Slashdot Mirror
Newmark Denies Craigslist Is Killing Newspapers
Ian Lamont writes "Computerworld has an interview with Craig Newmark about the history of Craigslist and it's growth over the years (it's now expanding into foreign-language markets — it recently created several Spanish sites in Spanish cities). He also disputes the notion that Craigslist is responsible for dismantling newspapers' revenue models. Rather, he blames niche-classified sites like autotrader.com and Monster as well as newspapers' unrealistic profit expectations in the new media world: 'Newspapers are going after 10% to 30% profit margins for their businesses and that hurts them more than anything. A lot of things are happening on the Internet that never happened before because the Internet is a vehicle for everyone. The mass media is no longer only for the powerful, and that's a huge change for the entire newspaper and news industry."
On the one hand, the newspaper's days are numbered. Who wants to go outside and dig their paper out of the snow to read yesterday's news when they can go online and get what's happening right now?
On the other hand, that's a damn shame. All the news media in recent times has become, frankly, a laughing stock, but newspapers it seems have held onto the most integrity (not that that's saying much). More importantly, we need someone who can pay reporters to investigate the government, and bloggers just aren't going to cut it.
I fear living in a world where the only things a government has to worry about are citizen journalists and internal leaks.
eBay, ubid, and countless other auction sites, along with the formentioned craigs list, autotrader, etc, etc. etc. The whole paper-classifieds industry is coming down. If newspapers don't take local classifieds to the internet and find a way to make some $$ of of it, they will need to find a new business model, period. The times are achangin'
It's funny to see someone bothering to repute claims that Craigslist "kills" newspapers. The question is not whether it does or doesn't (and IMO it does in a way), but why should we care?
It's a free market out there. Craigslist is able to offer services better than newspapers. Newspapers should either adapt to compete, or they deserve to die. Why should there be some kind of welfare state for newspapers where they have to be supported externally, or even more important, why should better technologies be attacked for outcompeting worse ones?
Do you attack cars for "killing" horse-and-carriage? Do you attack e-mail for reducing profits of snail mail/fax sales (and it did by a very large margin)? If the technology is able to better provide the service, it is the one that deserves to get the market.
I understand that many people base the argument like that "Newspapers offer content we like, but can only be funded by ads. Now people use craigslist for ads instead of papers, so papers have no money to publish other content with". While this may seem more indirect, I don't see why this is any more valid than the earlier example. If people are not willing to pay for the content on its own (via newspaper sales), then maybe you should move out of the market, or actually make your content worthwhile.
The "broadsheet" papers which actually offer content you don't see on a typical news site for free (such as in-depth editorials) are the ones that are still selling. If all your paper had is a bulletpoint list of recent events and a local buy-sell section, then why does it deserve to live in the first place, when you can get both free online (the first from any news site, the second from Craigslist). And if you claim your paper supposedly brings some value to the "good old mom-and-pop local community", then get the community to pay for it, either through a local tax the community agrees on, or through increased paper prices. If the community is not willing to pay either, than guess what, the value your paper provides to the community just isn't good enough for them to pay for.
Either offer something that's good on its own (and better than the competition), or get the hell out of the business. The protectionist neoluddism of "papers being oppressed by the evil Craigslist" is seriously pissing me off.
Ironically, its because they change so slowly. They don't make over their site once a year the way most successful sites do, adding bloat and red tape and/or jettisoning or resetting community forums in the process.
Now, this approach probably won't work for newspapers trying to compete with craigslist. They'll have to be a lot more creative and aggressive than they've been.
but still people can't tell the possessive ITS from the contraction IT'S==IT IS.
Newspapers still have a virtual monopoly on one aspect of newsmaking: digging deep, traveling, researching, and fact-checking. Unfortunately, MOST newspapers are just regurgitators of whatever the AP or other news-wires spend big bucks to write. The days of the old traveling reporter seem to be short, but there are still a few out there who really work hard to get the news.
The Internet, on the other hand, is still a beacon of opinion, without much digging. Facts aren't checked (not that all mainstream press outlet do much of that), biases are obvious, and many bloggers just preach to the choir. That's an area that isn't likely to change.
