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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.'"
This is why recessions aren't always bad. Some of these old companies will only do something novel when they absolutely have to. Otherwise, it's business as usual.
Just think like a media executive: stop thinking about how you are going to attract customers, and instead just fantasize about how you are going to lock them in. "It's not proprietary, it's exclusive!"
Give me a reader for $80 and maybe. $300? Screw that.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Outside of those carrying briefcases or backpacks, who wants to carry around a papersized piece of equipment to read old-fashioned news. Shouldn't they be focusing on a cheaper kindle-like device, since that has shown some acceptance in the marketplace?
Theres a lot to be said for a newspaper which can be rolled up or folded to take with you. Size is important for this sort of media.
Overclockers
The newspapers are doomed. Their focus is to be able to get the same revenue for ads with a bigger device. They completely miss the point. They think that "giving away content" on the internet was their biggest mistake.
In reality, their biggest mistake was not containing costs 10 years ago (slowly) to reflect the structural shift of information to a different medium.
I used to have a subscription to the Wall Street Journal, which gave me both dead-tree and online information. While the content was ok at first, when NewsCorp destroyed the editorial content it was no longer worth the effort. Only about 10% of the dead-tree editions would be read because the format was unwieldy at the desk.
They need to bring costs in-line and generate quality content at the same time. (No, I didn't say it was easy.) There isn't a top-line solution that will make them viable long-term. Look no farther than ad rates to understand the limited value that the papers can generate for most of their advertisers.
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 readers to pay for those
I'm willing to pay for content OR to have it infested with ads. Not both.
They want to have my cake and eat it too. This is why I can't wait for these businesses to crash and burn.
You can't take the sky from me...
I'd be interested in this, provided it's on a device I can use for other things (like a Kindle, I don't want a newspaper only reader), and it can get the paper wirelessly every morning. If those two things are true, I'd likely transfer my dead tree subscription over to the digital one, which saves the newspaper the cost of printing and delivering a paper to me every day (which are substantial costs).
Of course, right now the Kindle doesn't really work in Canada at all, so that's a pipe dream for me at the moment.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Advertisers are more interested in people who bothered to subscribe or buy something, they figure they will actually look at it.
That doesn't mean that they won't buy ads in free papers, but they won't pay as much if you don't have some sort of reasonable proof that there is reader interest in your publication.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
e-Reader: $300
Newspaper: 50 cents.
I know which one I'm more likely to buy...
According to current trends: neither.
There have been free ad-supported newspapers out there for decades. None of them make the kind of money the subscription-based ones do even today, so why would you think a free model would work better?
For the reasons noted by the other reply to your post, advertisers will pay a much lower rate for ads in a free paper than in a paper people have to pay for. This means that in a free newspaper you'll have to have a much higher advertisement-to-content ratio, and even then you're not likely to make enough money to sustain any more than a few reporters, which means the quality of your content will suffer.
The free newspaper market is crowded and low margin, even more so than the subscriber-based newspaper market. Going that route will only accelerate the decline.
My newspaper costs over $360 for a year's subscription.
If I get it via some kind of branded device, how many free years will they give me? Even one is cost effective for me, assuming I don't care about color pictures or the comics.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Ben Goldacre had it right.
The thing that bothers me with newspaper and TV news is that many stories need information from a specialist and they insist on putting a non-specialist, a journalist, between you and the person who knows what they're talking about.
In scientific stories, you always get a 3 minute story with an idiot dressed in a lab-coat dumbing down the message of a professor or medic, followed by a measly 10 second snippet with the actual expert. Of course experts won't always speak in the most media friendly way possible - so coach them! Edit the interview until it makes sense! But don't feed them through a non-comprehending cipher.
It really is reaching the stage where the best way to get the information is to find a decent blog from somebody who actually works in that field.
Good point. A real subscription to WSJ or NYT is not cheap. But keeping current subscribers isn't really the problem, is it? It would be much better (financially) to get some old subscribers back, or even new subscribers.
The cost argument is very good, but I don't want 3-4 eReaders, each that only works on one paper. That's just a hassle.
Then there is the up-front cost. Right now I can buy my local paper only on Sundays, or when I see an interesting story. But very few people will front the $360 unless they are very committed. If they are that committed, they probably already subscribe. But you can't get rid of the paper edition, because how would you attract new readers when the price of starting goes from $1.50 to $360? You have to keep print, so you won't be able to cut costs too much.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
The browser makes a crappy newspaper. Various e-readers have a chance, especially if I can mix my local paper with the NYT, the WSJ, SFC, and maybe /. for breakfast. Add in my comics. Put it on my cable bill. I'm sold-- and happy I don't have to haul sacks of dead trees to a recycler.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
The subscriber count is one of the big problems of free newspapers, since they can't get accurate numbers. But if you gave away free eReaders, they could report back reader numbers so you could value the ads much better, allowing you to get higher rates since you can prove your readership (instead of surveys saying it's between 1,500 and 30,000), right?
