imply it is, then why should you care what it says about anyone else? (Behold: the power of information slipping from the newspapers' fingers!)
You mean like when Slashdot editors merge their own opinions into the article summaries, arrogantly assuming that their biased opinion is hard fact, and arrogantly assuming that anyone cares what they think?
I think every Internet-savvy person is aware enough now to know that all sources of media, traditional or otherwise, have a viewpoint.
Most people not buying newspapers are instead getting their news from TV or the Internet. When they use the Internet it's for convenience, not because of a lack of 'elitism'.
That must be a comforting thought for you, but you have no way of showing that it is true. From what I read, charges of elitism in traditional news sources are so-talked out that it's become a boring refrain. Perhaps media elitism is not considered an "important" story in the sources that you usually frequent. I hardly wonder why.
How can you have the audacity to criticise newspapers for arrogance and elitism, and then hold blogs up as an alternative?
Perhaps because a blog got Dan Rather and Mary Mapes fired? That sure was a good day!
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
Sorry, this is the dumbest buzzword I have heard in years. I can't take your post seriously anymore, it just brings up memories of Maddox.
If these words were people, I would embrace their genocide.
They all seem to have some major backer that I don't feel I can trust to give me honest, unbiased news.
You don't want unbiased news.
I'm not trying to tell you what you want and don't want. I'm trying to state a fact of human nature. You don't want unbiased news. You want news that confirms what you already know (or, in some cases, suspect) is true. News that contradicts what you know is true is something that you will usually ignore or, in the rare case that you're feeling punchy, come up with counterarguments against.
This is not an attack on your character. Most human beings, myself included, are exactly like this. We don't need to be told The Truth. We already know The Truth. And we need to hear other people tell us that we're right because it feels good.
(That is also why I don't watch television news, but they have a whole other type of corruption going on there!!! *coughs..fox *coughs*)
You probably don't need me to tell you that FOX News is Lies, right? You already know that it's all Lies, and that's why you don't watch it. Am I close?
There's nothing wrong with this. Everyone does it. (Well, lots of people know that FOX News is The Truth, but I think you catch my generic drift.)
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
Don't get me started on auto billing (money grab); for me GMAC, Mass. Electric, and my Auto Insurance drive me crazy by only giving me the choice of mailing a paper check or giving them permission to access my bank account. There is some amount of satisfaction in controlling when and how much each vendor gets each month. For these three the price of a stamp is worth it.
I think I stopped watching the local TV news even before canceling my newspaper subscription;-) Maybe things have changed but there was too much chit-chat between the anchors and every third "news" story was meant to outrage the audience. Mostly get local news from the (not so) local news radio station. While only subtly different it works out better for me.
Back on topic; the newspaper industry appears to be afraid of change (who isn't). In some ways very similar to the **AA only the papers can not claim anyone is "stealing" their product. At least not to the same extent.
I wouldn't want to see the papers go away. There is some gratification in holding an "official" newsprint copy of the paper but I don't need that every day. Maybe the economys of scale won't allow the newspaper companys to run the presses at a reduced rate and still survive. In which case we may be stuck with the likes of CNN and MSNBC (or god forbid some j-random blog) for most our news in the future.
Great column, Roblimo. I've got 3 colleagues who're nth-generation newsies and my local paper's online subscription plan is essentially 'pay again for the same content' that even *I* won't buy (and I'd say I'm their prime demographic). Wanting to help 'em with constructive criticism, I had thought things through to answer this same question and many of my ideas were in my remarks. I'll be printing your column out and handing it to them.
I probably overlooked a few overlaps, but here are some ideas that I don't see you mentioning, tied to your 'community news' theme:
Take advantage of the web-news' ability to add color, and take advantage of locals carrying digital cameras everywhere. Don't be afraid to let your online edition gradually become indistinguishable from a streaming-content-enriched website for CNN or some TV station, even. After all, large color photos on newsprint is expensive and paper-based A/V streams are impossible -- but online, it becomes stupid-cheap. Rather than just web-publishing the same single-best image from last night's high-school game, have the best shot in the paper and then link to your website's five, ten or twenty best photos. Let readers write captions (to identify players, etc). Content-overload should be your motto everywhere: include edited highlights, unedited footage, streaming-audio archives of town meetings, etc. Embrace coral-cache and bittorrent, whereever possible. To use a business cliche, try to eat local TV's lunch!
While slashdot seems incapable of growing a substantial and credible trusted-expert base (sorry for the knock), it is reasonable for sub-million-population communities to grow a large, trusted group of regular readers that are recognized as impartial, interested topical experts, and grant them minor editorial powers. Rather than a 12-member reader's advisory board, aim for dozen or more such groups, each on a field of expertise or interest: town planning, public meetings, sports, crime, courts, restaurants, local politics, summarizers or aggregators of state or national political news with local impact, entertainment and music, outdoors/activities, events, technology, businesses, state news aggregators, national or international news aggregators, etc. For example, let any 'vetted' enthusiast provide any local sport stats, even if you've never covered scuba-lacrosse before. Unlike with large anonymous sites, locals face the loss of privileges and a tarnished daily reputation if they act unscrupulously or doctor things, so they usually WON'T! The goal here is twofold: you answer the locals who regularly complain you're not covering 'their' favorite news adequately, and you embrace a commonly-stated strength that newspapers have over other media: readership studies consistently show that people turn to newspapers for DETAIL and DEPTH in the stories that interest them.
Never forget: a news *website* doesn't need to restrict the quantity of news or data... you're not limited to a single page of local sports in the online edition. Find ways (like the many-advisory-boards above) to enable trusted locals to write and peer-edit or moderate things. Spend your editorial time choosing the gems that ripple up in those categories to your printed edition, rather than restricting your content because you're overworked.
I didn't see roblimo mention anything about NY Times vs. WSJ editorials: the former has deemed editorials 'premium' content, the latter gives them away freely. Early results seem to show that the WSJ got it right: pushing editorial content acts as a draw to a news website while increasing a paper's prestige and increasing their impact on public discourse. Charging for it so far has caused NYT to diminish both their ability to influence public policy and their overall readership. Recognize that anything that grabs eyeballs (and ad viewership) increases ad revenues.
Color reprints (of images or archive pages) are an income prospect (Local TV stations, the same thing goes for your news/video footage!) Whe
Oh, that's nothing. Long before I started reading news online using my TRS-80 and 300 baud hand dialup modem, I was receiving reports direct by teletype using a teletype machine in the basement of my parents house (I was 15 at the time, not some hopeless basement-dwelling geek). Oh, the sound of the clacking keys and the smell of the fresh ink splattered on not-so-fresh paper! Oh the memories!
In the rural area I live in there is one major newspaper that covers the region. The paper has been around for over 100 years and must have tens of thousands of articles and could build a massive database of information and use the web to showcase this information. A hundred years of history and photos from a region could attract visitors from all over the world. The website could potentially fill 100,000+ pages.
