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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.'"
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's true that Viewtron was long before the Web, but it very much affected the way newspaper companies looked at new technology.
Knight-Ridder invested more than $50 million in Viewtron over six years and got nothing back. The money just went away. Gone forever. They could have bought a couple of mid-size daily newspapers at that price and had a solid rate of return.
Memories of Viewtron fed a lot of fear in the 1993-1997 era. That's actually when U.S. newspapers blew their opportunities to be leaders in what became the modern Web. Nobody was willing to place a really big bet. Nobody wanted to flush $50 million down the toilet. So newspapers got all tangled up in complicated, unworkable cooperative deals like New Century Network.
And when the dotbubble burst in 2001, people could say "see, I told you so!"
Life moves on. Suddenly everything changes, and big companies are caught napping.
So there you have it. Newspapers were among the pioneers in the online space, pushing content onto CompuServe and The Source, publishing on Prodigy, building entire national networks like Viewtron. Roll ahead a couple of decades and they're being reviled as a worst-case example of an industry caught sleeping at the switch.
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'd think if he was trying to suck up to the moderators, he wouldn't have posted anonymously.
Audiotext was a project that most newspaper chains embarked upon in the early nineties, and like most of their other "new media" initiatives, it was a case of spending tens of millions of dollars to chase tens of people.
The newspaper industry has two major problems.
The first is that they are sheep - nobody wants to take risks. They all see something shiny, then attempt to emulate it, spending millions in the process. I sat in many a meeting in my former life as a web manager at a group of small daily papers owned by one of the largest chains having others on the management chain, my boss the publisher and corporate execs telling us "we should look at what newspaper X is doing, we shouldn't reinvent the wheel."
Along with another poster in this thread, I tried for nine years to do unique and innovative things, but I was met with resistance throughout the corporate and local bureaucracy. I've left the industry and haven't looked back.
The second big problem is Wall Street. The dirty secret of the newspaper industry is that it's still EXTREMELY profitable. I'm talking 20-30%. The problem is, this is historically low, from the halcyon days when the margins were 50%+. Most business would kill for a margin in the 20's, and I suspect only healthcare and financial services still can match newspapers in that respect. Yet, because the returns are lower than in the past, stock prices fall, and the industry is considered a financial failure.
The point was that the newspapers gave up on it too soon.
So the 'failure', was short-termism from the management.