The big item of interest, though, is always financial: "Can I do this, and can I make money at it?" I think the obvious answer for almost all forms of media is: YES, and more of a yes than any time in the past. For two generations, musicians tended to only make money when they were corporately owned. Now, individual groups can make money just by promoting themselves and their tours online. The same is true with journalism, or even movie making. Heck, the Ron Paul girl has made five figures just taking her clothes off and promoting the candidate. Amazing. Soon, we'll see theatre and acting groups rendering their own sitcoms on YouTube for a small profit, but they still won't have the backend that the mainstream companies do: script-writers, fact-checkers, editors, sound people, crew, etc.
I like the new age, because it does open up options for the individual to earn a living. I know quite a few people who now make almost 6-figures annual blogging (but they're working 50-60 hours a week on their sites!). I know more than one band who is making more than 6-figures annual with no record label contract. I know a graphic designer or two who are making a decent living by drawing cartoon characters for individual companies, churches and organizations and not having to "slave" 40 hours a week for Disney or another employer.
I do think the classifieds HAVE to go away, but I don't think Craigslist is necessarily the answer or the final option. The web will likely move to a more object-oriented fashion, rather than purely single HTML endlinks. I've always theorized that particular web pages will be broken down to segments of information, designated with content variables ("tags"), that will be easily integrated into the desktop sites of others. I know Microsoft tried this eons ago, and it failed, but the web wasn't ready.
Why should I post an ad to craiglist for a 2001 Toro lawnmower for sale in zip code 60031, when I can just pop in an object into my MySpace, or my blog, or another site, signifying an object for-sale, the price, the zip code, etc, and allow Google or other search engines to point interested buyers to that particular object? Maybe we'll have sites that integrate all those similar objects into a mash-up of information to utilize for other people's needs (like we're now seeing with websites that mash-up data from various non-similar sites of data).
The answer in the long-run is not another market or company that takes over information disperal, but the individualization of data in an object form for many individuals or organizations to provide for new markets to develop. A personal blog may be composed of 20 individual objects, all with their own tags, all distributable in their own singular nature to be re-displayed on various sites for whatever purpose.
Methinks HTML is dying, fast. Even the Web 2.0 stuff seems to be ready for extinction. A new day, a new web, will really harm the Web 2.0 companies that are still focusing on the page, instead of breaking down the individual content within the page.
I think "killing newspapers" is a bit of a stretch. It's not like college students regularly read newspapers before craigslist, and there isn't much reason to believe craigslist is used by a wider audience than that.
I call shenagains on that. Have you read any science or technology articles recently? Most reporters don't know much about any specilized fields, and couldn't be bothered to ask anyone who does actually know.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
So what if the Craigslist IS killing the newspaper industry? I don't see anyone getting up in arms about the automobile killing the horse drawn carriage industry.
Times change. Business models face extinction just as species do.
Question everything
No. What's killing newspapers is not craigslist.
It's the fact that they've been bought out by non-newsmen bean counters
that see a newspaper as just another business rather than an end to itself.
They have stopped "selling" news and are instead just selling ad space.
The era of the "investigative reporter" are pretty much over. The
typical newspaper story doesn't have any more inherent value than
the average blog post. Everyone knows it. THIS is why newspapers
are in danger of extinction. They have pretty much all abandoned
their key value.
Hook some magnets up to Murrow and he could power manhattan.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Henry Ford denies that the mass produced automobile is killing the buggy whip industry. He says that lack of innovation and bloat is causing the industry to expire. To quote "If buggy whip makers would cater to the niche needs of their customers, and sell at a reasonable price, the manufacturers would have no trouble selling to the ever growing modern horse driven buggy market."
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
All the paper consisted of was were wire reports. Usually the exact same content I had read via Yahoo or Cnn.com the day before. There was very little local investigative journalism. They did a 5-part expose on the local fire districts and some stuff that was going on there with the wives of firefighters being elected to boards/etc. Back in 2005. But not much since.
I forget the lady's name (The old woman in front row of the White House daily briefings (Helen something). She wrote a book about this topic a few years ago and she pointed out that it was this lack of in depth local news reporting was the major reason why newspapers were loosing so much readership. Her reason is that hiring investigative reports and having a real news room is expensive. So in order to boost short term profits....
