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5 Ways Newspapers Botched the Web
nicholas.m.carlson writes "Remember Knight-Ridder and AT&T's Viewtron from 1983? With a $900 terminal and $12 a month, you could access news from the Miami Herald and the New York Times, online shopping, banking and food delivery, via a 300-baud modem. After sinking $16 million a year into the project, Knight-Ridder shut it down in 1986. That's just the earliest of the 5 newspaper failures on the Web that Valleywag details in this post, writing: 'each tale ends the same way: A promising start, shuttered amid fear, uncertainty, and doubt.'"
Your medium is dying!
Another way newspapers are failing on the web is the use of terms in headlines that generate high ranking on search engines.
Stories like the iPhone Nano that the Mail ran a few weeks ago, and that was linked to from here are perfect examples of it.
Journalism is second place to the SEO it seems.
Charlie Brooker wrote about it a couple of weeks ago, but the best example he gave was from the Telegraph where journalists wrote: "Young women - such as Britney Spears - are buying more shoes than ever"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jul/21/charliebrooker.pressandpublishing
I dreamed of Freud: What does this mean?
Well they've sure taken a strong lesson with the anonymity of the web. It seems every headline I read is based on an anonymous submission, a source who detailed events under the protection of anonymity, et cetera.
Not sure how we still call them news agencies.
Modding me -1 troll doesn't make me wrong.
In 1983, Knight Ridder and AT&T joined to launch videotext service Viewtron. Anybody with a dedicated terminal, phone line, and $12 a month could access news from the Miami Herald and the New York Times, online shopping, banking and food delivery, via a 300-baud modem.
This happened in the mid 1980s so it had nothing to do with the web. It sounds like a brave early attempt to anticipate the web. Good on them. Sorry it failed but they were clearly before their time. I wouldn't call it a botch.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Newspapers are paper and gasoline-based dinosaurs. This is what is causing their demise. It will soon cost too much to actually schlep all this stupid paper from the printing plant to the houses.
Newspapers traditionally do the following things:
- Inform their readers what is happening in the world.
- Inform what is happening in their city, town, or neighborhood.
- Provide a forum for information private sales and rentals, e.g. the classified ads.
- Provide a network for a common political viewpoints.
- Provide a central source for commercial ads of local retailers.
- Provide an accepted 'source of record' for local events and legal notices; weddings, bankruptcies, public legal notices, etc...
The web does all these things better:
- CNN, BBC, Digg, and Slashdot tell us what is happening in the world.
- CraigsList and eBay provide local ads and private sales information.
- Blog and political websites provide a forum for persons with shared political views.
Newspapers are still good at local city and neighborhood news and ads for local retailers. And the web has nothing for being a 'source of record' for legal notices, and all that stuff. Newspapers have permanence: once something is printed in the local paper it stays printed and accessable. It can't be changed by some cracker like web site info. Newspapers have credibility for that reason.
But their dependence on paper and gasoline to move all this paper makes them irrelevant nowdays. Soon it cost too much to distribute all this paper and newspapers will be gone, like typewriters are now. Ever used a typewriter? They were a real pain in the neck.
Gone but fondly remembered are Netly News, Nando Times, SatireWire, and (last and least) the Worst of the Web. Fucked Company seems pretty fucked of late, as well.
If you post it, they will read.
Slashdot isn't Digg, even if the Idle experiment is trying to make a Digg-like Slashdot. While the quality of Slashdot submissions are sometimes crappy, on average they are pretty decent and topical. And even when they are screwed up, the userbase is smart enough to figure it out and add the relevant corrections.
Smart userbase + decent stories (on average) = Slashdot.
Barking retards + junk stories = Digg.
Isn't it ironic that newspaper generated content is on the front page of yahoo (often) powers google news and is the source of a lot of content on the web but they make no money off it. The problem with newspapers failing is how do we become informed? The above piece was pretty much illustrates the headline nature of news on the net and cable news has turned into a complete joke with almost no informative news coverage. If newspapers fail and are replaced with headlines and fluff it only brings us closer to idiocracy.
