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Are Newspapers Doomed?
Ponca City, We love you writes "James Surowiecki has an interesting article in the New Yorker that crystalizes the problems facing print newspapers today and explains why we may soon be seeing more major newspapers filing for bankruptcy, as the Tribune Company did last week. 'There's no mystery as to the source of all the trouble: advertising revenue has dried up,' writes Surowiecki, but the 'peculiar fact about the current crisis is that even as big papers have become less profitable they've arguably become more popular,' with the blogosphere piggybacking on traditional journalism's content. Surowiecki imagines many possible futures for newspapers, from becoming foundation-run nonprofits to relying on reader donations to deep-pocketed patrons. 'For a while now, readers have had the best of both worlds: all the benefits of the old, high-profit regime — intensive reporting, experienced editors, and so on — and the low costs of the new one. But that situation can't last. Soon enough, we're going to start getting what we pay for, and we may find out just how little that is.'"
This is terrible. You can't put websites at the bottom of the parrot cage!
Once most of the people who grew up reading newspapers die or just stop reading them, it's inevitable that the print form will cease to exist -- as we know it. I see a lot more prints of news websites than I see newspaper clippings, so the need for SOME of it to hit paper is still there. It's just that most people don't want the whole thing delivered physically any more. They still want the content, but most of it never leaves the digital form, so while NEWSPAPERS may die, journalism does not necessarily follow suit.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
'For a while now, readers have had the best of both worlds: all the benefits of the old, high-profit regime â" intensive reporting, experienced editors, and so on â" and the low costs of the new one. But that situation can't last. Soon enough, we're going to start getting what we pay for, and we may find out just how little that is.'
really? I thought that vanished in 1999
There has been very little fact checking or true investigation in reporting in quite some time, and I'm afraid you can't blame the internet for that.
Newspapers will not die though. Most of their stories are sourced from the same organizations which source on-line content (reuters, associated press, et al), and they will continue on in their ineptitude and failure to fact check or investigate, as usual.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
last I checked my local newspaper was easily 50% to 70% just ads
and the content trashy with alot of spelling mistakes
at least on the web we can adblock the noise
...I honestly would expect a death to printed pornography before the death of the printed newspaper.
OK, newspapers have their problems, but the biggest problem with the Tribune is that Sam Zell loaded it up with an unmanageable level of debt when he bought it.
The Tribune is more an example of how raiders like Zell enrich themselves during a leveraged buyout than an example of a failing newspaper.
Ad revenue cannot and should not sustain newspapers or television. We really need to figure out what is important to have in our society and start ponying up money to support it. I would like to see more money going to services like PBS and NPR to expand that quality of programming into a local printed publication. I have to admit that I very rarely read a paper, but I do listen to NPR pretty much every time I am in the car and I recognize that the bulk of their programming comes from news discovered by print journalists.
Go ahead and tax people for it and give the papers away. If there are no reporters out there to dig up the interesting stories that don't qualify for the sensationalist 10PM news shows then we are in danger of losing that part of our history. It's time people stop thinking about themselves, and making a quick buck on ads by catering to the lowest common denominator and start thinking about what they can do to add value to the quality of life for the entire human race.
Newspapers have been declared dead every few years for the past 15 or so. When I went to university, one of our projects was to come up with suggestions on how newspapers could leverage all the new tech (Internet was new at that time) so they could "survive".
Look, they're still around. I guess they'll still be here in another 15 years.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
internet. Once micropayments came along (which back then was always real soon), everything on the internet was supposed to become pay-for. Every website you visit would deduct a fraction of a penny from your browser or something. This would be "necessary" to pay for inherent costs. What they didn't count on was that on the internet, oftentimes, if someone doesn't provide it free, someone else is willing to step in and grab that audience.
Also, since many newspapers are little more than repackaged AP and Reuters news, looking at the NY Times for guidance - I don't know what their value proposition is supposed to be. This past election cycle, because I paid attention to politics - I have seen how the old media doesn't even pretend to present the world as it is but just their packaged version of it - they do a bad job of reporting things of niche interest - 3rd parties, other people running other than the "top 2" candidates that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, etc.
Considering this, what value do they bring to the table? If they don't carry the most general of news, someone else will. And since they don't cover anything in depth (not every interest in audience, by nature), most easy to find forums, blogs, etc will cover a subject deeper and be more informative.
All I see is someone bickering that their pre-packaged, repackaged jack-of-all-subjects, master-of-none is becoming obsolete by the fact that it's not the pre-1980s anymore when people relied on print to stay informed.