This boils down to one thing: Content. You have good content, people will come. It doesn't matter if that is on the web or in print.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
for their own downfall.
/. readers know that story so I won't regurgitate it.
/. knows this. The interesting thing will be to observe what happens when Craigslist and its cohorts sell out to the same corporate interests for the big score and start degrading the content. Will new challengers spring up online to steal their lunch in the same manner?
Radio has been killed by ClearChannel's near total monopoly of the airwaves. Yes, they no longer have competition in radio, but they've ended the diversity held the audience's attention, and pushed commercials up to the point where you have to wade through 10 minutes of used-car ads to get to the 4 minutes of bland commercial pop.
Newspapers, meanwhile, stopped doing real journalism 15 years ago. It's much easier to pay a fee for AP articles and an editor to arrange them on a page around ad space than to keep on a staff of journalists doing in-depth investigative pieces; heck, it's even cheaper to change a couple words in the press releases companies send to newspapers these days and print them verbatim than to license AP articles--that's what more and more "news" outlets are doing these days.
TV, well, reality programs are boring, and commercials are annoying, and the few programs worth watching are in endless re-runs thanks to the writer's strike; or, the movies they run on cable are just promotional vehicles for the sequels that are coincidentally debuting next Friday.
Movies and music.
In short, greed, corporatism (is that redundant with greed?), and focus group-tested pap that the old media have pumped out in the last decade to maximize profits has alienated the audience. Craigslist and other segments of the Internet are simply doing a better job of taking over the few useful activities the old used to perform, but without all the baggage.
Everyone on
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Just earlier today I was thinking wtf are the editors doing missing obvious mistakes in that math article but I don't get what the furore is here. It's supposed to be "it's" in the summary not its! How the hell did this even get tagged "its" ? Note: Quotation marks used for clarity instead of '.
Did you even bother to read beyond the first line before commenting?
The newspapers in my city (Vancouver, BC, Canada) are sooooo shitty. They are produced by the same company and their editorials are dictated by the company's head office which is thousands of miles away.
They don't give a care about the people, only the advertisers. Their current editorial actually says that you are a bad person if you don't go out and shop on Boxing day!
i just hope the cost of bird cage liner does not go up...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
There are a lot of people pretty chuffed with their horse-and-carriage-beaten-by-car analogy; nobody seems to notice that the replacement isn't better, it's *worse*. As a newspaper, Craiglist sucks. But it has taken over one of the key ways newspapers make money.
It's not a straightforward "outdated business model" this: the model's been outdated since the radio came along. Nobody needs to buy news: we're drowning in free news. But we do need to live in a society where politicians and the powerful are held to account, where corruption is exposed and so on. The best way we've seen so far for doing this is investigative journalism, which isn't cheap. In fact, journalism is incredibly expensive to create. There isn't a single newspaper website out there that can afford to pay for the cost of its journalism by itself; they rely on subsidy from their print operations.
A Free Press isn't free. It has just been our luck that newspapers could make enough money from small ads to pay for all the journalists without actually having to try and sell us the unsellable (news). That luck is running out.
LOL, he blames Auto Trader, but Craigslist has already killed the private listings in Auto Trader.
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
Mod parent insightful. Great post.
I agree wholeheartedly. Craigslist is not the answer, it's just an electronic version of the old model. Less than the old model in fact. At least with a newspaper there's news or comics or some reason to view it every day. There's no reason to visit Craigslist unless you are looking for something.
However, the fundamental problem with Craigslist is the scams, and their flagging system. I find it curious to see this article talk about how they are expanding into Europe. Craigslist has had sites in EU countries for along time, however they are worthless due to the failure of the flagging system. Lots of scams listed -> not enough site visitors to remove the scams -> more scams -> less site visitors -- as all anyone sees are the scams and have no reason to hang around.
In some cases there might be language issues. However, Craigslist UK doesn't have that issue. While it does have 1,000s of listings, almost all of them are scams. Thus no-one is using the site. There's no risk to UK newspapers from Craigslist. None at all.
It's been said here before, and it needs said again until search improves, the ONLY reason sites like Criagslist and eBay etc etc exist is because search is still failing to deliver quality results on a local level. Google, please take note. Google's competitors, work harder -- much harder. There's been no significant advances in search technology for 10 years. That is not good. Not good enough.