Maybe folks just couldn't get used to Kitt's computerized voice...
Instead of doing a lot of indepth local reporting, many of them are just local syndicated content outlets. If they would do a lot of hard-hitting local journalism, especially on matters like local government corruption and abuse of power, there would be more interest in their product.
The Fort Worth Star-Telegram ran a dialup news-delivery service called StarText from 1982 to 1997. The Internet and newspaper's web site eventually supplanted it. Until a couple of years ago startext.com still pointed to the newspaper's web site.
Here is a snapshot from 1996.
I was still using a terminal based computing until the 90's. Perhaps my terminal was a microcomputer running kermit, but it was terminal dialed into a mainframe. It may seem strange to those who were not present that someone would develop a dedicated terminal based application instead of writing an app for a GPC. An IBM XT for $8,000? And then spend another $500 for the terminal program? Hardware was not cheap in 1985. The $4000 for a Macintosh and $3000 for a Compaq were considered quite reasonable.
What I find truly annoying of a technology site is that people make fun of those innovators that tried to do something interesting, even if it the wrong thing. It sometimes seems that we are so obsessed with people copy existing ideas in an effort to make them cheaper, which is certainly important, that we forget that all our cool stuff would not available with the risk taking inventors and early adopters that we all laugh at.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
The LA Times, which has historically been one of the best papers in the US, has recently been through a lot of management shakeups, layoffs, and a change of ownership, and its relationship to the web has been a big point of controversy. WP says, 'In December 2006, a team of Times reporters delivered management with a critique of the paper's online news efforts known as the Spring Street Project. The report, which condemned the Times as a "web-stupid" organization," was followed by a shakeup in management of the paper's Web site, latimes.com, and a rebuke of print staff who have "treated change as a threat."' Some of the reporters feel that journalistic standards are lower on the paper's web site than they are in the printed paper. Their circulation is way down.
Find free books.
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In March of 1939 The St. Louis Post Dispatch began experimental public broadcasts of a nine page facsimile newspaper to the home using technology developed by RCA.
"So far as the transmitting equipment is concerned, it is the standard scanner manufactured by RCA, the output of which is fed into a 100-watt transmitter operating on 31,600 kc. We selected the ultra-high frequency band because it offered the opportunity of broadcasting facsimile during the day time--in fact any time we desire.
We have not experienced nearly as much trouble with interference on the ultra-high frequency band as was expected. The characteristics of the recorders are such that far more interference can be tolerated than is the case in the reception of sound broadcasting an these frequencies."
Within the next month RCA expects to be able to supply receivers at a cost of about $260. Several will be placed in public places for demonstration. The range of Station W9XZY is from 20 to 30 miles.
"On the first page of this "radio newspaper," now being received in every home in the St. Louis service area of W9XZY equipped with a facsimile receiver, are the leading news articles of the day. Then following sports news, several pages of pictures, Fitzpatrick's editorial cartoon, a summary of radio programs and radio gossip, and a page of financial news and stock market quotations."
The antenna of the receiver set in the home picks up these waves. The receiver, a closed cabinet with no dials to be operated or adjustments to be made by the owner, contains continuously-feeding rolls of paper and carbon paper which pass over a revolving metal cylinder from which a small stylus projects.
Pressure, varying with the intensity of the radio waves, is exerted on a metal bar, parallel to the axis of the cylinder, beneath which the paper and carbon is fed. Thus the black and white of the original copy scanned by the "electric eye" is duplicated on the paper passing over the cylinder of the receiving set which is synchronized with that of the sending mechanism.
It is unnecessary for the reader to be on hand when a broadcast begin since a clock, set for the scheduled time, will automatically start the receiving set and stop it at conclusion of broadcasting. It requires 15 minutes to transmit one page.