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
The cost argument is very good, but I don't want 3-4 eReaders, each that only works on one paper. That's just a hassle.
Right. I would definitely think the business model should be to standardize on a single reader (or better yet, a specification that different manufacturers can meet), and then subsidize the cost of the reader, sort of like cell phones. Buy subscriptions to the WSJ and NYT, get a free e-reader.
Even giving away a $300 device, the publishers will save money in the long term by not having to actually print and deliver things-- given either a long enough timeline or a large enough number of subscriptions per device.
Ben Goldacre had it right.
That's a pretty good list, especially 1, 4, and 5.
It does seem to me that large newspapers are having trouble on the web because they don't seem to understand the differences of what the "new media" has to offer. I don't got to the NYT website to read my news, I come to Slashdot or Digg, who might possibly link to the NYT. Why is that?
Well, first because they're offering a broader selection of news. Second and more importantly, Slashdot provides a good discussion system for me to talk about the story. It gives a place where people, sometimes with equal or greater expertise than those writing the story, can comment, either supporting the conclusions of the article or picking them apart. There's added depth.
And this is where the biggest value of this "new media" comes in: there aren't real space limitations. You can put up all your content, as much as you have, in any number of combinations, permutations, and sorted in any number of ways, all at the same time. You can have a good discussion system, and people who aren't interested in it can choose not to visit it. If you have a scientific issue and you have two different experts with differing opinions, you can have the dumbed-down synopsis of the debate written by a journalist, but you can also allow each expert to write their own argument and publish them alongside the journalist's story.
The only real expense for these things is in editing or moderating, which I think probably can be done in a cost-effective way.
I would rather be holding a book to reading stuff onscreen. I would rather be holding a reflective flexible reader (e-ink and the like) to holding a newspaper. Most noticeable reasons: a newspaper is disgusting to hold, and it kills lots of trees for mostly meaningless content that will be irrelevant by tomorrow. For durable content, go dead tree. Makes sense. For transitory content, don't waste valuable resources and energy converting trees into landfill bulk. Leave it in the for of transient electrical charges. We can always print a hardcopy for archiving purposes.
I like my dinosaurs feathery, and my pterosaurs hairy (or is it pycnofibery?)
This whole idea begs the question of whether or not newspapers actually need "saving". The Kindle is not going to save large newspapers anymore than their websites will save them. What needs to change is not so much the delivery format but the way newspapers are run. Newspapers and news entities cannot effectively run as for-profit organizations or at the very least not as publicly traded for-profit organizations. The demand for stock price returns have led to newsroom cuts, consolidations, and expansions into markets newspapers shouldn't really be in. Newspapers either became or got swallowed up by "media companies" and now are part of television, radio, newspapers, magazine, and sometimes internet media conglomerates. We're all the worse for it because in order to drive a profit newspapers have increased column inches for advertising and reduced column inches for actual articles. They've also taken to filling space with wire articles instead of having a decent sized newsroom of their own. Wire services in and of themselves are useful entities, especially for smaller papers but we've moved into an age where people can log onto Google News and read wire service articles, newspapers don't need to waste ink printing them.
What will save newspapers the media conglomerates failing under their own weight and breaking back up. Newspapers will end up becoming more format neutral news organizations. They'll start providing news articles to specialized providers instead of running the whole stack themselves. A newsroom will write the stories and pass them off to Amazon to load on the Kindle, to Audible to make into an audiobook, to their website, and to a printer that will put the words to paper for people that still want (or need) a physical version of the news. The LA Times newspaper (for example) however will probably go away. It will end up being the "News and other work from the LA region" paper. A dedicated publishing group will pick up stories from the LA Times newsroom, advertisers, and possibly local blogs, and print and distribute them. The LA Times newsroom will no longer have to worry about the printer as long as their stories are submitted on time, advertisers can still get local ads out to people, and everyone will still be able to get the news that is important to them.
The main difference between that future and today will be the newsroom and the printer will not be owned and operated by the same company. More newsrooms will likely end up privatized or run as community owned entities similar to the St.Petersburg Times. News is a difficult thing to make profitable as it is a service in the public interest. If existing news organizations don't reorganize they will fail and other organizations with more streamlined processes and better management will eventually fill the void. A newspaper might fail but the journalists that love their work will keep doing it in one way or another.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.