Instead,
They started with a pretty basic website that only covered the daily headlines. They finally revamped the website a few years ago and added the ability to look up some history and read the dialy paper online. When they updated the website, they made it subscription only except for subscribers of the newspaper. Of course, if you get the newspaper, why would you want to read it online. If you enjoy reading it online, why get the physical paper. If you don't get the physical paper, then you must pay a monthly fee to view the online content.
Even with the subscription, their online paper is small, has hardly any useful information. History only goes back a few years and contains no photos. They have no image gallery, all images are very small when they even include images. They not only don't have any type of community interaction on the website, they hide their email addresses so they don't get hassled with stupid questions (I emailed them with a question and told them how difficult it was to find their email address, thats when they told me they don't like to be hassled with questions). On top of everything else their site uses flash for the main menu and looks like a 4th grade class website project.
A few years ago I applied for a webmaster job at the newspaper and was turned down without an interview. They probably hired someone with a bachelors in english who took an html class in college.
I saw an opportunity to take advantage of their completely ignorant approach to a website. I started my own local website. I started it about 3 years ago and am still going strong
1) Bought an expensive digital camera with a shitload of memory and on the weekends I travel around the region taking photos, ~25,000 so far. I then go through my photos and pick the best and photoshop them into perfection.
2) Using a public domain mapping service, I create custom maps with directions for each city, cemetery, school and so on.
3) Bought a cheap GPS and take coordinates and altitude everyplace I go to take pictures. If someone wants to go stand in the exact spot I took a picture from, they can.
4) Didn't set up a forum but more of a community message board were people promote their local business, website, event or whatever for free.
5) Searched the internet and created a database of every local website I could find. New websites can fill out a simple one line form to get their websites added.
6) I write one article a week posted on the front page with information about a place to visit in the area or a recent major event. I also include plenty of photos.
7) I built a local search using the hand picked websites for the area ~1,500. It's not as powerful as a google search but their is 0% spam in the results.
8) I just use google for the ads. If a local place wants to put ads on my website, they can deal with google. I am actually shocked at the amount of local ads through google since I am the only website I know of in the region that uses adsense. No sales staff, no dealing with customers, no haggling over prices, and no bounced checks all equals more time to add content.
So on just the weekends, with a staff of 1 and almost no budget, I have built an interactive local website with ~6,000 pages of free searchable content covering the same region as the local newspaper. They have a staff of 75+ (not including paper boys) in a large downtown office building. For non-subscribers, their website has 3 small daily photos and headlines with news that cuts off after the first paragraph.
Years ago somebody did a study on newspaper consoldiation. They found that the second (and third or whatever) newspapers in cities got eaten by the bigger paper or went out of business in pretty much the same way. They dubbed it the death spiral. Basically, the newspaper business guys did the usual business thing (no matter what the editorial slant or quality of the paper): cut costs to make (or increase) profits. The problem was, they did that by cutting value -- cutting sections or reporters or whatever. The readers, seeing less value, left. The advertisers, seeing fewer readers, left too. So they business guys had to cut costs, which they did by cutting value...
There were the exceptions that proved the rule by fighting back with better writing and more value and winning.
It seems to me that the author sees a similar inability to recognize a fundamental change in the value their publication offers in a changing marketplace. Before, things changed for various reasons, but the upshot was that, in all but the biggest cities, the market would only support one newspaper per city. Now, the marketplace is changing again, and the newspaper business guys are again failing to see the change for what it is and how to operate around it or profit from it.
This reinforces my opinion that newspaper business guys may be very intelligent, but they're not very smart. It also reinforces my opinion that the term "newspaper business" should be recognized as an oxymoron. Good reporting is, or should be, antithetical to good business. The fact that somebody latched onto newspapers as an advertising vehicle is probably the worst thing to ever happen to journalism, and it might be that blogs are a return to the pre-let's-make-this-newspaper-a-business days of journalism. Which means that onlines ads in blogs are...Ah well. It was good while it lasted.
Lastly, I have a question for those who think it has to do with the political bent of today's newspapers: Why didn't you just call Rush Limbaugh? It may be that journalistic balance is gone, but that's more likely because the whole country is polarized, not because journalists are natural-born left-wingers. More and more (it seems to me) people only want to see things they know they are going to agree with. Talk radio, blogs, personalized news portals and feeds all reinforce this be allowing people to edit out the opposition before they ever see or hear any of it. The result is that much of the population seems to think that partisan politicians should be the model for intellectual honesty and balance.
I did learn one thing from Rush Limbaugh and his fellow failed wrestling announcers, though: "mega dittoes" is English for "Baaaa."
See ya,
joe f.
http://www.mississauga.com/ is one that I think covers a lot of the points that were addressed in the article. And they've been doing it for years.
Actually, a person who knows physics well and can write tolerably (say, Lee Smollin or Roger Penrose or any one of a large number of lesser known or virtually unknown physicists) would be able to convey a new physics concept or describe some ongoing physics research much better than some journalist who doesn't know Schroedinger's equation from Maxwell's equations or what "those funny upside-down triangles with arrows over them" are.
The biggest problem with journalists, and yes I have known several, is that they think they actually know something and are qualified to report on anything. When you want to write an article, what's the use of finding an expert if you don't really understand what the hell is saying to you??? That's why in articles about science, religion, philosophy, politics, hell even the spelling of people's names, there is so much incorrect information because so many journalists are arrogant snobs who don't know what they are talking about.
OK. Now hold all the bloggers you know out there to the same standards, criticisms and repercussions that people in mainstream media face. How many do you think will survive?
:)
The cream will rise to the top, now that we have a much, much, much more open market on the dissemination of information. The reason why the mainstream media faces the standards, criticisms, and repercussions that you dislike is because of the incredible power that they (used to) wield.
I'm not saying that such mistakes by the mainstream media are excusable. It's just that if you compare the amount of objectivity and professionalism present in blogs and the mainstream, the mainstream is the obvious winner.
If it really was so "obvious" that the mainstream media is more objective and professional than alternative soures of media, why would you need to say it? Most everyone now knows that every source of media has a viewpoint. Mainstream media is not nearly as objective and professional as you want them to be, nor will any claims (or facades) or said objectivity and professionalism save them from their imminent demise. Almost anyone can be a journalist now, and a meritocracy will arise. In other words, what happening in software (anyone can write software and publish it via the Internet) is happening in the field of journalism. It must be a painful and frightening time for members of (and supporters of) the mainstream media.
So blogs got a couple up on the major news sources. Big fucking deal.
Some "non-objective", "unprofessional" bloggers got Dan Rather, one of the most powerful names in the mainstream media, FIRED for being, of all things, non-objective and unprofessional. If that isn't a big fucking deal, then I don't know what is. But I understand why you want to downplay it. Perhaps you also understand why I like to talk about it with schoolgirl-like glee. My, how the mighty have fallen!
So that means it's better to get news from The Drudge Report rather than The New York Times or The Washington Post? Not bloody likely.
That, of course, merely your opinion, and it won't hold back the flood of people who, in increasing numbers, prefer to get their news from sources other than the New York Times and the Washington Post. Their readership will continue to decline and there's absolutely nothing you can do to stop it. Posting elitist messages on Slashdot certainly won't help your cause!