First Daily Newspaper by RADIO FACSIMILE
[as published in Radio-Craft, March 1939]
We bring this up at work quite a bit. Radio was going to completely kill print. TV would completely kill print. Some newspapers are hurting right now, but the well run papers are doing just fine.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
> Knight-Ridder and AT&T's Viewtron from 1983?
No.
Their they're doing there hair.
I'm still amazed at how difficult conventional media say it is to make money off the web when Google makes billions off of dinky text ads.
I know I could notlight my fire with my laptop. And until now, the newpaper has been the most cost effective way to consume news on the train or bus on my way home from work. That was until I got a caching browser on my phone, then I stopped buying the paper 8) Luckily the local rags still deliver, so I still have fire-lighters at the end of the week.
You only used "Smart userbase" to suck up to the moderators. Admit it.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
First off, it spoke NAPLPS -- basically, Flash before there was Flash. There was no text-only interface. So you got to stare at the screen as it drew almost pretty pictures at you, at 300 bits per second.
Now there was nothing intrinsically wrong with NAPLPS -- it was fairly sophisticated and portable for its day. Dave Hughes was a big champion of it. But since newspapers were vehicles for advertising, and advertising "requires" graphics, you spent a non-trivial amount of time waiting for the ad to render, then the UI, then the information you actually requested. It made the text-only services of the day like CompuServe and The Source seem speedy by comparison.
It still floors me that they plowed over 10 million 1980 dollars in to this thing. On-line sophisticates universally declared it as wretched, and there was no way it would ever have been appealing enough for someone to go out and drop large sums of money on new equipment to get access to it. (By the way, I'm pretty sure the Viewtron client I saw was running on a Commodore-64. Viewtron wouldn't have justified the purchase of the modem, much less the C64.)
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
So what will all those out-of-work print-journalists do now? I know that the typical newspaper company would love nothing more than cornering larger percentages in their respective markets? But, exactly how long can they really keep competitive with that business model anymore? On the other hand, there will always be a large demand for quality journalism. User generated content is great, but other than the occasional pet-trick on youtube, you don't get too much viral demand for amature articles. What we would truly need is something for regional journalists to post their articles onto a site like built region-specific, free and user-generated like craigslist. Giving a reader in Wichita the chance to read articles as they relate to "Kansas-> Wichita-> Sports" for instance, but also incorporates reader ratings like Digg. Put these together with a platform for ad providers to find content generators and pay them based upon rating and we have a new model for real journalists to publish what they want to publish, but based upon the success of their articles also receive compensation commensurate with their Digg-like rating...
Although many of them are doing well on the basis of something *other* than their news business. The Washington Post for instance makes very little money on their news business, but they make the big bucks on their Kaplan Test Prep business. (Their most recent annual profits report had the overall profit down 39% even though Kaplan more than pulled its weight with 14% increase in sales). The New York Times, arguably the most well known and respected paper in the country, had profits drops over 80% in the past year (they also own about.com, no idea how their income stream breaks down). While both of them are still in the black, it's not hard to see where a lot of less well known papers would have serious problems.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
... but I see Slashdot and Digg like this:
Pseudo-intelligent, one-sided userbase + decent stories, but with the summary written in a pseudo-intelligent, one-sided manner + dupes + flamebait + "I don't believe in imaginary property" + pro-Linux fluff + the occasional "balanced" story = Slashdot.
Pseudo-intelligent, one-sided userbase, one-sided userbase + lolcat pictures + junk stories/outright untruths written in a pseudo-intelligent, one-sided manner + Obama praise + McCain bashing + "lol RIAA sux" + pro-Linux fluff + human interest stories = Digg.
Seems like the same to me. Fortunately Slashdot is still the lesser of two evils.
For now.
That's a great link!
I have an image of a Radio Craft cover from that era that I frequently use when I'm speaking at journalism conferences.
It shows a guy who looks like Bob (from the Church of the Subgenius) collecting a fax paper from a radio device.
The point, of course, is that radio unfolded on a completely different path. Cars are not horseless carriages. Websites shouldn't be "online newspapers." And that sort of thing.