Traditional mass media is obsolete. Were the internet a simple issue of distribution, then, newspapers would simply be the same thing, but cheaper. What's happened is that people are interested in their own niches of information, and mass media simply can't get its head around it. All of the sifting through events that reporters and editors used to do, the internet makes pointless. Because there is essentially infinite bandwidth, you don't need someone to decide what news is worth actually distributing. Now, it all can be distributed.
You can get in depth knowledge on any topic. The odd review about a car or a movie in the paper just can't cut it compared to the in depth information you get from a direct source. Why go to the Philadelphia Inquirer car section or computer section when I can go to not just one, but any number of computer or car web sites. About all that newspapers are good for are sports columnists, and even they have made a transition to online or, gasp, radio talk shows. On the other end of the scale, a lot of information reporters get comes from 3rd hand sources, such as the AP Wires, and now, you can get the same article online.
You can get any information you want. If you want to find out what is going on in Switzerland, you can go to a web site in Switzerland and read it. If you want to find out what's going on in politics, you don't have to be aggravated that your political view isn't represented in the media. On the internet, all views are.
You can find anyone to agree with you. Newspapers and broadcast media needed to foster the notion that there was a mainstream of opinion, a sweet spot or common ground for everyone. Reality is a lot more complex and we're finding that there's no such thing as mainstream. There's a lot of people online, and, on any given topic, you can find someone that agrees with you. You don't have to believe you are an outcast, when you have 30,000 people that form their own online community. If someone else calls me a crackpot for wanting to pave the earth, I can find someone to agree with me.
This trend isn't going to affect just newspapers and broadcast media. They are just the first pickings. In the future, every traditional role of knowledge acquisition and distribution will be upended by the democratizing influence of the internet. At some point, as search tools get better, and communications improves, there won't even be a need for a specialized formal education. We are moving towards, truly, the world of the matrix, where if we want to learn to fly a helicopter, we'll find it on google.
This is my sig.
The articles is absolutely correct when it states newspapers are killing themselves, which is why I left 4 years ago. Publishers know that the profit margins of old are long gone, however their response to that is what is causing it's greatest harm - an insatiable appetite to reduce expenses...rather than an expansion into other services to grow revenue. Newspaper publishers and owners are the most pessimistic people on the planet. Their favorite, and most often decision-making process is the "decision to make no decision" - thus, their unwillingness to change with the times will leave them buried in the past.
Their posts in the subject and continue them in the body.
The thing is, most of the people who say these things are the highly connected tech savvy who generally socialize with their own kind. The rest of the population is perfectly happy with newspapers.
The main problem with newspapers is than like most businesses these days, ,i.their stockholders / owners demand exponential profit growth. It's not the medium that is unsustainable, it's the profit model they insist on.
But you must excuse me, I had chili for breakfast. I'm off to the bathroom with my newspaper...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
If the newspapers give me quality searchable classifieds that include great random free stuff, then I might start using them again. I don't get that from the local papers.
Craigslist gives us a great way to communicate about free items. Items one person doesn't want that may have use to another person. It's a great way to keep things from going to the dumps. It's my main use for Craigslist.
...not "it's" when you're showing possession. For example "It's Christmas Eve!" as opposed to something like "Christmas Eve is here in all its glory".
Please don't use "umm" or "err" or "erm".
News flash! News media goes to hell! News at 11! Film at 12!
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
My guess, Cory, is that you probably don't really care what's going on outside your own little world. Otherwise, you wouldn't say newspapers provide "little to no news." My local daily is full of wire service reports from around the world. A typical edition usually has one or two lengthy staff-written pieces about local and regional matters that will not appear in any other mediium. Can the paper's distribution system compete with the speed of other media? No. But no other media reports in the depth that the newspaper does. If my local newspaper runs a 5-part series of 10,000 word articles about local politcal corruption, do you even imagine that any other news source is going to cover it in the same depth? Come on. Internet readers get annoyed if they need to scroll, and TV and radio seem to have a prohibition on any story lasting longer than a minute or so. That local community radio site is likely buying copy from the wire services, too, and doesn't contribute much of anything itself.