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
...all you need is to be reasonably intelligent and be able to string words together into sentences...
So this is pretty much all there is to journalism...? Guess we've been making big fuss about nothing (journalism) then.
If they can't even understand what the expert is saying, how do you want them to use they "excelent" writting skills? Yes, some random guy with average writting talent and deep knowledge of the subject is better situated to report a fact that some journalis with "excelent" writting skills that can't recognize the fact, understand it or even know what this expert is talking about.
Rethinking email
really?
really? as long as you can write coherently then mastering the latest debates on whether or not string theory is a dead end is a doddle and you can be a science reporter? you can, in a matter of hours, learn to discern what constitutes news out of the Linux camp? and bias? writing he-says she-says nonsense parroting the talking points of political parties does not constitute the elimination of bias...
journalism schools seem to teach the avoidance of stating objective facts as facts even if that renders one side of a debate as clearly being untruthful... the great age of print journalism existed before the recent trend for 'journalism' courses...
it is like these community 'computer courses' that teach people to use some obscure piece of software that bears no resemblance to what they actually use in real life... useless but once you get enough people invested in saying that they are valid then no-one dare challenge them...
but it is time to call bullshit on journalims studies
"When no-one around you understands start your own revolution and cut out the middle man"
I highly disagree with the idea of keeping it purely local. Sure people can go to other sources, but if you are a news site, most of your traffic is going to be from other people at their workplace; they don't have the time or want to risk being seen by their boss to sift through 5 different sites for their news. You need to provide a relevant mix, but make it unique and hand pick those stories as opposed to running a bland autonomous AP feed. Even AP runs material not found in the mainstream if you dig hard enough - and your readers will respect you for it. You dont have to inundate and it should never eclipse local coverage - but dont make the mistake of blowing it off. Your neighbor down the street may have a son or daughter serving in Iraq; dont make the mistake of thinking that world events dont matter to yur local readrship. Besides, they can't comment on news stories on those big mainstream sites, but they can and often do with us. Most of our biggest discussions are on world stories. Web content managers should well look into the work of Doug McGill and his work in tying global trends to local interests. As passionate as I am about the hyperlocal trend, I'm equally passionate on this point too.
I've documented our efforts and philosophy on participatory media on our new media blog at http://newmedianewmexico.blogspot.com/. Anyone interested in these issues is welcome to take a look at our experiences.
best and blessings Carry Joy - build Hope - offer love
This isn't insightful. It's just ignorant. One might also ask why slashdot has lost readership -- to much ignorance being branded insightful and getting through my filters.
People that read newspapers are interested in information - not community. When I pick up a newspaper I do that because I can filter what I want to read and when I want to read it. I really don't care who's opinions are on the OpEd page, nor the columnist's names (although I'm starting to get familiar with a few writers).
I think the /. crowd is focused too much on building communities around information. Communities are great - I'm a huge advocate - but they have their place and a newspaper site isn't it.
Newspapers are still important and they don't need an on-line presence to be successful today. I believe that a newspaper's survival is based on providing credible, non-biased, insightful reporting - nothing more.
Many people have complaints about registration for sites however it, obviously, helps the site by allowing them to show how many readers they have in order to support the price to advertisers, etc. The problem is that readers have no incentive to register at all and thus resent having to do something which is, at the very least, a nuisance, and in many cases seen as a lot worse.
I'd like to see an online newspaper actually make use of their computing infrastructure in a productive, helpful, fashion and make registration actually profitable for the end-user at the same time. I should be able to register with a news site and fill out preferences saying what types of news I want:
(1) Any Computer Networking related news world-wide.
(2) Any news about Apple Computers in the US.
(3) Any news about Middle Eastern Music in California.
(4) All local news for my town, except for sports related news.
The site would then create my news site built for me on-the-fly from the news service's database. I should also be able to RSS subscribe to any news articles which match my personal criteria.
This would give me some incentive to register with the site and the site would, in turn, have a good idea of how many people are really accessing their articles.
Finally, if the site doesn't allow motion ads, which seriously distract the reader, I wouldn't have any problem with the ads being included into the articles. Of course, if they really want to be progressive, they could allow the reader to control what types of ads they see and thus ads would be a lot more valuable.
I'd mod you as funny if I didn't actually want to respond to your drivel.
Abandoning any pretense of objectivity, Wally actually came on the TV news and told us he opposed Vietnam and that we were doomed (that helped us win, huh?)
Right off, I can see that you have no clue as to what journalism is about. A journalist is not supposed to "help win wars". They're supposed to report the facts in a cohesive manner. People who "help win wars" are called "soliders", and they carry guns, not cameras. It sounds as if you actually want journalists to push government propaganda. Wow.
And you're exactly right. In that situation, Walter Cronkite did abandon any pretense of objectivity. That wasn't journalism. Do you think that people are stupid enough to think that what every single talking head on TV says is fact? Do you think that he was trying to pass off his very well-educated opinion as fact? Of course not. You're citing an example of editoralizing. Not journalism.
So then, your link to a web site with somewhat insane conspiracy theories written by a guy named "Al". So let me see... do I consider news from the BBC, which has college educated journalists, photographers, editors, and fact checkers to be more accurate than a blog written by some guy who calls himself "Al"? You bet your ass I do. If that's what you call good information, then I know this guy who stands on the street corner near here that you can talk to. He has this great story about pink elephants that I think will prove to you, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that the CS Monitor makes up their stories.
You can keep your tin foil hat, thanks. There are good and bad sources of news, as there have always been, but to think that "Al" and his buddies sitting at home have discredited the entire field of journalism, is, quite honestly, one of the most batshit things I have ever read here on Slashdot.
Don't get me started on auto billing (money grab); for me GMAC, Mass. Electric, and my Auto Insurance drive me crazy by only giving me the choice of mailing a paper check or giving them permission to access my bank account. There is some amount of satisfaction in controlling when and how much each vendor gets each month. For these three the price of a stamp is worth it.
I feel bad for you just having to do business with GMAC. They rank up there with Capital One in my book.
I'm a bit luckier. My credit union has a free billpayer service. Any bill that I have the option of sending a paper check to I can pay via this service. I can even add my own payees that aren't on the official list. A lot of the vendors are setup for electronic payments -- meaning they get my payment the day after I send it. The others actually get a paper check in the mail with my account number.
I'm very happy with that arrangement because I control the transactions. I've never had a problem with pushing electronic transactions. I just have a problem when they get to pull them from my account. For that reason I don't even have direct deposit of my payroll -- because my company has a rather draconian agreement that gives them the power to debit my account if they feel that they have made an error.
You should look and see if your credit union or bank has a similar billpayer product. It's worked out well for me :)
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Not to self aggrandize, but I wrote a similar piece, though shorter, written in the same vien as it applies to newspapers and the threat/opportunity of eReaders and other around the corner technologies. You can read my thoughts and how they dovetail into Roblimo's own conclusions at, www.techarati.com, the article is titled "Print is Dead".
