Slashdot Mirror
Letting Time Solve the Online News Dilemma
The Guardian's John Naughton isn't looking to micro-transactions or licensing fees from search services to solve the online news business model problems that have come to a head recently. Instead, he's simply waiting for capitalism to do its job in killing off the providers who can't cut it. Once that happens, he says, the remaining organizations will be in a far better position to see what web-goers will pay for online news, and he doesn't think it will inhibit the growth of an increasingly information-rich news ecosystem.
"Things have got so bad that Rupert Murdoch has tasked a team with finding a way of charging for News Corp content. This is the 'make the bastards pay' school of thought. Another group of fantasists speculate about ways of extorting money from Google, which they portray as a parasitic feeder on their hallowed produce. ... But what will journalism be like in the perfectly competitive online world? One clue is provided by the novelist William Gibson's celebrated maxim that 'the future is already here; it's just not evenly distributed.' In a recent lecture, the writer Steven Johnson took Gibson's insight to heart and argued that if we want to know what the networked journalism of the future might be like, we should look now at how the reporting of technology has evolved over the past few decades."
It's difficult to keep one's head when all about one people are losing theirs, but let us have a go. First of all, some historical perspective might help. When broadcast radio arrived in the US in the 1920s, nobody could figure out a business model for it. How could one generate revenue from something that could be listened to by anyone for free? Dozens of companies were founded to exploit the new medium, and most of them folded. The problem was solved by a detergent manufacturer named Procter & Gamble, which came up with the idea of sponsoring dramatic serials: the soap opera â" and the mass market â" was born.
What you're overlooking is that newspapers have enjoyed revenues for quite sometime. Granted, they've risen and fallen, they are used to this steady income. Radio wasn't used to this income. Models like brand name advertising and recognition ensured its success. Newspapers have made money off of controlling the distribution channels of a similar model with great results, now they are staring down the barrel of a distribution model that they cannot control. They aren't used to this and they certainly aren't handling it well.
... who could blame them?
What radio saw was a controlled explosion in which they ramped up and expanded across everywhere. That's an easy thing to do because it's positive. What newspapers across the country should be doing is cutting unnecessary jobs, refactoring salaries. Being a columnist is not going to be glamorous any more. The irony is that you're going to be more widely read but be paid less. That might make a lot of people want to quit and find other work
This restructuring must happen or you will die. Marketing and endorsements have been the only card you have played (Murdoch's micro charging is proof he's out of ideas) for the past decade as the internet has exploded. The recession is making this more obvious now than it was last year. You had your chance to invent the new way, now you must act or reduce your work force.
The moral is simple: eventually someone will figure out a business model that works for online news. But it may take some time, and lots of outfits will fall by the wayside in the meantime. That's capitalism for you.
You are wrong. There is an end state where no one figures out a way for the model to work. Newspapers go the way of the buffalo just like drive in theaters. You have done yourself and your kind a great disservice by theorizing this false safety net and are only further lulling them into inaction and unemployment. I am not in your business but I see it from the outside and as a customer, use this advice.
My work here is dung.
The website will soon be all that's left of the Guardian. I have a friend working for the paper - their financial situation is dire and their circulation is dropping steadily due to their cheerleading for the British government. They blew through £50 million in 2008 and have a pot left of ~£200 million. They've been asked to try and slash £20 million from their internal budget for 09. Sooner or later printing the paper will have to cease - it is approaching the vanity publishing level now.
Capitalism just maximizes for profit not for equity, not fairness. NPR versus Fox News is a great example of this. Fox News will be going strong for a long, long time; regardless of their bias. NPR could be hurt if the government cut off all their funds.
Saying that capitalism will save the day overly simplistic.
Another group of fantasists speculate about ways of extorting money from Google, which they portray as a parasitic feeder on their hallowed produce.
From what I understand Google licenses news from the big news wires as well as from some of the big newspapers. Some of that has been forced through lawsuits.
