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Cory Doctorow Calls Death To Music, Movies, Print
An anonymous reader writes "Boing Boing editor Cory Doctorow depicts an unfortunate near-future for a handful of media industries being transformed or killed by the Internet. Predicting a large-scale transformation of the music, movie, book, and newspaper industry, Doctorow says, 'The Internet chews up media and spits them out again. Sometimes they get more robust. Sometimes they get more profitable. Sometimes they die.' While the Internet has the potential to help the dying book industry, for example, Doctorow predicts the 'imminent collapse' of the American newspaper industry because advertisers are uninterested in spending money on the remaining offline readership, such as senior citizens, who prove less valuable."
Time magazine recently had a very good article about this. It's spread across 4 pages, so here's the important part:
"The key to attracting online revenue, I think, is to come up with an iTunes-easy method of micropayment. We need something like digital coins or an E-ZPass digital wallet -- a one-click system with a really simple interface that will permit impulse purchases of a newspaper, magazine, article, blog or video for a penny, nickel, dime or whatever the creator chooses to charge..."
"...Admittedly, the Internet is littered with failed micropayment companies. If you remember Flooz, Beenz, CyberCash, Bitpass, Peppercoin and DigiCash, it's probably because you lost money investing in them..."
"...Under a micropayment system, a newspaper might decide to charge a nickel for an article or a dime for that day's full edition or $2 for a month's worth of Web access. Some surfers would balk, but I suspect most would merrily click through if it were cheap and easy enough..."
"...I say this not because I am "evil," which is the description my daughter slings at those who want to charge for their Web content, music or apps. Instead, I say this because my daughter is very creative, and when she gets older, I want her to get paid for producing really neat stuff rather than come to me for money or decide that it makes more sense to be an investment banker."
Obviously, certain aspects of the internet threaten newspapers(Hi Craigslist!) chiefly through hitting their ad and classifieds revenue, and in siphoning off some readers.
Beyond that, though, I fear that the papers' response to this will, in many cases, be what ends up killing(or at least mutilating beyond recognition) them. Essentially, the problem is this: High quality news reporting is more expensive than printed trash reporting, vapid gossip, and opinion. On the internet, vapid gossip and opinion are free. So, the newspapers' costs are always going to be higher than the internet's costs. However, if the newspapers move to cut costs by cutting back on good reporting, the quality of their product will go down, and the value proposition of paper will become even weaker in comparison to web.
I hope that at least some paper news sources will be able to swim upstream, instead of trying to out-cut the internet(which they'll never be able to do) and differentiate themselves by providing high quality reporting that classic internet sources don't. If, though, the papers just keep cutting quality in order to attempt to match price with the web, they will deserve their own inevitable deaths.
television did eliminate evening edition newspapers. just like radio eliminated the "extra,extra read all about it" extra editions. in my opinion, this is the future of newspapers: 1. Free print editions...less pages and really just an advertisement "teaser" for the online version. 2. Admission of liberal/etc. editorial viewpoints and publish to that niche or demographic. forget about being objective or even lying about it. 3. Huge reduction in staffing. elimination of sports/weather/entertainment sections. yes, they will "cover" them, but only as "contract" services such as ESPN/TWC/TMZ.
Yes, they have to adapt. They need an online presence. They need a different approach, to marketing and advertising.
But there are a few things that people seem to forget when making the argument that the internet will kill media as we know it.
1. Local news. Sorry, but unless a plane drops out of the sky, CNN isn't remotely interested in in Ballarat, Australia - nor do most CNN readers care about the local government elections, or which local VIP has just been arrested for DUI, or who won the district football on the weekend - but I do, and so does our local newspaper.
While they don't have the circulations of the major world newspapers...the bulk of print news is still regionally based.
2. Local Advertising. The local plumber doesn't need to or want to advertise to the entire state, country or to the world writ large. He wants to target the people in his immediate area, and the larger newspapers, and TV, are cost prohibitive, and online sites (mostly) don't meet that need. Local businesses and small businesses need a
centralised local vehicle to push their message.
2. Content. Someone, somewhere has to generate it. Someone has to follow up on leads and stories, and get the word out. Sure, once the word IS OUT, there is no limit to the number of places online where you can find out about it, but someone had to go out and get the story in the first place, check the facts, and filter it down to a piece that most people can digest. THIS is where newspapers must head if they want to survive.
They need to be going out and getting the in-depth investigations and stories that their competitors don't have, and stop relying on regurgitating the same stories that everyone else has.
If a plane drops into the Hudson, or a bushfire kills hundreds in Australia, its covered.. by everyone.. and I can find information on it everywhere. Its the local impact or other local events IN ADDITION TO the major news items, that push me to select one news organisation over another, and one medium over another, for day to day consumption.
As long as people still want to sit down with a coffee to read through the week's news, local, national, international, and do the crosswords, read the comics etc., newspapers will be around. People enjoy sitting down and flicking through a paper at their leisure, and you can't do that online. Having said that, one does not preclude the other - they're different beasts.
Trouble is, the internet doesn't have to be a good replacement in order to end up replacing newspapers. If the Times could only afford to embed reporters in dusty warzones because of classified ad revenue, and their classifieds department has been gutted, well, I guess there won't be any more reporters out there, will there?
