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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!"
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 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.
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?)