In the late 1990s, I attended a future scenario-planning workshop with a bunch of newspaper folks. We all broke up into groups to brainstorm products. One of the other groups -- not MY group! -- came up with a great idea: We'll deliver fax newspapers, over the Internet. It was 1939, all over again.
William Gibson said the future is already here; it's just unevenly distributed. That's true. But it's also true that when it's here, most of us can't see it, because we're so desperately trying to fit it into a framework from our own past.
The #1 way newspapers screwed up was by trying to charge for stuff you can get for free. They tried to cram their existing model of paying for news on a medium where you can get a lot of good news for free and without a lot of hassle. Charging for their version of the same story, making non-home subscribers register or pay, the hoops we were made to jump through, all led to most newspapers taking a giant dump on the internet. Most of those schemes have been scaled back or done away with for many of the dailies I read online. I don't know if its too little, too late, but lots of newspapers are hurting and failing to correctly embrace the web had something to do with it.
I work for the Omaha World-Herald which owns a direct marketing company, as well as almost every paper in Nebraska and Iowa. We have online advertising as well, but our money almost all comes from physical insert advertising in our paper.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
I'd think if he was trying to suck up to the moderators, he wouldn't have posted anonymously.
It's tedious, and you need to show a lot of cleavage.
The problem with talking about people `getting on the Clue Train' is that while the clues are usually obvious in retrospect, they're not always obvious at the time.
No matter what the clue is, somebody knows it, and probably shares it with the paper somehow. The problem is that the newspaper has to filter through 1000 different clues, and pick the ones that will turn out to be `true' and discard the `wrong' ones. And this isn't so easy -- successful executives made the right choices, and failed executives chose poorly. And the problem isn't specific to newspapers.
Unfortunately, there's not just one Clue Train. There's 1000 of them, and you have to pick the right ones. And it's not always easy.
I'll give you botches.
"No doubt, our company will shift more and more online in the future, but print isn't dead yet if you put out a quality product, cater to your audience, and sell advertising like mad."
Were does E-ink fit into all this?
Well not quite. For one, newspapers have a lot of room for things which aren't time sensitive. When it comes to news itself things are a bit different. The days of newspapers being able to stick AP articles into the paper are long over. To maintain relevance, newspapers have to (*gasp*) start researching, thinking about, and producing their own content. Today breaking news is available minutes after it was written, newspapers cannot afford to simply reprint what we've already read the day before. They have to put the effort in to consolidate and analyze all of the available information, as well as gather their own to produce something better.
Newspapers need to accept that all of this NEEDS to be duplicated on the web. The web should be thought of as nothing more than a free digital version of the newspaper. Advertising should be expected to support it.
Newspapers that can't pull it off, should shut down while they can.
Valleywag neglected to mention the failed New York Times venture New York Videotex, which was rechristened New York Pulse before it folded around 1987. At the time it was believed that to support a few dozen simultaneous online users, special I/O boards containing upwards of 200 megabytes would be needed. The DEC microvax wasn't up to it. Of course, there was no web, no html, no linux. The technical management believed that videotex would require implementing an object oriented language called Omega, which had an applicative component language called Alpha; both languages were conceived by computer scientist Bruce J. MacLennan. The attitude of the Times towards New York Pulse was that it was insurance in case videotex, or something like it, were to take off. There was little chance of this: the hardware was too expensive for all but the most affluent users, and the software was primitive by today's standards. The Times was hostile to videotex, which was considered a threat to the newspaper business, and they were relieved when New York Pulse and Prodigy, a substantially larger Citibank backed competitor, both failed. Of course, when the World Wide Web took off, the Times found itself back in the hypertext business, without the help of the veterans of their failed experiment, many of whom never completely recovered.
... both made "Knight-Ridder" look like "Knight Rider", and I thought they were beaming electronic messages to modified black Trans Ams. The thing that makes reality even stranger is that the show was airing in the same time period.
Okay, put down the pitchfork. I'm getting off your lawn.
