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.'"

Comments

Newspapers and SEO

[notseamus]

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

Anonymous sources

[narcberry]

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.

Viewtron

[MichaelSmith]

From TFA:

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.

Re:Viewtron

[yelvington]

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.

Paper and gasoline-based dinosaurs

[Simonetta]

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.

Re:Paper and gasoline-based dinosaurs

[Anonymous Coward]

You have some valid points, but there is a distinction which is often overlooked between those who generate hard content by reporting the news, and those who serve as portals or brokers for news content that has already been generated by others.

It's not hard to see how Google, Slashdot, and others can make a good business out of aggregating and selecting the best work of others, some adding value by providing forums such as this one. But who's going to do the original reporting? Some say that the Flikr model works best. Good luck with that for coverage of stuff other than disasters and staged events... how many private citizens will be cultivating sources inside the administration, Congress, and state and local governments so they can report what and how policies are being made, and provide meaningful analysis? Sure there are millions of bloggers out there, but who has time to determine which of them are trustworthy, instead of being misinformed or having an axe to grind?

So I think it's in the interest of all of us to consider ways in which established primary news organizations can continue to thrive.

Re:Paper and gasoline-based dinosaurs

[Anonymous Coward]

Newspapers are still good at local city and neighborhood news and ads for local retailers.

I read about things via Google news the day before they're printed in the local paper.

emp. added

Congratulations on living in a major metropolitan area.

If you live in a place with a population < 500,000, most of the local news stories won't make it to Google news - and if they do, it's because the local newspaper did a write-up on it. No one from CNN/ABC/FOX cares about a crime wave in Paduca, or the effect of the local grain elevator closing in Peoria. And the only time you get election coverage for small-town council elections in Google news is if one of the candidates is in a sex scandal.

Sure, LA, SF, DC, and NY will get "local" coverage in Google News, but the only people covering local news here in "flyover country" is the local newspaper - I don't see that changing anytime soon.

Re:Paper and gasoline-based dinosaurs

[Enderandrew]

I work for a newspaper company.

We have an internet presence, and even though it costs less than our very expensive physical product, we still make far more money off the physical product. Advertisers are still willing to pay more to have a physical insert in the physical paper, and they don't seem very interested in recreating that via PDF or Flash, or whatever online.

We actually drive our paper in all directions, as far as 7 hours away, DAILY. Do you know how much we pay in transportation? Yet, this is still our most profitable model.

I've suggested printing the paper locally in each location, and sending electronic copies to those cities rather than trucking them, but my company is actually more committed to putting out the best product, even at the expense of profit. We have really nice presses in our main facility. If we printed our paper in small towns, rather than deliver it via truck, the quality wouldn't be as good.

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.

Re:Paper and gasoline-based dinosaurs

[rk]

As someone who worked for one of the bigger newspaper chains in "new media" for two years, I have to agree with this. In theory local information is something that local papers should be able to dominate in online. The reality is the papers spend basically squat on local presence and are centralizing all their web presence. Google, and MSN and Yahoo for that matter, have way too many people all smarter than the people running the online newspaper business. Those companies will eat the newspapers for lunch and they won't know what hit them.

The paper I worked for had just spent 30 million dollars on a new press facility, while online media was me (engineer), my boss, a designer, and an online editor, and we were lucky to have that much. Our servers were handled centrally and we paid nearly a quarter of a million dollars per year for the privilege. For what we got out of that money, we could've bought a couple servers, dropped in a DS3, and hired another person and done way more than what we did. We spent a lot of our time wrestling with their byzantine CMS, when we could've done the whole thing with Drupal or some other decent open source CMS and some customization.

I hear the executives talk the talk about how their industry must transform, but my brief experience indicated that they don't have clue one on how to do it. I wouldn't touch a newspaper stock with a ten foot pole.

They've botched their entire business

[MikeRT]

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.

Re:most screwed up

[yelvington]

Newspapers are not going bankrupt. They just have to refocus.

It's not that simple. A few big newspapers are losing lots of money, millions of dollars a month. But most smaller newspapers continue to make money with operating margins that look good by most traditional business standards.

Newspaper operating margins traditionally have run between 10 and 45 percent of gross revenues (yes, really). A margin of 10 percent is just fine, unless you borrowed money under an assumption of 25. Then you're in big trouble. That is the core of the problem facing newspaper companies today.

If you bought stock in a publicly held newspaper company and assumed you'd retire on the earnings, you can forget about it. The McClatchy Company, which bought Knight-Ridder, was worth over $74 a share about three years ago. Today it's worth less than $4. Shareholders are abandoning newspaper stocks. Why? Loans and bonds come before shareholders. A company with a lot of debt and a suddenly sinking line of business is one that shareholders quickly abandon, especially if the news is full of chatter about how the Internet is destroying its business model.

If things get bad enough, a company could go into bankruptcy -- leaving shareholders with nothing -- even while it's still making a profit on regular operations. Debt service can kill you.

The Internet really is changing the world, but that's not the biggest reason U.S. newspaper companies are hurting right now. It's the economy. Local advertisers, which are the big sources of revenue, are cutting back. Employment ads, real estate ads, used-car ads are suddenly way down.

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. All that stuff is true. But the crisis right now is one of ownership and finance, not continued operation.

And I will not be surprised to see one or more bankruptcies in the next year.

These are off the mark, IMO

[Huntr]

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.

Re:1 Way Slashdot is Turning Into Digg

[Thexare Blademoon]

I'd think if he was trying to suck up to the moderators, he wouldn't have posted anonymously.

Re:Ha ha!

[mmarlett]

Actually, you'll note that some of these botches of the web actually predate the web. It is easy to mock in hindsight.

In the fall of 1994, I was the first editor of the third daily newspaper to go online daily (the Kansas State Collegian, which followed the Kentucky Kernel (which beat us by a few days as their school year started earlier) and the Raleigh News and Observer (nando.net -- now a McClatchy holding -- which was online with news everyday at some point that summer). In the spring of 1995 I had a newspaper management class and the publisher of the Kansas City Star spoke about how it had invested millions in this new thing that was going to let people read their newspapers at home on their PCs. When he was done, I invited him back to the student newsroom and showed him the Internet. ("It's kinda like AOL," I told him.) What we were doing -- for the cost of two part-time student salaries and one retired yet dedicated Mac SE 30 -- was almost exactly what he described. He was both amazed and pissed. The Star project was canceled months later.

We were originally going to do a Gopher site to archive our newspaper, but some jackass at the ever competitive University of Kansas had done a mock up of the University Daily Kansan as a web page (spring of 1994). Spurred into action, we changed our plans and did that web thing instead. Why? Because it let us display images with the stories. But if Kelly Campbell, our technical brains, hadn't been curiously checking out our options, we'd have done a Gopher site and it would have been complete obscurity. One curious tech was the difference between bleeding edge correct and looking goofy. (Kelly, btw, is a senior programer for Google now.)

When that KU jackass got his degree, he went to work for Knight-Ridder and led its Internet efforts. Then it created the "RealCities" horseshit that the article describes. I witnessed firsthand the RealCities disaster, as I was working at the Wichita Eagle (a Knight-Ridder paper), and called it when I saw it -- but nobody who mattered listened.

Pretty much everything after 1995 is open for mockery. But those early efforts are just bleeding edge research projects that could have gone any direction. The whole idea of open standards just didn't exist for anything but automotive cigarette lighters. We were all just guessing, and some were willing to put their money where their mouths were.