Before that, they would just crawl news sites and display headlines and summaries, just like in their normal search.
It seems odd. Google has to pay for the privilege of sending them traffic. I wish I could get a deal like that.
If I were Google, the next time the traditional news outlets came to me with their hands out I'd tell them I've decided that I'd be more than happy to remove all their content from my index and no longer "steal" their business. Thew newspaper execs wouldn't like that too much.
Dual Opteron < $600
The below URL's are all live and referencable. Anyone have anything else that I haven't heard yet? Would be nice if Slashdot had a news station feed of Rob Malda's voice reading news or somthing like a storybook at the end of my day. Get them and learn espectialy about AVRN and the patriot and pirate radio wars that will be eventually shut down by Washington DC through RIAA and Patriot Act.
American Voice Radio Network
World Wide First Amendment Radio
Liberty Radio Live
Republic Broadcasting Network
Infowars.com Prison Planet
BurlingtonNews.net BUFO
Why pay for online news when we're* not paying for Movies, Television, Music, Software, etc? We'll just download it from Usenet with everything else when we get home each night. It might not be "Today's" news, but so long as the world didn't noticeably melt down during the course of the day, whatever was in there can wait.
*You all. Not me. I'll just stop reading Slashdot when Rupert gets his claws in the 'stuff that matters.'
Will people pay for well-reasoned, researched, and written commentary and opinion columns?
I would, but not the price of a year's subscription for print. I would pay that, however, if I had unfettered access to, e.g., all (or most) Canadian newspapers online; including the small, local papers. Similarly for a major English-language paper from each country.
This simulates the blog experience - access to a multitude of differing viewpoints, but with financing to be able to do a good to excellent job.
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
It seems likely to me that the only way for these guys to really survive is going to be for them to get back to doing real, hard hitting investigative journalism. Anyone can and does do the shallow stuff. Blogs will certainly fill that niche, and they will remain free. What you can charge for is first access to breaking news and good investigative journalism. Want to see where the money trail leads in the bank bailouts? You'll have to subscribe to our premium service. Want to hear which of your local politicians is taking kickbacks from government contractors? That'll be a one time fee, or free to our subscribers.
The days of relying on the news wire are over, guys. Anyone can do that, and they can do it without having to pay a single salary, while making money off of ad content. In a perfectly competitive system, consumer costs approach the marginal costs. When something is basically free, or cheap enough to be ad supported, then it will be. If the audience is limited, or the costs too high, than a fee to read will be used, or some other model will emerge. This is how the market works. It drives non-competitive players out of the market. On a side note, the music industry would do well to adopt a similar strategy (ie the music is free/ad supported, but the concerts are not).
Surely Murdoch's effort to monetarize News Corp content is not 'make the bastards pay', but 'make us pay the bastards'?
The problem with funding news isn't itself news. The reason I watch and respect a news service is because they put resources into investigating the world and offering valuable insight. But I also aknowledge, that I can be occasionally pulled into cheap editorial content.
Guess which one's cheaper.
So, in the commercial news business, the industry has once again shifted drastically towards the cost-conscious editorial and rehashed-news dominance. Everyone's using the same sources, and the sources are dwindling. And because of that, the feeling that any given news provider has unique value is only contained in the unique voice they give themselves, but even that is becoming a formless soup.
The news providers provide less meaningful news, leading to less interest, leading to less money, leading to more editorial dominance, and so on... mostly because the global pool of money has shrunk so much to prevent many real sparks of bold investigative journalism from being worth the risk in the environment. Like with the chicken and the egg, even when we've learned that the egg is far older than any chicken, it doesn't get us more chicken.
That's why I've been turning to the BBC (and the CBC) more often. Put whatever hate you want on socialism, but it really does improve on capitalism when it comes to allowing media to do an effective job at funding news. They're certainly not perfect - but the signal to noise ratio is so much better, in terms of what remains after the bullshit filter, from my biased perspective. PBS/NPR are also nice in spots, but they really have lacked diversity, as administrations have waged ideological wars through appointments.