Sounds like you're satisified with 3.5 minutes of news at the top of the hour. I'm not, and neither are a lot of other people. That's the market newspapers serve. So, if you are happy with knowing that "A bomb just went off in Iraq and lots of people were killed" or "More people are losing their homes because they can't handle the hike in their adjustable mortage", then stick to the radio, But, if you want to have a chance to understand why all that is happening, you need to start reading a good newspaper.
And, remember, paper is only a publication medium. If papers were invented today, they'd go straight to the web. Everything in my paper's "paper" edition is on its site, plus a lot more. A smart newspaper knows it will take more than paper to survive.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Save a tree. Read your news online.
The fact I know her name is proof that I have no life.
"The fight for freedom has only just begun." - Geert Wilders
It seems as though the AP has had its role in killing newspapers as well. If your newspaper buys and reprints stories from the AP, it's equivalent to outsourcing your hard-hitting, incisive, investigative journalism. I read a long time ago in a post here that AP stories without name attribution aren't very well researched. If they were quality stories, people wouldn't mind putting their names to them. So it seems to me that if you're looking for investigative journalists and reading AP stories, look for names, and look for names that you've seen many times. That doesn't help the local scene, but talent has to go where it's valued.
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
The last good reason to keep newspapers around is that the news can't be revised. Once it goes to print, that's it. You can't go back and say "Oh, we never said invading Iraq was about WMD. It was about installing democracy. Oh we never said it was about installing democracy. It was about bringing the war to the terrorists. Oh, we never said that...
I was Waiting for sombody to say this! it's the lack of content to maintain grossly high profit margins that is killing the papers. I have seen a rapid growth of papers that focus ONLY on the local news and editorials on national events. They now as well, as everybody else, your reading CNN about floods in china, it's the stuff you can't find, like wine tastings, rock concerts, and D.A. coruption where the monyes at tomarrow, and the media be it blogs or paper isn't the deal breacker. It's selling people information they can't get on their own, so the journalist goes out and gets it. That is the industry, not all this hype about blogs and news, it's making a product and selling it.
To put a little context here I use to read the paper every day almost every page. Today I'm lucky to pick up the Sunday paper.
The thing was I started to cut back on paper reading long before I became internet addicted. The issues with the paper started when the editorial became to far left of center, and in depth local coverage went out the door. Now I often skip the daily paper except on Wednesday and that to find out what is happening around town for the weekend. Even the local weekend scene could be take care of with a tablet PC of the right type, as everything of interest has a web site.
The interesting thing with the tablet desire is that somethings just are easier to peruse away from home. Thus if I'm taking lunch at a local establishment I might read the paper, if a tablet is as easy to carry as a paper came along I'd likely switch to only that. Things like the iPhone are real close to being just the nuts, but the screen is to damn small (+45 years old).
So what I'm trying to say is that the future of the daily newspaper looks rather dim. Especially if they can't get the editorial quality up. Well that and cover local stuff with a little conviction.
The funny thing is there is a very small weekly publication in the near buy city that seems to flourish and they don't even charge for a copy. Again a little left reading but far more balanced especialy with respect to editorial and the willingness to print commentary that doesn't match the papers left leaning slant. In other words I can't always agree with the paper but I can at least respect them for putting in a good effort.
I Guess in a nut shell that sums it up, people have lost respect for the papers and their business model.
Dave
...and websites == a la carte
Bundled cable channels force people to pay for channels that they don't want, in order to get the few channels they do want. Under the a la carte system, people pay only for what they're interested in, and the low-interest channels die a natural death.
Newspapers bundle local news, national news, world news, sports, stock market info, classified ads, comics, crossword puzzles, etc, etc. They charge a humoungous markup on their classified ads, and use that excess revenue to pay for reporters.
If I'm only interested in sports in general, I can go to a sports site. If I'm interested in world news, I can go to a zillion web sites. For comics, try Dilbert.com, for classified try Craigslist, etc, etc. Note that Craigslist is not supporting a bunch of investigative reporters, and unionized pressmen pull down humoungous wages, thanks to fat-cat union contracts. It does take a few salaries for techies, and servers, and bandwidth, but with a free db (MySQL or PostgreSQL) you can set up a classified service for a much lower cost than how a newspaper does it.