I get two newspapers each week.
One is going broke, one is doing fine.
One is skimmed, one is read front to back.
One is full of AP content, one has no AP content.
One is full of news I have already seen online, one is full of fresh stories.
Most newspapers are trying to churn out stories for the AP, hoping that their (version of the) story gets picked up and brings in some money. Meanwhile they have to pay for the expensive incoming AP stories, which they use liberally in their papers to justify the cost, filling their paper with barely readable, highly edited and condensed, dreck that has been widely available elsewhere.
Newspapers that will survive are covering the stories that no one else is covering.
Newspapers used to be the main source of aggregated of information about current events; they were few alternatives. Now we have a wide variety of sources for the same information; and don't need a daily paper to satisfy our information needs. As a result, the business model will change
You'll still need services such as the AP; but how the information is used will change. I would expect to see the multi-channel news organizations who can combine television, radio, and internet (blogs, websites, streaming data) to be replace newspapers as the primary daily news source.
As a side note, I expect more DCMA take down notices as organizations seek to protect their IP from being redistributed by outlets that don't pay for it.
I'd also expect to see local papers thrive - they can cover stories of limited interest beyond their communities, and deliver targeted ads for businesses. In addition, I'd expect specialty papers that target specific audiences (such as sports fans) to thrive because they can do more in depth and broader coverage of a narrow topic than say the AP. And of course, USA Today because every major hotel in the US buys a ton of them.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
The comment above points to ad revenue drying up as one cause for the demise of print news. While reduced ad revenue may cause newspapers to fold (pun intended), it is not the cause of the reduced circulation and therefore lower ad revenue.
Content is everything and as our society has become more politically polarized, the bias in American news media has become more and more obvious. This leads potential readers (like me) to simply not subscribe. Just as when I see movies with certain politically vocal stars, I simply avoid the box office. This is America and actors can be advocates and newspapers can be political advertisements, but choices have consequences and I sometimes wonder if these groups understand that you can't diss half of your audience without consequences.
I am a computer guy, but I hate to read long pieces on line. I would actually like to subscribe to a regional paper if I really did think that I was being offered unbiased news. So although I think that online media contributes to the demise, once again I do not think it is the cause.
The simplest cause for the demise of newspapers: content (or lack thereof).
Investigative newspaper reporting died over a decade ago. Newspapers today are nothing more than a collection of press releases.
The investigative reporters are now almost exclusively online. You no longer need a distribution network, and printing facilities. A good investigative reporter can setup a web site fairly easily, and if he/she is any good, the ad dollars will follow.
Take thetruthaboutcars.com - those guys called the demise of the American autos years ago - way before mainstream media. They were able to perform the in-depth financial analysis that the journalists at major newspapers simply ignored until recently.
Investors know this as well. Not many investors I know read newspapers any more for news. By the time the newspapers report it; the information is almost useless.
Goodbye newspapers. A generation of kids is growing up seeing the newspaper as obsolete as the typewriter.
-ted
Nobody's saying they'll just go "poof" and just cease to exist, one day. There most certainly will be newspapers around in 15 years time. But how many?
I used to read a newspaper in the metro, and even got the paper delivered to my mailbox; but it's even easier to just read it on one of my 24" screens instead of having to go down the stairs to pick it up. And in the metro I just read the news on my $smartphone.
I also work for a newspaper, and I was shown stories from the advent of radio how radio was going to kill newspapers. Then TV was going to kill newspapers. Then the internet was going to kill newspapers. IBM also said computers would give us a paperless office.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
I don't think we need to look much further than the most recent Iraq war to see how dangerous the current system is. All of our major media outlets are owned by very large corporations, many with defense interests. The press has always curried the favor of the deep pocket interests of the day. It's very instructive to look back at old press clippings on topics where we today know what the facts were ("Was the war a bad idea?" "Was this person corrupt?" "Will this harmless additive kill us?") and see how calm, certain, and forthright the pressmen were in their defense of the special interest. They have the air of the level-headed man of reason, putting our concerns to rest. Of course, they were dead fucking wrong but hey, we're all human, right?
It's true that the current blog model uses press articles and news reports as talking points to begin their own articles, those articles foster discussion threads, etc. If those dry up, more original reporting will need to be done.