We are all born originals - why is it so many of us die copies? -Edward Young, poet (1683-1765)
You work at a newspaper and can't spell "seperate"?
Sorry, Rob. You are NOT a reporter, and what you do do can not really be called "editing" either.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
TV ADS: PVR skip.
Marketing people and ad agencies have navel lint for brains. Don't they understand why people tune in to or record the Super Bowl? It's not for the pregame, the half-time, or any of the pagentry. Note to marketing people and ad agencies on
_________________________
RADIO ADS: Change station.
There's a new station here in Indy which is playing older songs (not "golden oldies" and not the "Classic Rock" played on the station which Bob & Tom are from (for those of you who hear them in syndication). They post the station owner's cell phone number on the air and he asks for feedback. One commercial break an hour. Their ratings are climbing faster than Spiderman with a bad case of the runs and the bathroom is on the roof.
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NEWSPAPER: Never buy.
Six every day, thank-you. No subscriptions. If somethings missing (e.g. usually the NYTimes, which rides a bus from Chicago, or the Chicago Tribune, which comes East from Central Illinois), I don't want them to extend my subscription one day. I want that issue and know how where every paperbox which might have either is located within the entire city. If I know it hasn't been delivered due to weather, I have friends who can get the correct edition (remember, these are published around the clock) and send them to me. Paying the cover price is worth the peace of mind to keep my compulsion happy. Magazines? Whichever I get first. Scientific American subscriptions arrive two weeks before the issues hit the stands, so a subscription it shall be. If something arrives after the newsstand, then I'll pay full price to get it first. Timing is everything. If you aren't a compulsive, voracious reader, you won't and can't understand.
_________________________
MOVIE THEATER ADS: Show up 10 minutes after start.
The movie industry has pushed brooms up their collective posterior so far they've scrambled their brains. They make a *lot* of money from concessions. (just like bars and restaurants make money from alcohol). If it's a good movie, people aren't going to leave their seats to buy more to eat or drink. They need to look back at what used to happen: intermissions. Take a five or ten minute break, drain the bladders, buy more to eat & drink, then resume the movie. During that time, they can play the local ads they play before the movie. I don't mind trailers before the movie, but the ads for real estate agents need to be punched up a bit. There's no creativity there.
So this is pretty much all there is to journalism...?
Of course not. While I phrased it flippantly, the ability to string words together into sentences is decidedly non-trivial. My point is that writing skill and intelligence are far more important than topical knowledge for a journalist or freelance writer. Topical knowledge *helps*, without a doubt, but to suggest that a writer for a general-interest publication has no business writing about things with which he has no experience is just outlandish.
My local paper once carried a series of articles on a rape victim and her quest for justice. Do you think that the reporter was unqualified to write the series because he was never a police officer? Because he was never raped? Because he was never a therapist or a lawyer? Or a rapist?
Writers constantly deal with areas of expertise outside of their own. It's part of the job.
You're making up my feelings to try and support your own argrument. I don't dislike the standards, criticisms and repurcussions that the mainstream media faces at all. As a matter of fact, I believe they should face more of them. The problem is that blogs face none of these, and yet they are taken as the gospel truth by their readers.
If it really was so "obvious" that the mainstream media is more objective and professional than alternative soures of media, why would you need to say it?
Actually, I am kind of shocked that I do.
Most everyone now knows that every source of media has a viewpoint. Mainstream media is not nearly as objective and professional as you want them to be, nor will any claims (or facades) or said objectivity and professionalism save them from their imminent demise. Almost anyone can be a journalist now, and a meritocracy will arise.
Yes, Captain Obvious. Every source of media has a viewpoint. Yes, mainstream media make factual mistakes and skewed reporting that they must be called on. But they, to a much greater extent than your beloved blogs, derive their power from how well they can establish that they are doing accurate, honest journalism. Why are you so sure that blogs will thrive or fail based on this type of merit? Many blogs I see become successful by pandering to an ill-informed, opinionated group of people (left-wing, right-wing, whatever), saying the most outlandish statements they can think of to appeal to them, and keeping the echo-chamber going. And since they don't need to live up as the same standards as other news sources, they get away with it. What kind of merit is that?
Some "non-objective", "unprofessional" bloggers got Dan Rather, one of the most powerful names in the mainstream media, FIRED for being, of all things, non-objective and unprofessional. If that isn't a big fucking deal, then I don't know what is. But I understand why you want to downplay it.
I think it's great that somebody called powerful people in the mainstream media on errors. FANTASTIC! STUPENDOUS! Give yourself and your fellow bloggers a big round of applause on these individual victories. Honestly. But now consider how many of you would get into hot water if held to the same standards that they (correctly) were and you might not feel so hot anymore. I'll acknwoledge that bloggers can be vital for checking out and correcting items missed by the mainstream. But blogs becoming the primary source of news for the general populous would be... not good.
Insisting on healthy doses of accuracy and (at least an occasional attempt at) objectivity in all media is not "elitism".
Happy people make bad consumers.
What people (bloggers and their fans) don't understand is that journalism deals with being able to write coherently, using facts, and as little bias as possible.
Wow, that's amazing! Do you know where I might be able to see some journalism, cuz all I see now is stenography.
1. There are varying degrees of journalism. Calling "60 Minutes" "journalism" is like calling somebody who whipped up a blog a computer programmer. Even if you want to look at 60 Minutes as "journalism", just because your brother and anybody else with a computer can edit video doesn't necessarily mean that it's done by real journalists. Better still, there's lots and lots of real journalism that doesn't rely on video in any way, whatsoever.
2. Elitism? Snobbery? Because I don't think that anyone who writes a blog is a "journalist"? Call it what you will. I also don't call my mom a software engineer because she can create an email. To call a blogger a "journalist" is to shit on every real journalist that has ever existed. A "blogger" is somebody who writes a diary online. It's nothing more than narcissism at its worst.
You're not a journalist. That doesn't give you the right to call yourself and every other 75 IQ person who can write a scathing expose on their adventures baking bread a "journalist". You have no right to insult journalists that way.
I'm sure many of you have read Alvin Toffler's book The Third Wave, one of his best books.
:-)
One particular chapter of that book was extraordinarily prophetic--"De-masssifying the Media." In that chapter, Toffler wrote that as communications technologies improve, the age of a few companies completely dominating the dissemination of what you read in newspapers/periodicals, what you hear on radio and sound recordings, and what you see on TV and the movies will come to an end. Since the publication of The Third Wave in 1979, look at what has happened:
1. Videocassette recorders (and increasingly digital video recorders) have pretty much made the idea of prime time meaningless, since recorders allow you to time-shift TV programming to whatever time later you want to watch the program. As a result, instead of wondering what people were saying about all the latest plot revelations in Lost, you can play back your VCR or DVR recording and find out yourself.
2. Pre-recorded home videos--especially since the arrival of the DVD in 1997--has substantially altered movie theater patronage. Except for a few "event" films (e.g., The Lord of the Rings movies) and high-quality screening rooms with THX-certified sound systems and Kodak-certified projectors, who wants to fight the exorbitant price of tickets, the exorbitant price of concessions and the annoyance of other audience members when you can enjoy the movie in peace at home?