That's my fix for reliable news sources - make funding more independent from news content, and get more international perspective where possible.
Ryan Fenton
Naked News will survive much longer than their paid service.
We all know we prefer to pay to see women undress than a dressed person reading the same news...
...is that most of the "easy fruit" of reporting that basicly just being on site and report what's happening is easily done by regular people, there's always someone who likes to talk about it. They can blog and twitter and take cell phone pictures and videos on youtube. Other sections are much better covered by special services such as online marketplaces. Other things is just stuff anybody can and do write about like sports events and cd/film reviews and such. If you go through the newspaper with such a critical eye there's not really much that you really can not get from any other source.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
That's capitalism for you.
How about the NPR/PBS model? If the NYT was desperate for money and sent letters begging for donations, I'm sure more than a few faithful readers would step up to the plate. Conservatives could donate to Murdoch (cuz he doesn't have enough money already) and I can donate to whoever I think is good. It would be extra cool if I had the option of donating to specific reporters that I liked (Frank Rich).
Capitalism does not always work for everything, markets fail more often than your libertarian econ profs tell you. I always enjoyed PBS more than any other broadcast TV, and I wouldn't miss a world without reality shows.
Media commentators fear for the future of investigative journalism. "How can we hold governments' feet to the fire without money to pay our great reporters? Where would you get your recycled wire feeds, your Garfield cartoons?"
Newspapers have suffered badly since the collapse of their previous business model of selling readers to advertisers on a local monopoly basis. The replacement models appear to involve phlogiston, caloric and luminiferous aether.
Publishers hold that it is natural for readers to pay what advertisers once did, just as cows have to make up the difference out of their own pockets when the price of milk falls.
"We have to educate people that free doesn't work, particularly for us," said Vanessa Thorpe of the Guardian Media Group. "I tried an advertorial repeating several times that nothing will be free any more, to magic it into happening. I also subtly implied the Pirate Bay were Nazis -- HITLER! HITLER! HITLER! -- so we'll see if we can make that one fly too."
Publishers have also explored the notion of getting Google to pay its "fair share" for so parasitically leading people to newspapers' websites. The Wikimedia Foundation promptly started billing journalists for their reprints from Wikipedia. "We feel this is completely unfair," said Tom Curley of the Associated Press, "as real news stories spring forth from the heads of accredited reporters in an immaculate creation from nothingness. My preciousss ." Maurice Jarre was unavailable for comment.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Not to mention the massive bill that must be on the way from the Wikimedia Foundation. That'll solve the fundraising problem this year.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Many 'large' newspapers are part of media conglomerates that also control cable systems and radio stations. In order for the newspaper protion to survive they will have to cease providing 'free' service to non-subscribers. Cablevision, which controls the Long Island, New York-based Newsday, will be changing their website to a subscription only service starting in June of 2009. Long Island Cablevision subscribers will have access to the site as part of their cable service, while others will have to pay if they want more than 'limited' news. Apparently the S.F. Chronicle will be doing the same thing soon. This is probably the start of a trend that will continue as these companies struggle to make a profit.
Sig this!
FoxNews and its ilk such as the Sun newspaper in the UK represent where news is headed. The likes of Rush Limberger Cheese of an argument are at the vanguard of this trend.
Put simply people want their bigotry and opinions confirmed by the "news" not to get the facts and have to make up their own mind.
This is what is killing decent journalism WAY more than the internet. Its the rise of individualised news which presents opinions as facts and anyone who disagrees as a terrorist. The internet has aided this explosion by enabling people to create ever more extreme opinions and to move further and further away from the facts.