Just like low-interest channels die when not forcibly bundled with popular channels, so too will investigative reporting die when not forcibly bundled with moneymaking services like classifieds an full-page ads for cars or computers. However, when a newspaper's existance depends on fullpage ads from car manufacturers, do you really expect muck-raking exposes about unsafe or easy-to-steal cars? That is on aspect where citizen-bloggers are better than staff reporters. Their articles can't be threatened by an advertiser pulling its ads. Yes, SLAPP suits are possible, but they can backfire with Streisand-effect backlash.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
Really what the effect Craigslist is having is on the free Weeklies. These papers are free, and exist on print ad and classified ad revenues. These papers are often times the only reliable and trustworthy source of independent information in any given market. I live here in Idaho and I am an avid reader of Boise Weekly. Before that I read Willamette Weekly in Oregon. I've noticed that the weeklies have taken a few shots at craigslist over the years, but nothing serious, more voicing of concerns than anything else. And yes they still keep papers shipping. But it's a shame to see an outfit have to struggle so hard to get information out to the people. But then again, if the people don't want anything but the recycled drivel that spews forth from their picture boxes and news(ad)papers... Support your Weeklies!
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask where they're goin' and hook up with 'em later.
Yes, you can talk about how newspapers are dying because of bad reporting, but I think that it has more to do with the fact that people are less likely to be interested in the news.
If you actually look at trends in news consumption, they've remained in a rather steady downward trend - even when you add in news consumption among ALL media. Which means that the Internet is taking another slice of an already shrinking pie for newspapers.
There are a number of complicated and interrelated reasons for this.
Let me run down my theories:
Theory One: People are not seeing the utility of the news.
If you believe that being well informed about current events is important to your job, your society, or your family, you will be well informed. Fewer people, however, believe this is so. The biggest culprit here is the insulation of public officials from public pressure. It seems that the elected officials can get away with just about anything and there "ain't a damn thing we can do about it." This leads to decreased news consumption. In previous environments, if you didn't like what was going on in politics, you could protest and at the very least, have a chance for those protests to be heard. If you didn't like what was going on in business you could ask your congressman to start an investigation. But people now feel that these actions are non-productive and at best counterproductive because both politicians and business owners have insulated themselves from public pressure. I won't go into how - that's a discussion in and of itself - but between safe seats, redistricting, partisan media sources, gullible reporters, and the broken labor movement, people feel that because there is nothing they can do about the bad stuff they learn about in the newspaper, then learning about the bad stuff would just make them miserable.
Theory Two: People are not connected to their communities.
Can you name your neighbors? Most people can't. America's sense of community - local community - is broken. This is the subject of Robert Putnam's "Bowling Alone" - for the past 30 years, we've been less likely to make friends, and to do things in groups. This is true of everything from political organization to bowling leagues. We have little "social capital" and we simply care less about what happens to our neighbors because we don't know our neighbors faces.
Putnam said there were many factors but the clearest correlation that he could see was the amount of television consumption.
Theory Three: The commerce clause...
One of the reasons for saying that people are insulated from public opinion is because more and more of the important decisions are being made in federal, not state, governments. Granted, I agree that without a strong federal government we wouldn't have things like desegregation, but it's a double-edged sword. The people of California want medical marijuana decriminalization, the federal government wants to interfere with that. People, quite rightly, believe they have more of an influence over the state governments than they do over the local governments - but if the state governments themselves have less influence...
Theory Four: The news just sucks
The idea is that if the news were better at reporting, their would be less insulation of public officials from public opinion. Instead, Britany Spears' sister being pregnant knocks out stories on the CIA withholding information from the 9/11 commission.
This is mostly because, as the original author noted, good reporting costs money, but advertising brings in the same amount of money no matter what you put on the page. Fluff is cheap.
I don't disagree with it, but I do think there's more to it than that. If good, investigative reporting was salable, Harpers and the New Yorker would be in everyone's mailbox; not in the mailbox of the few people who seem to crave hard-hitting reporting.
So, it's a complicated problem.
-- Brian Boyko
-- M.A. Journalism, U.Texas-Austin, 2005
I used to work for NetQoS. I no longer do, but want to keep the excellent karma attached to this account.