3. The development of cheap and powerful desktop computers plus cheaper printing press operations has made it possible to print more magazines for a niche audience, hence the reduction of influence of the major newsmagazines. Look at the magazine stands of any major bookstore nowadays--most of these magazines couldn't exist without today's computer and cheap printing press technology.
4. The rise of proprietary online services in the 1980's and the arrival of the public Internet in the early 1990's has really caused a major revolution in the dissemination of information. We can now disseminate information at breathtaking speeds that makes the major media outlets--even newspapers--look ultra slow in comparison. Also, the public Internet has begun to offer services that could SERIOUSLY cut into newspaper revenue; Craigslist and eBay are doing major end-runs around newspaper classified ads in a big way already, and several Realtor companies have begun to put their public listings of homes for sale online, also a major blow to newspapers.
5. The rise of high-quality cheap camcorders using the MiniDV format has been a huge boon for small-time filmmakers. Why do you think film festivals are discovering many surprisingly talented filmmakers that use these "cheap" equipment to make very good films? And the small-time filmmaker will soon get access to low-cost high-definition camcorders that (in my humble opinion!) by 2008-2009 could equal the US$150,000 digital cameras used by George Lucas for the second and third Star Wars trilogy films. In the long run, this could hurt the power of the major studios because the smaller filmmakers will incur far less overhead costs in terms of production.
All these changes have seriously buffetted the mainstream media, especially in the last ten years. In the case of newspapers, they have to recognize this and start changing their format to recognize that newspapers can be use to write longer, more thoughtful stories. Also, the powerful watchdog capability of users on the Internet from both political Right and Left will start forcing newspapers to write stories that cover both sides of the arguement equally.
I feel a little responsible in hurting the ad industry in my region.
I don't. Kill 'em all and let Google sort them out, I say. If there's a chance I can get through a day without being bombarded with thirty-seven gazillion screaming exhortations to buy products and services I wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole, I say go for it.
If I want to buy something, I'll check the Yellow Pages or online review sites. If there's a new product out that I would want to have, then trust me, I'll hear about it - either through the channels I monitor or the people I talk to.
In a world of ever-increasing instant information, consumers have no need for an advertising industry. That doesn't mean that we're not still being subjected to its annoying blaring as long as businesses think there's something to gain by using them.
Well done! It sounds like you do nice work, maybe now your local paper will get up and start growing again.
We have a fair number of free advertising only or mostly papers in our area. The truth is in the local paper about all I read was the comics, Ann Landers, and the letters to the editor. There was a time I was reading the local articles pretty consistanly, but it not to often your city's mayor gets sent to prison for child molesting.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
If you don't know and understand the background of the subject matter then how do you ever hope to be able to know if your getting the facts, carefuly selected facts to spin an article in a desired agendas direction or a bunch of fadist bullshit? Oh sorry I forgot every backwater paper has a Lou Grant type Editor to sort it all out.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
In short, people want USA Today "info graphics", unscientific user polls, and rambling comments by John Q public which are short and often funny instead of in-depth news reporting. (What do I care if the Earth has warmed .001 degrees, what did Paris Hilton do now???) Hmmmm....I dont know if this means the death of the newspaper but rather a shift from in-depth articles to more light entertaining/practical pieces like the New England Courant (think Ben Franklin's Silence Dogood pieces).
... the ability to string words together into sentences is decidedly non-trivial. My point is that writing skill and intelligence are far more important than topical knowledge for a journalist or freelance writer...
... Topical knowledge *helps*, without a doubt, but to suggest that a writer for a general-interest publication has no business writing about things with which he has no experience is just outlandish...
...
Writing skill and intelligence are important skills for most professions. What makes journalism different from, say, creative writing?
As outlandish as this from the post by NineNine (to which I was replying):
All of the subject matter can be learned pretty easily
Let's take your rape incident example. It's one thing to report who was raped, when, the police officer handling the case, etc. Another to wrap the incident around the rising sex crimes in the town, the sociological implication of the trend, etc. Is simple reporting different from journalism? Where's the line? Some gal trained in accouting goes on to report a rape incident, and then plug in her version of the victim's psychological profile, let's say. Or a guy trained in art history gets assigned to report a newly published GDP numbers. If they reported only the bits that they actually understood, they won't be filing more than a paragraph for each story. Given the resources and times at the reporters' disposal for a given story, plus the fact that the journalism axiom, according to NineNine's post, that subject matters knowledge is incidental, what's the chance of anything more than verbatim copy being reported (or more likely, nice sounding misinformation)?
Writers constantly deal with areas of expertise outside of their own. It's part of the job.
Yes, but only the responsible writers with time, resources, and aptitude to research and comprehend the issues and their context would likely to do decent work. I doubt it'd be the case of "journalists" trained to think all subject matters are easy to grok.
I'm not arguing you shouldn't write about X if you don't have phd and publication credits in X. I am arguing that nothing ever is as simple as it may seem, and that journalism that marginalizes subject matter knowledge is unlikely to produce accurate reports, much less anything insightful.
Actualy I recently read a guest article in the WSJ written by a law profesor who even quoted the law and made a strong arguement that the law didn't apply to the CIA agent for several reasons, mostly because it's designed to protect field agents rather than desk-jockies that have been at headquaters for more than 5 years.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
One thing I really agree with in this article is the idea that newspapers should focus on local news. Obviously this won't do for all of them, but a small paper should just do what it does best.
For a year and a half, I was a reporter for a small Georgia paper that covered only local news, unless "outside" news had a local connection. Our paper reached nearly every household in the county. There were only three or four reporters, so there was no way in heck we could cover, say, the war in Iraq, but nobody could tell you what was going on in the community like we could.
I do think that a Slashdot-style feedback mechanism on a paper's web site would be useful, but Slashdot also benefits from many many moderators, who work for free. It takes a lot of time for a small staff just to keep up with letters to the editor - imagine if we had to moderate stuff as well. Yes, the public could do it, but until you reach a critical mass of participation, a few people can always dominate the discussion. We at least tried to be objective - readers frequently wrote things in submitted letters that would get us all sued if we printed them.
Even with lots of people, the most web-savvy will have the loudest voice. Not a problem on Slashdot, because all the readers are (theoretically) geeks. But in a small town, that might mean, for example, that those 40 and under control the discussion.
It's still a good idea, but thinking about it would cause me a lot of headaches if I were an editor.
Any news source has only two real assets. Integrity and credibility. Do they speak the truth? And do people believe what they say? As regards such mainstream news sources as today's newspapers, my own answers are "No" and "Hell, no!" That many other people agree with me is the explanation of the poor health of their industry.
The motivation is actually quite trivial. Some greedy people make lots of money by lying. They had no integrity, and quickly lose their credibility. You'd think they might be happy with the money, but they aren't. [Money in this context is often equated to power, but you can really use the two terms almost interchangably in this context.] Since they still want more money, they may then use their money to buy credibility from somewhere else. The sincere journalists in the MSM (MainStream Media) were actually quite aware of this and tried to resist it for many years, but they lost. FAUX News. I rest my case.