Will this trend stop? God I hope so, but given that the primary drivers of this shift to "truthiness" are the politicians then its hard to see how.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
That's how the news has always been for the past 2000 years, beginning from the first post at Jesus the Christ slandered to become "King of the Jews" by a local BBS administrator.
Today, it's no different than it was back then, only now they're sharing alleged "journalists" with eachother to syndicate and spread a half-wit's perception of what he either heard from an unverified witness of intent of what he was payed to write. Truly, this is an awful news day that things have degraded as they are, where subscribers are determined by entertainment of their psychosis rather than an actual forum where one can assert an interest. It's a dictatorship in terms of commercial speach, and it has nothing to do with freedom of speech. There are no major "name-only" news papers that are secured in the 1st Amendment but only corporations that adopt or embrace a colorable privilege that attornies and bad council mis-interpret as being the licenture of the 1st Amendment "reservations."
Corporations aren't on the Vine, let them all whither.
In the days where normal people couldn't have their opinions read / heard / seen by the masses, the position of those in organizations like newspapers had some perceived value to them. With the widespread adoption of the internet allowing more people than ever to have their opinions widely spread we are starting to see that many so called "professional" writers are not that much better than amateurs with blogs. We can do what they do for free. There are "proper journalists" who do stand out, but those are the minority, not the majority.
We have also long seen that "news" organizations are nothing more than agenda machines who will seek to feed every story through their political / moral / religious agenda to try and influence their audience......again I ask, what is so different about bloggers? The concept that being part of an organization brings a level of trusted journalism is mostly bullshit. It does carry the guarantee that the story put out will be part of that agenda, regardless of how much they have to twist it out of all context to make it fit.
Any source of "news" is reliant on it's credibility. That credibility is earned, not paid for by sponsors. Traditional news organizations have long held the upper hand and abused the truth for their own ends with nobody else as an alternative. They now face the facts that many bloggers have more credibility than the so called "professionals". They now face the fact that bloggers content is just a click away.
Poor journalists will fall in the face of this, no doubt whining to their unions and anyone who will listen that they're being hard done by and that "the public good" will be harmed by their unemployment while journalists who have stood firm and tried their hardest to "report" the news rather than try to "set" the news to a particular agenda will prosper. Reputation is everything.
Fox News is an perfect example of an agenda network with the name "news" in the title to try and pretend otherwise. Given their collusion with the Bush regime and detachment from reality they deserve all the karma they have coming.
I think "Make the bastards pay" is a pretty crude way to put the concept of what Murdoch is trying to do.
He is simply saying, we have content that I think is valuable, let's look and see if there is any way to have people pay for it the same way people are wiling to pay for the Wall St. Journal. It's not the concept of "the bastards are stealing our news", it's a sense of self-worth that you need to have to succeed in business.
Now the trouble will be if the news they offer is too commodity, then they are going to have trouble finding people wanting to pay (witness the NYT paid content that went free a while ago). But surely there's room for a paid service that offers truly hard reporting instead of almost wholly editorial content.
Editorial content i(even quality editorial content) s free now thanks to blogs, I don't think you can change that much. It's the reporting that is key now.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
New technology becomes widespread when it makes it easier for human beings to accomplish the same task with less human labor, or to accomplish a new goal that meets human desires. That's why we work to invent technology.
The internet makes it possible now for basically everyone who was a news subscriber before to get their information from any source they can send a web browser to, instead of just dead tree products.
Right now, there are more news outlets and news writers than there are people willing to pay for them. Hard fact.
A lot of people blame the greasy feel of newsprint, or Craiglist, or the current advertising crash, or things they don't like about the local newspaper. That isn't the problem. Right now, the market has too many sellers.
How's it going to end up? I don't know. One interesting fact I found is that for specific, timely information about a specific subject, nothing beats an online message board. For researching my whole path to medical school, residency, and beyond I spent hundreds of hours on the "studentdoctor.net" forums, and I learned more frank information than any book or news article about becoming a physician could have ever taught me.