But you know what? We've already reached that point with the mainstream media. Investigative journalism is expensive, nobody wants to pay for it. Most news articles these days are just repackaged press releases. Nobody wants to rock the boat and lose their jobs. If Bush says that Iraq has WMD's, if your editor tells you the organization is backing the administration's line because it's good for business, then you're writing about the WMD's. If you won't, there's a thousand other cub reporters just dying to get their shot at the big leagues.
I predict what we'll eventually see is all news sourcing going directly online. There's a lot of capital tied up in a traditional media operation be it the printing presses, distribution chain, and the useless overhead of the parent corporation that demands the news outlet be a profit center. Crossing my fingers, I hope we see a shakeout where traditional media outlets cannot compete with the price model of the net, they fall apart, and what replaces the AP feed is a loose federation of small-time private journalists who have small enough operations they can make their money off of the banner ads. They would peer with other sources to create their own wire feed and we see a more economic business model.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
....SOMEONE has to create the content. The blogosphere (and hell, even slashdot) mostly points to someone else's content. Joe Blogger isn't going to be doing any in-depth investigations and that is the foundation of journalism. One can look at how superficial how TV journalism is to print journalism...and then realize that the blogosphere offers insight and nothing else.
Content isn't going to come with compensation.
We'veindeed reached the moment at which Internet news is putting print news out of business. The problem is that much of the genuine value found in print publications hasn't been ported to the new medium. Most web-only publications are making money, but still can't afford to hire trained journalists or underwrite investigative journalism. The reason you see less worthwhile investigative work in print is that these units were easy targets when newspapers cut staff.
We're near the tipping point at which online news sites need to hire or acquire the talent that supported print publications. The recession will speed the demise of newspapers, making lots of talent available. Can web companies afford to seize this opportunity and invest in staff? It can happen. The Politico is one example of this opportunity.
But the bottom line is that there are a number of lean years ahead for journalists, who will likely face pay cuts as they shift from print to online.
RichM
Data Center Knowledge
Heh, heh. Well, I'd say Tistork's subject line is spot on, but there's the great melting pot for you. I quit reading newspapers years ago because they unreflectively mouth the Neocon Proto-Fascist line. Quit watching network news and listening to public radio and switched to the BBC and Paris for audio and video and the internet for print for that matter.
Met a proud liberal around the Reagan years who started a campaign of spray-painting "Lies" on our metro newspaper boxes. According to Tistork, he must have surely been one mixed up dude biting the hand that fed him the propaganda he should have so dearly loved.
This ignores the point of the article - that the bedrock, actual "sources" of news such as the NYT are also in dire financial straits. Once they are gone (and by that I don't mean "cease to exist," merely that the quality nosedives because there are fewer investigative journalist slots) then all the secondary news sources you decry - and their readers - will be high and dry. The blogs and forums are just cud-chewers. Somebody still has to do the interviews and take the photos for them to ruminate over.
Ad revenue is only one of 3 issues causing the collapse of the newspaper industry. While classified ads and print ads provided the bulk of newspaper's income, there are two other factors involved in recent problems. Think of advertising revenue as the "incoming problem" - here are the "outgoing problems"
Home delivery is the weak link in distribution. The Boston Globe, for instance, maintains a huge fleet of delivery trucks that bring papers not just around the city but throughout coastal New England. I'm not sure of the exact costs, but it has to be millions per year, to deliver dead trees to people's doors and stores. This is a hold-over from a time when media was a one-to-many form of distribution, it has almost no relevance to today's media markets or readers. Netbooks or e-readers shipped with custom software (NYTimes "Reader) or just the local paper's website as a landing page would make more sense.
The third problem is the readers and our changing habits. Most people don't have the time to read a newspaper or won't make the time - for younger people it interferes with Facebook & gaming, for middle-aged people it interferes with being overworked on that adjustable-rate mortgage train. The only reliable newspaper readers in demographic terms are retirees.
All of this boils down to one thing, one thing most papers have missed completely: relevance.
How to take massive institutions, industrial-era institutions if you've seen the presses running, and make them into nimble, 21stCentury, Internet-centric businesses? It's a tough nut to crack and so far I'm not seeing any of them actually make it work. It's weird because I personally love reading the news from a broadsheet but it's an anachronism when the entire world's news is available at my fingertips, 24/7. The world simply does not wait for the morning print run. When news impacts "after deadline" the morning newspaper is already out of date when it lands in the driveway.
-Josh
gigantino.tv - Heavy but weighs nothing.
To quote Egon Spengler in Ghostbusters, "Print is dead."