The particular mechanism that most interests me is the technical one: broadcast radio. The first viable economic model they came up with involved advertisers paying for the broadcasts in exchange for brainwashing time. That model was propagated into TV, the famous "glass teat", and now threatens the Internet, too.
S'oright. <How do you spell that?> Truth will win out, and the societies that do a better job of dealing with the truth are going to win out in the long run.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
The Globe Gazette of Mason City, Iowa (of all places) is doing a pretty good job in this area, with their site looking more like a blog. Comments are allowed also.
This is fine, except that without some knowledge of the field:
You can't tell the difference between an expert and a charlatan
You can't even know what questions to ask. The questions you ask are more likely to be inane
You aren't likely to be able to critically examine the answers.
No, given all that I think knowledge of the field is a necessity for someone like a reporter who is (well, used to be, anyway) trusted to get the story right.
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
Hey Robin
...
This is an excellent analysis piece. Well thought out and well written. It is the kind of thinking ahead of the curve that few people do. Thanks.
One good test for whether that newspaper you gave as an example will see the light is whether they:
a. Experience the Slashdot effect.
b. Wonder what is going on.
c. Check their web site's log.
d. Read your article.
e. Give to the higher up in the hierarchy.
f. ???
g. Profit
If these people can save their business, f. would be that they may take you up on your offer on the computer column you mentioned.
Write us back when/if they get in touch with you
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
As a result of these posting barriers, you hardly see any reader comments on the Herald's site, and what few there are seem to come from a small group that posts over and over.
Wow! Where have I seen that phenomenon??!!??
resigned
Out2.com is a hyper-local newspaper with user-generated content, that has a revenue model based on very local advertisers.
Name me some blogs that actually generate their own factual content, rather than simply opinions on one article or another. This is especially true in politics.
At best, I see blogs aspiring to two things: providing context (Ars Technica's news section does a nice job of this) and news aggregation (the Slashdot model). The one exception to this is something like a developer blog or "celebrity" blog (I don't mean someone like Paris Hilton, but someone like Jonathan Schwartz of Sun, who can occasionally generate newsworthy nuggets or comments, if he feels like flouting SEC rules.)
That's not to say that citizens can't be journalists -- in fact, I really hope they do. But honestly, I really feel that most people are lazy, or suffer from the same syndrome that Robin mentions: "Oh, I don't have time to do...". Well, you can either chatter, or inform.
On the other hand, I completely agree that reporters need to reach out to their readers more. This is basic. Good cops don't sit at their desks; good politicians engage their constituents, and good reporters talk to their readers. You simply can't be everywhere at once, and a good reader-reporter relationship leads to better stories!
a lot of dupes, a lot of poorly researched crap, a lot of conflict-of-interest BS, and a severe hatred of anything resembling a 'corrections' column. seriously, the internet is garbage. fortunately that will mean a lot of garbage newspapers will not be able to survive, preserving millions of trees, and cubic miles of landfill space.
Newsmakers need to sleep,
News reporters need to write and file copy, editors need to edit.
Events can happen anytime, but more run of the mill news tends to finish up by 6pm of a night, if the newspaper is on your step by the time you wake up you haven't missed much (given that you too need to sleep).
I read one dead-tree a day and use several news services during the day (I'm paid to be on top of events) the print copy of the Financial Review is still indispensable to me.
But that's not a cheap paper either, the eco-system is certainly changing.
'There is a Light that never goes out.'
"Print-them-yourself coupons....Why don't more papers make this boast about their online editions? TV stations could do this on their sites, too. This would be an entirely new source of revenue for them, since there is no way to put a coupon in a TV spot. "
Because companies don't want people to use coupons, just like they don't want consumers actually sending in for rebates. They just want it to appear like you can save money while they are hoping you miss the rebate deadline or forget to print out the coupons
Ah, a spelling troll, how quaint. It may interest you to know that journalists are not especially good spellers. However, I am not a journalist.
I used to work at a biology lab without knowing any biology either. Worked for a glass company without learning how to make glass. Worked for a car dealership without ever touching a car. Worked for an architect without doing any architecture, worked for a pest control company without dealing with any pests (excepting people like yourself, of course). Even worked for a country club, without ever talking to a member.
In short, like everyone else here, I'm a techie. I work with computers. I write code. And despite what you seem to believe, I do this perfectly well, despite my obvious serious mental handicaps. Imagine...Having a spelling error. Gosh I hope all the journalists didn't see! My reputation will be ruined! How ever shall I go on? Clearly I am unfit to live.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
There are varying degrees of journalism. Calling "60 Minutes" "journalism" is like calling somebody who whipped up a blog a computer programmer.
I'm sure there are plenty of investigative reporters, fact checkers, and journalists on the 60 Minutes crew who would be immensely insulted by that statement. Why should I take your word for what "True(TM) Journalism" is?
Better still, there's lots and lots of real journalism that doesn't rely on video in any way, whatsoever.
Yes, of course. Take, for example, the New York Times. They can post stories that fit their agenda on the front page, over and over again (Abu Ghraib Scandal) whereas they can bury stories on page 16 that don't fit their agenda (American successes in Iraq). There are many examples of mainstream media bias on all levels. It all comes from a viewpoint. No one is without an agenda.
Elitism? Snobbery? Because I don't think that anyone who writes a blog is a "journalist"? Call it what you will. I also don't call my mom a software engineer because she can create an email.
You misunderstand me. I didn't call you elitist or snobbish because you failed to call bloggers journalists. I called you those things because you treat journalism as some kind of holy profession that non-journalists are too stupid to understand. You think journalists are in a higher class than non-journalists. You think their essence is superior. It's rank elitism, and you deserve to be taken down a notch for it.
To call a blogger a "journalist" is to shit on every real journalist that has ever existed. A "blogger" is somebody who writes a diary online. It's nothing more than narcissism at its worst.
Where did I call a blogger a "journalist"? I wasn't trying to elevate bloggers. I'm trying to take journalists down a notch -- something that they sorely deserve.
You're not a journalist.
I don't know how I'd live with myself if I was. I see little difference between a journalist and a movie maker. Both are merely creating realities that they would prefer existed.
That doesn't give you the right to call yourself and every other 75 IQ person who can write a scathing expose on their adventures baking bread a "journalist". You have no right to insult journalists that way.