Ditto for say, learning how to tune a computer for maximum performance, or how to properly install an SSD.
Maybe the news outlets of the future will be identity verified online forums where local citizens discuss local city news. Everyone will receive electronic versions of just the big, world famous newspapers (aka Wall street Journal/New York Times) on devices like the kindle.
McDonald's Founder's wife left $200 Million to them
NPR, the last I heard from them, gets about 10% of their budget from the Government. But I agree, that should be cut too.
LOL, I'm sure he is. The absurdity of Murdoch's news channel here in the States became so outrageous I decided I wasn't willing to subsidize it with the channels I did want to watch on satellite, so I cancelled the satellite subscription and installed an antenna in the attic to pick up OTA DTV/HDTV and get my journalism from PBS.
Its not that journalism isn't worth paying for, its that you need to find value in the journalism that is worth paying for. Values like truth, honesty, facts, and breadth of coverage are valuable and in short supply in some news outlets. Racism, hate, ignorance, and titillation that focuses on those core weaknesses is not something worth paying for in journalism.
NPR is another valuable journalistic outlet worth paying for. Feel free to watch or listen to either and instead of paying Murdoch for the garbage he purveys consider a donation to support real journalism.
It's absolutely true that some people will find a way to continue making a living delivering news (people want it, after all,) and that others will provide news and commentary for free.
If you are a religious free market nut, you may think this is an improvement over current circumstances. To a heretic such as myself, this is clearly not an improvement over our current circumstances where, desultory as it may be, there has been some effort to keep the general public informed, particularly on events of local or civic relevance. Meanwhile, billionaire glamor publishers like Murdoch and Eli Broad will increase their already disproportionate influence over public discourse. Fantastic.
So, as a public service, municipalities should set up non-profit local newspapers with independent editorial staffs (I would suggest direct election of editors, with the contents of the newspaper split between the top five vote-getters who can then publish whatever they want without even consulting one another if they wish.) If this sounds impossible, given how popular it would be with the public (particularly in large cities), that tells you how thoroughly degraded our political culture has become. Turning news into even-more of a for-profit venture with no broader responsibility to the community will degrade our political culture further, until we end up a kleptocracy like Mexico or Italy.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
Anyone notice the increase in stories in the mainstream media connecting Craigslist to various crimes - the "Craigslist robber", selling babies on Craigslist, Cragislist hookers, Craigslist attempted murderers, Craigslist scammers, etc, etc.
It seems that every struggling newspaper in the country goes to some effort to tie Craigslist to any local crime. I don't recall any of these papers connecting crimes to their own classified ads. It's almost like these papers have some sort of agenda...
And BUFO is free, while it seems Coast2Coast AM is prepaid. Anyone have a link to a free stream piped from a Coast2Coast AM account feed?
And don't forget the main truck to GCN Radio. That's a Ted Anderson outfit that feeds more than just RBN and Prison Planet. GCN is a multi-station network, and more can be found on a GCN Radio station at JEFFRENSE.COM live feeds (archive feeds need to be bought).
Just now briefly listening to AVRN as you posted, they have a great documentary on GMO'd containment problems in Mexico. Horrible prosecutors were suing the heirloom corn seed farmers because the GMO'd crap cross-polinated a generation into their crop and that violated Montanto's IP.
The BBC, CBC media model is far from perfect, but it's far better than the nonsense that pretends a news in the US.
I can live with the occasional antiques show stuck in the middle of the prime time schedule to get some actual foreign news coverage.
Citizen rackserverdeals
We have been hearing Bad Things about you. Your existence on Google is hereby terminated. All your data has been deleted.
Do not bother attempting to reply to this as you no longer exist.
Sergey B.
So I don't recall seeing any journalists, editors or reporters working for google. They are in the unique position of being around as long as there is some company out there to absorb the costs of generating news. So google can sit around and wait for all the companies that actually generate news to die away all the while sucking margin out of those companies, as I'm sure that google gets compensated in some way for sending users to $news_site.