25 years too early, but it was a very insightful prediction nonetheless. The problem newspapers are facing is that they have historically filled a very specific niche: rapid distribution of largely perishable information, i.e. "news". In the beginning, advances in communication technology only helped newspapers, as they were expensive and only a well funded entity could afford to transmit and receive information over long distances. TV and radio were the first to threaten newspapers, but they actually ended up just exploiting a new market for the most part--- "live" news--- as they're limited to the relatively low-speed communication inherent to the spoken word. Newspapers held an advantage purely in bandwidth. Large quantities of printed information on cheap pulp delivered to your door beat anything TV or radio could offer in sheer volume of information.
Then came the publicly available Internet. Essentially at one stroke, newspapers were pushed to second place in bandwidth. Even a 56Kbps dialup connection could feed the printed word faster and in greater volume than a printing press. Newspapers were doomed, but they didn't know it yet. It took some time for people to catch on. I personally put the tipping point about four years ago. For decades the local newspaper where I live has run an annoying telemarketing division to badger people into getting the local paper. About four years ago, I started answering their entreaties with "no thanks, I already read that paper online for free". These telemarketers, who historically had a scripted response to any excuse, could only respond "oh, OK, thanks for your time"! When a Los Angeles Times telemarketer can't come up with a reason for you to subscribe, the jig is up.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
What you end up with in that future is a bunch porn, twiiter and trivial drool and nothing of substance.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Because thanks to the internet, we can now get our news from places that are *even more biased* then we could in print or tv. With the click of the back button, you can leave any page or content you disagree with, all the while justifying it by saying "oh they are just biased" then go back to your DailyKos, Digg, or wherever. After all, Digg isn't biased--the people decide what is important. DailyKos tells it like it is. Slashdot is the only place I trust for reporting on Microsoft, everybody else has been bought and paid for, right?
You should be scared of this future you tout. It is one that will be more partisan, and more bitter then the world we are in now.
Main stream media serves an important function--No matter our age, gender, political views, religion or sexuality, the main stream media is something we all use as a common reference point to our world. Without it, what will bind us together?
Also, since many newspapers are little more than repackaged AP and Reuters news, looking at the NY Times for guidance - I don't know what their value proposition is supposed to be.
I've heard at least one pundit suggest that maybe some newspapers should become like the AP - disassociate themselves from the publishing side of things. Stop publishing their newspapers themselves and instead become a subscription service that sells local coverage of their news to other newspapers. Whether it would actually work is beyond me, but it's an interesting theory.
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
The first 10 amendments were added so that the 13 colonies would approve the constitution.
Ironically, the separation of church and state was required by Virginia BAPTISTS, who feared domination by New England puritans. (See "So Help Me God", by Forrest Church.) But the Deists (many of the founders were 'Deists', who acknowledged God, but not bible or church) willingly accepted it. The Puritans (Adams, et al) went along.
Law students apparently get to argue whether or not the Bill of Rights (first 10 amendments) are valid, since their adoption did not follow the process laid out in the Constitution. (One side says they were adopted WITH the Constitution, another side says they have been adopted by stare decisis (respect for prior decisions), and one side argues petulantly that they are not valid.)
IANAL - I just like to read.
Remember that the Bill of Rights was written as a "sure, we'll put it in just to be safe" thing. It wasn't part of the original negotiated plan, and was likely written by a legislator who was trying to compe up with a good inclusive list one afternoon.
The way you say "likely" shows that even you can tell that you don't know what you're talking about. The U.S. Bill of Rights was introduced by James Madison the year after the Constitution was ratified. It was a compromise with anti-federalists who had been (rightly) suspicious of the power that was being ceded to the federal government. And it wasn't cobbled together in an afternoon, it was based on George Mason's earlier Virginia Declaration of Rights which was included with the Virginia state constitution thirteen years before. Indeed, Mason had refused to endorse the Constitution because it hadn't included that sort of explicit set of guarantees of individual rights.
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
Wireless network. Laptop. Works for me.
The big problem with "newspapers" is that, subtract the porn, what you describe is most of what you have left. Local newspapers, anyway.