Actually, I do have a right to insult anyone I please. This right is granted by the same thing which allows journalists to show their whole asses: the first amendment. And since when did I have a scathing expose on anything? My point here is not to elevate bloggers. It's to point out that being a journalist is not very hard, not very special, not very useful, and not very noble. Millions of people are realizing this, and that's why the mainstream media is losing more and more power every day. And guess what? Being some elitist jackass to me ("You have no right!") will do nothing to stop the winds of change. It truly is a pleasure to see pompous "journalists" losing their power.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
<i>...but encourage reader comments on all of its stories, not just on a blog or two.</i>
/ RTGAM.20051130.welectlead1130/BNStory/specialDecis ion2006/>
/ RTGAM.20051129.wxmathfront1129/BNStory/Front/>
Commenting does require registration, and seems to be subject to the Terms and Conditions, especially the "FORUMS AND CONTENT SUBMISSIONS" part: see <URL:http://www.theglobeandmail.com/services/site/ reg/helpwindow_terms.html>
How about the <URL:www.theglobeandmail.com>? Notice how reader comments are posted right below the story, with a few extra "teaser" links to comments in a box on the right, e.g. <URL:http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story
You can even be the first to comment on "Ingram: Apple in the living room?" <URL:http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story
How about http://www.theglobeandmail.com/? Notice how reader comments are posted right below the story, with a few extra "teaser" links to comments in a box on the right, e.g. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM .20051130.welectlead1130/BNStory/specialDecision20 06/
You can even be the first to comment on "Ingram: Apple in the living room?" http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM .20051129.wxmathfront1129/BNStory/Front/
Commenting does require registration, and seems to be subject to the Terms and Conditions, especially the "FORUMS AND CONTENT SUBMISSIONS" part: see http://www.theglobeandmail.com/services/site/reg/h elpwindow_terms.html
"Allowing readers to comment on stories, and allowing them to post anything they want (other than obscenities, blatant hate speech, and personal attacks) increases readers' faith in the newspaper, which makes it a more effective advertising medium in the long run because some of that trust will rub off on advertisers that support it."
That's your unsupported assertion, here's mine: No it doesn't.
This guy's essay makes some sense but runs off the rails sometimes too. Anytime I see people claiming blogs are the future of news I can't decide whether to laugh hysterically or moan in derision.
Newspapers do two important things
1) They filter the news
2) They present it in a highly portable and acccessible format
Blogs are a supplement: hardly ever an original source of news. They point to news ON ANOTHER WEBSITE - usually a newsaper's or magazine's, or another article on a website that itself is referencing a newspaper or magazine. They're yet another source of commentary and opinion. Occasionally insightful, usually honest about their bias, but frankly...
Give me ONE real news story for every HUNDRED commentary/opinion columns.
Commentary/opinion may help focus your views on a pre-existing story, but answer this: how many news stories were broken by blogs recently? And how many by newspapers?
A newspaper's main advantage is its reporting team. Maybe 4,000 bloggers can dig up a nugget that a reporter can't, but who has the time to read 4000 blogs? Contrary to popular belief most news stories don't come from guys in trilby hats doing private detective work. They come from leaks. Corporate and political leaks. Those people are going to call the papers, or TV media. They're not going to leak to some blog. They're taking a risk so they're going to get the bang for their buck.
A newspaper has heaps of useability advantages over an internet access point: weight, portability, power requirements, even 'scrolling speed'. Don't talk to me about PDAs and wireless broadband. You've got a PDA with a broadsheet-sized screen that you read on the train? You pick up your laptop from the breakfast table and carry it to read at the bus stop?
The man's right, news is local. This is not a commercial rule, it's basic human nature. Problems with the new traffic lights at 5th street are more important to you than 100 Nigerians dying in a train accident. But local news means a smaller advertising pool. Which is a big minus for media diversity. In other words: for local news it's either a few big media outlets or amateur hour.
I'm not even sure what you mean by being "shown up." Unless you limit the discussion to topics the article writer has in-depth knowledge about... someone is always going to be able to contribute more information to the discussion.
That's the grandparent's point. Journalists establish careers by building up prestige and credibility. If no-name readers are constantly correcting a journalist, how would that journalist build up prestige and credibility in the traditional fashion?
Truth takes a back seat to personal interest.
I miss the local company offers from the local newspaper. They have, naturally, an online edition but only ads from huge firms.
The ability to post online comments on newspaper articles is becomming increasingly common, but there's no interactivity going on if the journalist does not participate in the debate. Unfortunately the current mode of operation of journalists and commentators is to write their piece and move straight on to something else. Rob did the same thing. He did not participate in the debate on his piece, though he did warn us with his ex-cathedra tag.
We need a system that allows for extended debate without the problems caused by information overload. My solution is here.
GM isn't hurting because they don't make fuel efficient vehicles. It isn't helping them any at the moment, but it isn't thier biggest problem. Japanese hybrids, at this point, amount to little more than advertising; the technology costs more than the gas savings over the lifetime of the vehicle. The Japanese automakers sell plenty of gas hogs(check out a high end Acura or the Nissan pickup).
GM's problem is that they spend too damn much money on each vehicle. Labor costs are a big part of this, but GM isn't in much of a position to control them. What can they control? Making more than 50 different models and bragging about it! Toyota is creaming them, with 2.5 brands and what, 12 models? Scion is half brand half model in my mind. Lexus amounts to Toyota++ for people who don't want others to think that they drive something so lowly as a Toyota. At the same time, GM is advertising that OnStar is available in over 50 different models.
Toyota focuses on making money when they sell a car. GM focuses on making money when they sell more than 750,000 cars or some such ridiculous number anyway. See the problem?
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
"But they teach because they were in the lower range of their graduating class with generic degrees and as thus are willing to take meager salaries (this is my general experience with my friends who teach; no offense to those of you who teach on /., are competent, and love it). My solution: so many people are retiring younger and healthier than ever before. These people should teach."
Here is a revolutionary idea... pay teachers enough so the position attracts quality people. What I also find somewhat interesting about this post is the idea that teaching isn't a skill (implied)... Just because someone was a successful business person, scientist, author, etc. doesn't mean s/he will be a successful teacher. Teaching is a skill. I'm not a teacher myself, but this doesn't seem like it should be a hard point to get. That people don't is why (in part, there are other social reasons too) teachers (in many areas) are paid so poorly.
Wrong. I didn't imply that it wasn't a skill at all.
What I implied is that young retirees do have this skill, or are far more likely to have it. They've taught subordinates; they've taught children and possibly grandchildren. I further imply, with all things being equal, that young retirees are far more likely to possess this skill than recent graduates by virtue of life experience and professional experience alone. And, I reiterate, recruiting young retirees doesn't require additional budget layouts to the educational system. It allows the system to drastically increase the quality of its teaching core, quickly, at nominal cost increase. This is an amenable solution. In fact, I also reiterate, there is such a pilot program here in NYC, and it has enjoyed some success.
Again, you misintepreted. I merely assumed constant wages and looked at ways to improve the teaching core given such. In my mind, drastic pay raises for teachers across the board is unreasonable and not necessarily a solution to the problem at hand.
un burrito me trampeó.
according to Borrel and associates circa 2003 the average online newspaper visitor was worth $7.93. using RSS and a customized reader such as ours at www.inclue.com this can be doubled. :)
Not at all, and I'm sorry if I was misleading about this. I just feel that the average level of objectivity of established newspapers is much higher than your average alternative news source. And since these newspapers should be held to a higher standard than a blog or whatever, articles passed off as objective that are not are always worth mentioning. Of course some alternative outlets, like factcheck.org or spinsanity may come out ahead of many, possibly even most, articles in said newspapers.