My experience is that the quality of writing in the best British newspapers is better than the writing in U.S. newspapers.
True... Also add to the fact that of the newspapers I can get here, more than 2/3 goes straight to the recycling bin before I even get around to reading it. Why? Adverts and ad inserts. If they stuff that many ads in there in relation to actual content, why then should I even pay for the thing?
At least on websites there's no real overhead for ads (no money wasted on ink & paper), the user can ignore or even block them if not interested (instead of stuffing the recycling bin), and businesses can use trackers to see if they're worth it (click-through or whatever) in relation to results.
My Grandparents, who live in rural Wisconsin, told me their only information on what's happening outside of the U.S.A. is the local evening news, which gives a 60-second whirlwind medley of the day's international events. I asked them if they ever remembered anything from it and they said no, not because they're not interested but because it goes by too fast - they don't have time to focus in on any of the content.
Ah yes - news reporting - just another reason from the long list of reasons why I'm glad I emigrated when I was 21.
Om
Newspapers can go on being electronic. They can make a payment scheme where the first time users login every day, the amount of money that the actual newspaper costs is deducted from their account. In the end of the month, a 'newspaper' bill arrives that the user has to pay to continue their subscription.
In this way, nothing will change economically (the customer will continue to pay whatever he used to), and the newspapers can go on and be more useful (faster news delivery, better interactivity).
Well, the quality of writing in the best U.S. newspapers is better than the writing in U.S. newspapers, too. What was your point??
It would be nice if they would complement each other. I would worry (even more) about "journalists'" honesty if they began to compliment each other.
All 19 hijackers were known terrorists 09-10-2001. Lack of FBI intelligence does not justify warrantless wiretaps..
The Internet has just emphasized the incompetence of a profession that, by and large, cannot tell the difference between opinions and facts, and treats the existence of editorials as news. Such recursion in genetics is termed incest. I submit that recursion is equally unhealthy in the flow of pure information as in genetic information.
http://www.reuters.com/article/wtMostRead/idUSN2326769820071223
All 19 hijackers were known terrorists 09-10-2001. Lack of FBI intelligence does not justify warrantless wiretaps..
I was always eating the beaver to save those trees!
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
This is an fallacy similar to the mistake people make with evolution where they say that a wolf, because it larger and more complex, is more evolved than a beetle. The beetle is just as adapted to its environment as the wolf. All that matters in evolution is the ability of the offspring of both species to reproduce and flourish. The extra complexity in the wolf is merely a vehicle to get it there.
While the newspaper is higher quality than Craig's List, the newspaper's quality is simply a vehicle to drive sales. The low cost of the Internet allows Craig's List to be free at the point of use. The difference in quality between the newspaper and Craig's List is not sufficient to justify the increased cost of the paper. The result is that people don't buy it.
In the old days, if I wanted a new cupboard, I'd go and find a carpenter down the road to make it for me. Even the most basic hand-made cupboard is higher quality than a flat-pack piece. The lower price of the flat-pack more than compensates for it. My cupboard is not as pretty as a hand sculpted one but it is functionally equivalent, lasts long enough and is considerably cheaper.
Quality is a legitimate victim of economic growth. All you have to do is satisfy demand and if the lower quality version is cheaper and has the required level of function then the higher quality produce will be pushed out of the market.
Simon
My cupboard is not as pretty as a hand sculpted one but it is functionally equivalent, lasts long enough and is considerably cheaper.
Yes, but Craigslist is not functionally equivalent to a newspaper. None of the services that cherry-pick newspaper revenue streams are. And your point about the loss of quality just backs up my contention that Craigslist is, er, lower quality than newspapers in key respects.
It's more than just a loss of quality we're facing, although that is a tragedy. It's that there is no good link between the demand of people for accountable public life and the supply of that accountability. We previously got round it with a trick -- using the demand for classified advertising and TV listings and crosswords and sports results etc etc to pay for the investigative journalism -- but that trick is breaking down.
With regards to your object theory, Project Xanadu by Ted Nelson had that idea in 1960. :-)
"All you have to do is be fragile and grateful. So stay the underdog." Chuck Palahniuk, Choke