As a former employee of the now-defunct Knight-Ridder newspaper chain and founder of two alternative weekly newspapers, I have some experience with the actual creation and operation of newspapers as a business. To keep it short, I'll keep it to a few points:
1) For years, the big newspaper chains have owed their problems more to shareholder expectations than to ability to actually make money. It created an environment where increased corporate profit (annually) was the only goal; when you can't charge more for product you decrease labor costs. Instead of investing in what makes their product useful (news), they rely on wire services (the AP) and use local writers for drivel. (See below.) So every year, if they did not make more money than they made the year before, their stoke prices fell. When their stock prices fell, they became more and more vulnerable to corporate takeover. Newspaper companies became more and more gobbled up into larger and larger companies. Large companies could hide the loses of inefficient newspapers with the massive profits of efficient newspapers. But when the company decides to cut employees, it doesn't say, "Paper A, you are a turd and you are going to lose all your employees, and we may shut you down. Paper B, you are the goose that lays the golden egg, and we shall not touch a feather." No, a corporate newspaper company says, "We are going to lay off 10 percent of our workforce," then everyone loses 10 percent, usually by early retirement and seniority, relatively arbitrary and simple methods of reducing workforce that don't involve anyone saying, "you suck; you're fired."
2) Some corporate idiot started asking the public what they wanted. Survey after survey showed that people "don't like bad news." Well, no kidding. But that's what they buy the paper for. It speaks to our primal need to find and avoid dangers. It scares the hell out of us so that we'll remember it, like watching your buddy get jumped by a lion on the plains. You think to yourself, "I better remember that Bob got jumped right there." And when you get back to the tribe, you don't say "Bob and I had a great day finding berries and hunting." You say, "Bob, hunter gatherer, killed in lion attack." But, 95% of the stories in your local newspapers will be about berries. Readers only remember the lions -- the other five percent -- which are bad news. Which makes you wonder why they bother with the 95 percent at all. It is a significant waste of one's resources. Those corporate tools also see statehouse reporting (for example) coverage as redundant, so save the local guy for the really local bourgeois stuff -- bake sales, feel-good ditties about toy runs and the Salvation Army, all the other things that no one complains (or cares) about. So, for years now corporately owned regional and local newspapers have been cutting back and back and back on any coverage that can be pooled. Then they wonder why nobody reads their publication to get the news. Well, because CNN had the same story from the AP posted on the web last night, you jackass. Break some news.
3) Newsprint is just a physical media. For some publications, it is perfect. Anything where you want people who are out and about to pick it up and carry it with you. But it's hella expensive. Not as expensive as people to write, but expensive. Still, the people are the really expensive part. My newspapers had almost all volunteer staffs and the newsprint was about 1/3 of the cost. But 1/3 less is 1/3 less.
Newspapers may die, but written journalism will live on. The shock to everyone is going to be that if you want to get paid for writing news then you are going to have to go out and report some new news all the time. Sorry, people aren't going to by regurgitated stories about Bob's lion attack when they've already heard it.
Local TV news is likewise doomed. Without a local newspaper to crib from, they
Because you've earned +10 Insightful / Informative / Enlightening ...
My local area used to have two main newspapers, but then one got absorbed by the other, & we've had utter crap ever since.
Less news, more ads, less content, more crap.
I've come to rely on online news sources (AP, Reuters, etc) over print media for the simple fact that, by the time it IS in print, it's been online for upwards of a day, sometimes as much as a MONTH beforehand.
I'm not sure what keeps the newspapers in business given the only thing they have to offer over their online counter-parts is the added "value" of having to dig the paper out of the bushes, off the roof, or wring it out from the puddle the moron threw it into.
If I want a clean, professional, properly assembled (meaning *I* don't have to put it in its proper order) paper, I have to buy it from a vending machine.
The one I've paid to have delivered ends up arriving mangled (either by where it's landed, because of the rubber band used to hold it together, or both), wet (because they rarely use a plastic bag to cover them anymore), & unassembled.
Couple that with the fact that it's all old news I could (& have) read about online a day or two before, there's increasingly less reason to subscribe to it at all.
Which is why they keep giving it to me at half price when they call to ask me to renew & I tell them it's not worth the full price.
"It's old news regurgitated from online sources, stuffed full of ads like a Thanksgiving Turkey, & delivered in a completely unprofessional manner.
I'm not paying $30 a month for the 'convenience' of delivery when it's only two blocks to the nearest store that sells them, costs less per paper, & I end up getting a professionally prepared product.
You might want to think about that when it comes to renewing the delivery idiot's contract, because he's losing you a customer."
That's when they offer it at half price, promise to "reprimand" the delivery agent (they never do), & the cycle continues.
I think, next time it comes up, I'll cancel all-together.
There really is NO reason to get the thing anymore given the (lack of) quality & (un)professional delivery.
I'm already paying for internet where I can get my news for free.
The newspaper is worthless at that point.