"We are Microsoft. You shall be assimilated. Competition is futile."
Your comment makes me wonder if all newspapers are equally doomed. Does the web threaten the major big-city dailies more than smaller local papers? At the other end, I suspect the nationally-distributed papers like USA Today and the Wall Street Journal are also better positioned than big-city dailies.
I imagine that all news-on-dead-trees will go away sooner or later, but I think some are going away sooner.
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
How could they not mention Belo Corp (owner of the Dallas Morning News)$40 million dollar investment in the Cue Cat? The ultimate link between newspapers and web pages via bar codes in an adorable PS2 device.
http://www.dallasobserver.com/2001-06-28/news/goodbye-kitty/
Skip ------ See the latest from http://www.anArchyFortWorth.com
Why do I get the feeling Mr. Carlson is posting this stuff all over the place to promote ValleyWag?
2.) I do it anyway.
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It was 1989 all over again as well:
In two small Illinois towns, a one-page fax newspaper called Fax Today has challenged the local daily with some success, prompting predictions that similar fax papers could spread like a virus across the country and pose a threat to newspapers.
What makes Fax Today different is that it is free to subscribers and supported by advertising. It was started in 1989 in Effingham, Ill., by Jack M. Schultz, an entrepreneur with no newspaper experience. He expanded the service to Bloomington in 1990. The enterprise is profitable, Mr. Schultz said, and he sees significant potential for growth.
The last two years have seen a flurry of experiments in delivering news by fax. For instance, The Chicago Tribune, The Knoxville News-Sentinel in Tennessee and The Minneapolis Star Tribune abandoned fax papers that charged a subscription fee for a one-page afternoon update of business news.
The Los Angeles Times provides a free summary of news via fax to government officials and diplomats in Moscow as a promotional vehicle.
The New York Times has three fax news products aimed at areas where the newspaper is not readily available: a six-page fax newspaper for hotels in Japan, which emphasizes Japanese news; a six-page international edition for Australia and other foreign countries, and an eight-page edition for cruise ships. Small Fax Newspaper Shakes Up Its Press Rivals [August 12, 1991]
The RCA Radio Fax receiver is fascinating and provocative.
In 1939 for small print runs you cut a stencil for a mimeograph machine - the tech from hell - or you bought a letterpress out of the back pages of Popular Science.
The dry paper home fax machine that can deliver legible 7 pt. text and halftoned photographs is pure science fiction.
You might not want be able to justify a $260 radio fax machine for your home - but it's not hard to see what it brings to the Chris-Craft cabin cruiser or the branch office.
30 miles at 30 MHz. 100 watts. Perhaps ten times that range at lower frequencies and higher power. The thing ran off a clock. There were no external controls whatever.
That alone had to be an eye-opener for the shortwave hobbyist.
"So what's unfolding right now is largely an ownership crisis. In the long term, smearing ink on paper is a bad idea, the Internet is a better way to distribute news and information, and old business models have been disintegrated."'
Correction. Sources that the majority can afford are a good idea. The Internet will never be as cheap as the cost of a single paper, let alone a full subscription. The internet even with standard cellular plan isn't as cheap, nor as widespread. "how many bars?" is something you will never hear in a discussion about the newspaper. And if E-ink ever gets it's issues ironed out. The paper will still have a lot of life left.
Make no mistake -- the Internet WILL kill newsprint. Relying on a simplistic interpretation of history isn't going to save it.
Radio didn't kill print because it didn't satisfy the same needs that print did. TV didn't kill print because it didn't satisfy the same needs that print did. Now ask yourself: does the web satisfy the same needs that print does? It's clear to me (and basically everyone else that's under 50-years-old) that it does. Not only does it replace print, but it improves on it.
Years ago we had two local papers, The Union, and The Sacramento Bee.
Because they were in competition, you ALWAYS got a professionally assembled paper, on time every morning, & it was full of relevant news.
If you didn't deliver a "professional looking product" NLT 6am every morning (7am on Sunday's), then they'd fire your butt & find someone who could.