I don't think the mainstream media is one tenth as worried as any businessman or physician for being sued. How often does the New York Times get sued for being unobjective and unprofessional? Did it get sued of Jayson Blair?
And I don't think your average blogger is one one-hundredth as worried about repurcussions from bad reporting as the mainstream media. Jayson Blair and Dan Rather got fired. What blogger or whomever was forced to never write again or felt the effects of lost credibility for similar sloppiness?
You keep insisting that they're "a breed apart" which is false (not to mention elitist). Lots of people are realizing this, and it's part of the reason that the mainstream media is losing.
It may be part of the reason, but it's not clear that it's the driving force. The simplest and most likely explanation is that we all lead busy lives, and it is easier to look at your favorite blog that already agrees with your viewpoint than read the in-depth newspaper article that said blog used as their source of information. It's best that we check out several blogs of divergent viewpoints and vital we check out their source material (newspaper) to catch where they may have been misleading about what was originally said. I can't even count the number of times I heard from some blowhard, "I can't believe X said Y in this article! Outrageous!" Then I read the original article and think, "Where the fuck did he even hint at that???!!"
A "hack" engineer can't beat a real engineer, but a "hack" journalist (a blogger) can beat a real journalist.
Actually on rare occassions a hack engineer can beat a real engineer and a comparatively hack scientist can come up with a sound theory that a trained scienctist did not. An engineer can get caught up in equations, rush a job, or try to put one over on their client, and some insightful average Joe who has seen something similar before will call him on it. That's the value I see in the average blog and such, and I don't mean to minimize their importance. (Or maybe I just got carried away and did anyways). I just strongly feel that it's tremendously important that people at least read the newspaper source material that these bloggers and such like to riff off of before agreeing or disagreeing with them. Does this make me an elitist in your eyes?
Happy people make bad consumers.
The above sarcastic comment should have been between matching HUMOR and /HUMOR tags (*sigh*).
"If god did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him" --Voltaire
My city (Vancouver, BC) has recently been flooded by several free daily newspapers and tabloids. I ride the bus for a half hour to the big university in town, and everyone is reading these papers, including university students and profs.
I really think the future of newspapers is in giving them away for free on busy street corners like they're doing here (with people in branded aprons handing out the papers!). It obviously is working for these publications.
The interesting thing about these free daily papers is that, even though they are in colour and fairly professional, they don't have any more ads than your average newspaper or magazine.
How, in this era of "newspapers are dying!" can these daily papers not only exist, but thrive? They're obviously doing something right.
- Murphy's Corollary: - It is impossible to make things foolproof because fools are so ingenious.
So where do I go to read an interactive discussion about this product? I scrolled to the bottom of the page, expecting to find a comments section, but... nothing! And nothing in the "test cases" section either!
- Murphy's Corollary: - It is impossible to make things foolproof because fools are so ingenious.
The article suffered from a point of view problem. It assumes that newspapers are here to disseminate information; rather than, for example, to shape opinion.
Obviously, if you are the typical propaganda rag, you are going to have a different take on what to do about internet competition than you would if you were an honest purveyor of information.
The largest problem for papers is that everyone is starting to realize that "the emperor has no clothes". They can try to shape opinion all they like, but nobody is paying much attention to them any more. Not only is that clear in obvious measures like circulation, but in that the only reason my wife brings that "pack of lies" into the house any more is to read the ads. Others might do it to see their kid mentioned in the reporting about the local football game. I have to laugh when papers publish slates of candidates to vote for; the damn things probably harm their favorite candidates more than they help!
Reading this article and some of the comments makes me very happy to discover newspapers are even worse off (by a long shot) than I imagined. Thanks for making my day! Freedom of information is a good thing, even if the old propagandists are getting ulcers over the immanent loss of their jobs, and power.
Ha! You're right, the site should be eating its own dog food and puting the case for its own existence in the case database.
But the way the site works would require either someone who disagrees with at least some of my points, or one who can play devil's advocate, to be appointed as editor of the con case in order that the points can be rebutted.
But I'll go ahead and convert the about section to case form.
Do you think the concept is worthwhile Pejorian?
The problem with my discussion with you is that you and I saw each other as "opponents" and were biased to want to counter and dispute what the other said. I think I was more guilty of this than you were.
I became aware of this as soon as I read something from a like-minded source (today). The writer indicated that the mainstream media still rules despite the great strides made by alternative media. He commented (paraphrased): the alternative media does not report; rather, they only react to what the mainstream media reports.
I think this is partially true, and I will concede that it is a defining difference between the mainstream media and the alternative media. In most cases, the alternative media lacks the ability and resources to do investigative reporting. (Likewise, they also lack the ability and resources to do "editing" to the deceitful degree that many in the mainstream media do, but I digress.)
I do want to go back to our discussion about journalists verses engineers.
Suppose there was a group of hack engineers out there who started up a bunch of web pages which competed with and took attention away from real engineers. (You can "sed 's/engineers/journalists/g'" to understand where I'm going with this.) How would these hack engineers function?
In reality, they couldn't. Their bridges, automobiles, brain suckers (that's an actual product, see www.jarvisproducts.com), and what-not would almost certainly be of shoddy quality and cause much injury, death, and lawsuits. This is why there aren't any hack engineers out there doing this very thing.
Now, execute that sed. These "hack journalists" are what you call "bloggers". In opposition to the non-existant (and impossibly-existant) hack engineers, these hack journalists do quite well and take quite a bit of attention away from the mainstream media. I can only conclude that journalism is not that hard to do. If that were false, then there wouldn't be any bloggers.
If I were you, I would counter with, "That's not Real(TM) Journalism!" Well, what *is* real journalism anyway? I've already conceded that bloggers can't do investigative reporting (yet), but I think that's just a subset of what "journalism" is. Ultimately, the ones who decide which ones are the best journalists are the consumers of the product: the ones who are actually viewing the output of the journalists. In other words, the market. And you can't dispute that the market is starting to shift away from the mainstream media and to alternative sources of media (don't forget talk radio!).
I imagine your defense to that could be, "The people who consume talk radio / blogs / podcasts are too stupid to know what real jornalism is" -- and that is exactly what I would expect from an elitist who pours his adoration into journalistic uber-snobs who deserve to get fired by bloggers.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
At http://www.newsknife.com/ we rate news sites based on their appearances at Google News. Believe me, the Chronicle has been a star performer there for quite some time. San Francisco Chronicle was our 10th best news site in our Top News Sites of 2004. Now its SFGate.com site is the 7th best site in our Top News Sites of 2005. I'd say the Chronicle folk are figuring out the internet better than most. To flesh out those figures, at http://www.newsknife.com/google_algorithm_watch.ht ml you'll see SFGate.com are steadily gaining in their percentage share of all news sites appearing on the home page of Google News.
During the 12 months to early December 2005 Newsknife recorded San Francisco Chronicle\SFGate.com listed 207 times on the home page of Google News and 4013 times overall on the home page and 10 sub-pages deep of listings.