That is my concern. I hope that the virtues of newspapers will carry through; but it is far from assured. Things like foreign and political reporting, and stuff that pisses off possible advertisers, are socially vital; but they are cost centers in the strictly financial sense. They could, fairly easily, end up just being eliminated, without replacement.
1. Free print editions...less pages and really just an advertisement "teaser" for the online version.
That's an interesting turnabout. I used to mostly see online newspapers & magazines that were advertisement teasers for the printed version. And I suspect the printed version isn't afraid to put a full page advertisement on, which does allow some continuity of revenue even though the classifieds ink is less.
A trend in our neck of the woods (Victoria, Australia) is for a thriving community newspaper industry. The adverts are tied to very local businesses - e.g. your local tyre store, not national or international brands. This sense of connectedness with folks within driving distance means a closely tied advertising demographic. The trend for these newspapers is to get thicker, not thinner, and they're distributed free. So it appears for close community work, printed newspapers are still a viable concern.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
I remember one comment was "How many bloggers are embedded in Falujah?"
Just out of interest, how many (western) newspaper journalists were embedded in Falujah? The pattern across the board is for newspapers to keep cutting journalists on-the-ground, depending on hacks sub-editing Associated Press releases (and Associated Press seem to be constantly cutting journalists too). The reason internet bloggers recycling second-hand stories is a real threat to the newspaper industry is that that's just what the newspapers themselves have been doing for quite a while now. It's an enlightening excercise to pick a story and compare the actual text across different newspapers to see how many phrases are identical -- it's usually quite high. The stuff that newspapers still tend to do for themselves is the entertainment, gossip and sport. It's a lot cheaper to send a reporter to a celeb party or a big match than to a war zone -- it might even be free: some papers have been running punter reviews of concerts for years, and reader-generated content seems to be increasing.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
Dunno if he was in Falujah or not.
The disruption that the Internet lowers the cost of having your voice heard to near zero. The newspaper's advantage isn't that they have reporters. The newspaper's advantage is that they have editors.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
> Sending someone to report on conditions in some remote area of the world doesn't happen for free.
I used to think the same thing. Until this past Sunday when a TV station played the footage of the Meteor fireball..
That was an epiphany for me that posed the question of do we really need journalists to be sent out to where the news is?
In the days past, cameras were bulky and expensive, satellite up-links were required to upload content and needed entire van full of equipment to make that happen. You couldn't equip enough people - you needed a trained few.
When spontaneous events took place, all that could be mustered was a commentary and some interviews after the fact.
Yet, this last Sunday, someone filming a marathon on (presumably) their camera phone, caught the action live, uploaded it and the news stations picked it up. No need for after-the-fact commentary and interviews to 'recreate' what happened. We were able to see what actually happened - not an embellished recount of the events.
The TV station, in a small way, became the "chatterati" you speak of. They used footage from a person at the scene. Didn't have the send out reporters.
Now, take any part of the world.. why couldn't the people that are already there report it? Before the internet came along, the cost of sending someone there to get you the report was small compared to trying to equip someone that was already there and then to retrieve the material. Not anymore. People have access to usable cameras. Have the means to upload it to the internet. The internet has the ability to 'ship' it around the world.
You needed trained journalists because they were few (dictated by the resources needed to equip them, provide travel for them etc.) and needed the ability to cover wide range of events, topics etc. When you have everyone with the ability to 'report', presumably, they will be the familiar enough with the subject matter..
Anyhow, the sanctity of 'journalism', at least to me, is quickly eroding. Most news outlets don't have a 'journalist' to begin with - they have opinionated pundits who just found a bullhorn. But I digress.
Actually I think it is pointing out a serious weakness that newspapers have had for a LONG time, and that is the lack of local journalism and the rehashing of old news. All the local papers that I have seen lately, both at the city and state level, have almost nothing to interest the local reader and instead just rehash the same old wire stories that everyone else does.
Now this could work in the days before the Internet simply because most of us didn't have access to the wire services so it was that or the 30 second soundbites on the evening news. Now we can get the wire services just as fast as they can, so by the time they have rehased it(while adding little to no value to the story themselves) it is old news and nobody cares. So to me this period is just separating the wheat from the chaff. The smart ones will hire good local reporters and advertise stories that are of interest to local citizens and will probably flourish, albeit with a smaller readership than before, but even that can be supplemented with a good online presence, while the ones that simply regurgitate what they get from AP will die out, and rightly so. This is simply the bad ones that have been coasting for far too long getting what has been coming for a long time now.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
... with custom papers. I go to my news stand and order up a paper, AP, NYT, Nature, NBA, Premiership, brassiere ads, lots of cartoons and comic strips (that's what I want). The size allows for bigger pretty pictures than my laptop. It's paper so I don't worry about spilling coffee on it or reading it in a crowd or leaving it in a restaurant. I do the puzzles and drop the paper off at a news stand where a magic process strips the ink with a minimum of energy and water foot print. The paper is recycled.
Sci Fi I know, so flame away.
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
If the editors aren't even able to spot the obvious errors or even invoke a spell checker it eventually becomes obvious to even normal people that the editors probably aren't there any more. If an article isn't even spell checked it probably wasn't fact checked any better.
Mainstream news editors seem to serve mostly to fuck stories up. (I use this as my example because I'm quoted in it.) That particular article is a gentle example - we'll never see this sort of thing presented for an important story. They don't let people who would do this write those. Even so they changed the article substantially to demonize and sensationalize. In they process they actually made it less grammatically correct.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"