(I used to deliver both of them, and neither of them took ANY crap from their carriers.)
Now, years later, the Bee bought the Union.
There is no competition.
No matter how much we complain, we rarely get our paper before 7am, it is NEVER organized (the Front Page wrapped in the Classifieds, sections out of order, and *I* have to re-assemble it), and the "news paper" is nearly 80% *advertisements*.
As in a two-page, full-colour spread every few pages (oh look, Macy's... now Dish Network... AT&T), and NO page other than the FRONT page is completely free of advertisements.
You can't read a continuous story because it's broken up into two, three, or even four separate areas, with advertisements sprinkled like bird dung between all the bits.
On any given day, there may be eight sections, but of those, three are pure ads (Classified, Rental Properties, etc) and well-over-half of what's left is comprised of ads.
On a Sunday it's even worse - there are literally POUNDS of paper being dumped on my door step, and of that, there are maybe five sections of "news", and the rest of it is nothing but fliers, inserts, and entire sections of ads.
We don't get a "News Paper" any more, we get an _advertising_supplement_ with some news stories thrown in for flavour.
To add insult to injury, as others have mentioned before, the news is stale.
Everything, and I mean *EVERYTHING* I can read in the paper, I can get from online sources at LEAST 24 hours prior to seeing it in print, and sometimes I'll NEVER see it in print because the paper blows goats as far as actual REPORTING THE NEWS is concerned.
Stories about Britney Spears? Front Page, Above The Fold, full-colour, three pages worth.
Stories how Bush & Company is raping the Country & shredding our Rights?
That's buried in Section C, somewhere near the crease, in tiny type, no pictures, a single column blurb under 100 words, & buried in so it looks like it's part of an advertisement...
Newspapers are worthless.
When they're allowed to become a Monopoly, the Public isn't given a choice of what to read.
Yes all it takes is a few minutes online to get REAL news, but that's what the newspapers WERE supposed to be for, remember?
=/
Great! I learned that Knight-Ridder sucks.
But I still would rather read a real newspaper than read Valleywag ever again. (That was the first and last time.)
You only used "Smart userbase" to suck up to the moderators. Admit it.
Trust me on this. For various reasons I stopped using Slashdot altogether for almost a year (2006 IIRC). During that time I started using Digg- which back then had been hyped as the best thing since sliced bread, the poster-boy of Web 2.0, and was being talked about essentially as a next-generation, improved Slashdot.
Yeah, it's hard to believe that now, but that's how it was seen then. Anyway, I eventually stopped using Digg and moved back to Slashdot because I got sick of the moron-level discussions and popularity-contest, attention-grabbing crap stories. Even during the few months that I used it, the quality of both seemed to go down significantly, and it was nowhere as good as it had been hyped even when I started. Perhaps the rot had already set in by then, but if you want a riposte to that "wisdom of crowds" bullshit, the kneejerk, cliquish, sheeplike, bovine-level groupthink, stupidity of the Digg userbase is perfect.
There was a really good article on Kuro5hin about it, but it seems to have disappeared.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, when I came back to Slashdot, the comments *genuinely* seemed like they'd been written by- if not geniuses- then certainly vastly more intelligent people. And if you're thinking that this was in comparison with Digg, which would make anything look good- that's the point. Once the novelty had worn off, the usual factors started to irritate me again, but trust me when I say that compared to Digg, Slashdot users *are* fucking geniuses.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
You forgot the most important things that newspapers provide.
Ads for local stores
Funnies!!!
Everybody knows 3 people with my name.
I heard from someone high up that MNI is going tits up within the next 6 months. Look for senior leadership to bail, that's your cue to GTFO.
What I want is the article, and on the same page as the article, a "Comments" box, where I and others may publicly discuss the article, and not have our comments messed with unless they fail to meet some (fairly low) standards designed to prevent trolling, user-fights, and spamvertising.
Am I the only one that saw "Knight-Ridder and AT&T" and thought of a talking car reading me the news?