Can the New Digital Readers Save the Newspapers?

Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that several companies plan to introduce digital newspaper readers by the end of the year with screens roughly the size of a standard sheet of paper to present much of the editorial and advertising content of traditional periodicals in generally the same format as they appear in print. Publishers hope the new readers may be a way to get consumers to pay for those periodicals — something they have been reluctant to do on the Web — while allowing publishers to save millions on the cost of printing and distributing their publications, at precisely a time when their businesses are under historic levels of pressure from the loss of readers and advertising. 'We are looking at this with a great deal of interest,' said John Ridding, the chief executive of the 121-year-old British newspaper The Financial Times. 'The severe double whammy of the recession and the structural shift to the Internet has created an urgency that has rightly focused attention on these devices.' The new tablets will start with some serious shortcomings: the screens, which are currently in the Kindle and Sony Reader, display no color or video and update images at a slower rate than traditional computer screens. But many think the E-ink readers are simply too little, too late and have not appeared in time to save the troubled realm of print media. 'If these devices had been ready for the general consumer market five years ago, we probably could have taken advantage of them quickly,' said Roger Fidler, the program director for digital publishing at the University of Missouri, Columbia. 'Now the earliest we might see large-scale consumer adoption is next year, and unlike the iPod it's going to be a slower process migrating people from print to the device.'"

Comments

Why, are they idiots?

[wonkavader]

"...unlike the iPod it's going to be a slower process migrating people from print to the device."

What? Why in Heaven's name would Roger say that? If these come out at $50, come with a library of great books (all free from Gutenberg et al.), and allow you to put whatever you like on them in some open format which the FOSS community can create converters for, why wouldn't it blow the iPOD sales records out of the water?

And there's no reason for them to charge more than $50. They spend the price of a Kindle printing newspapers on every subscriber every year. They can sell it for $50 with a one-year subscription to two newspapers, or give it to anyone who has been a subscriber (showing a pattern of reading) for more than two years.

The difference between this sort of thing and the Kindle or the iPod is striking. Those were both created to sell downloads, and thus try to cripple you from doing anything other than buy from Amazon or iTunes. This proposed reader is a desperate attempt to move off of an expensive process (printing papers) and onto a cheap one.

The Kindle and the iPod are designed to wring more and more money out of the consumer. These are designed to preserve a revenue stream from an advertiser. One is designed to entrance and restrict, the other to entrance and keep entranced, whatever small cost is needed to accomplish that.

If the newspapers don't make this thing explode such that EVERYBODY has one by the end of the first year, it'll be because of gross incompetence (which I'm still betting on, unfortunately) or lack of ability to produce enough of them.

Re:Standardization

[SatanicPuppy]

You don't know what you're talking about. Papers have had digital format editions of the paper product for years (Knight Ridder did theirs corporate-wide in '05). Trying to push those (hilariously undersubscribed) editions using portable readers doesn't cost them anything.

It's a waste of time though. Bad pictures, no color...Hell, it'll look worse than the paper product.

And, as for going completely ad supported, it's not going to happen. The village voice can pull it off, and dinky little entertainment papers with 10,000 circ can pull it off, but they do it by having an extremely small permanent staff and practically zero physical plant.

I ran a weekly with 20,000 circ for a couple of years, and we were quite popular, but our margins were high enough to support more than 5 or 6 permanent staff, and we couldn't afford to pay our stringers more than a pittance. I work as a regional IT guy for two papers now (50,000 and 75,000 circ, respectively)

Each paper employs 30+ staff who do nothing but gather news, and that is down from the 50+ glory days when we could afford to send someone to every government meeting, and cover all our outlying coverage areas with their own reporters, and crap like that...Crap that makes a good product.

Without permanent employees, you lose all the benefits of working sources, you lose all the specialized knowledge of the area, and knowledge of the people who will and will not talk on the record...Hell, if you're not a full timer, you probably don't even know who to call.

And that's just reporters. Add in the ad people, the finance people, and, in your fantasy world, the production people (you won't even be able to pay for the paper edition on your ad revenue, so just give that one up), and you have a business that'll cost about 70% more than you can make with ads alone, even wicked expensive publication-of-record print ads.

Drop the print product, and your shortfall drops to about 20% (print is about 80% of your costs, but print ads are MUCH more lucrative than online ads, so ditching the print hurts your ad revenue as well). After that, you're cutting meat and bone. You need finance to collect your ad money and do your books, you need ad people to get your ads and deal with your ad customers, and you need journalists and designers to put up the actual product.

Basically, they need to find a way to make up those costs. Maybe ditching the office space. Maybe centralizing your finance people. Plenty of companies would love to do your ads for you (like Google) but they'll take their pound of flesh, and that's probably more than you'd lose if you did it yourself.

THAT, is how it can be done. Fucking armchair wanker. I can't believe all the people who think they have the answer.