The worst part about google's news is that if I search for something, I get the same news article from 10 different sources, all which are just reposting the same AP/Reuters article. Then again, how would google determine that user X should see the AP/Reuters article from $newsite_A vs $newsite_B.
I'm not going to fault google as they have a good business model, albeit one that will ultimately help with driving those that report the news out of business.
And the Bit Shifter hid under the bed as ideas danced in little Robby's sleaping head. Feeding him the thoughts to do for the day that would put news on Slashdot's a better way. When out from the closet sprang the Evil Bit and chased the Bit Shifter out through the door, down the hall, and onto the floor where rang the nightly call of CowboyNeal houling through the Intercom wishing well another day of LINUX.COM and Slashdot's over-extended stay. Wouldn't you know it, out in the yard, a Gnome distracts into the two datagrams a Goatse of Peccard, with vissions of Priceline.com sending Shatner on a ogo-pogo stick, sent up the ass of ol' Kike Thomas the Spick. With a hearty goodbye, the Gnome gave a yodel, back into Kathleen Fent's cunt he climed, saying Merry Christmas and don't ask me why.
Good night Anonymous Coward (*kiss)
The End
Any reasonable person listening to NPR would recognize the built in ideological slant to NPR.
Well, call me unreasonable then because I recognize little if any slant. And I know you will say that's proof of my political leanings but I don't think it is. I listen to NPR because the rest of radio is complete and utter trash. I don't want to listen to a naked girl rub her boobs on the host on air. I'd rather listen to Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me or Sound Money ... shows I can't see any liberal bias you speak of. You know in Minnesota, they have at least three different MPR stations that play music. Classical music and independent rock. Commercial free. You're also arguing against that when you argue against public radio.
One listener to NOR said it best in a letter read on the air: "Gays, Aids, and Abortion". You are guaranteed to hear at least one story on one of these subjects every freaking day.
I don't know what NOR is but I'll assume you meant NPR. I grew up listening to A Prairie Home Companion and don't recall any of those topics. I don't know what "Gays, Aids and Abortion" has to do with being liberal, they are all issues that should be addressed by anyone regardless of their political affiliation. They are current topics. Have you heard their coverage of the war in Iraq? I've found that to be very unbiased.
Throw in a story about how wonderful (insert liberal politician here) is and how evil (Insert conservative politician here) is and then add some snooty, witty, and amusing story about some obscure idiot and there you have an NPR broadcast.
You have never listened to NPR. Do you know that a lot of the affiliates switch over to BBC World News late at night? Do you find that to have a horribly liberal bias?
NPR should have their government funds cut off. Let George Soros buy it.
Do you know how much money you pay to NPR? Probably a few cents a month--if that. I don't think they would really care if they lost government funding, probably just push their pledge drive out another day. They get so little from the government and so much from listeners that would like to see any kind of news source free without ads, available everywhere in the country. Think about it, people hand money to them ... they don't have to charge like Murdoch wants to.
They may present more liberal topics than conservative topics but at least they don't use verbage that tries to tell me how to think about them (a la Fox News).
I would bet that if you took a citizen from another part of the world and made them listen to NPR they would see it as pretty damn neutral.
How the parent post got moderated insightful, I'll never know.
My work here is dung.
... I think even most capitalists can agree that for profit news only perpetuates those who have money to buy and pay people off and threaten peoples jobs so we never hear about all the corruption. We've seen more real news out of Wikileaks then all commercial news sites combined, you will see shit on wikileaks you will never find on commercial and government owned (really just another avenue of threat for private sector, since private men own the government anyway - the revolving door).
Commercial sites exist to make money, not give us real news. Unforunately the market for real news is rather small, and people with the intellect and skills to weigh truth from falsehood is scarce (lets not forget 50% of america believes in creationism). So people want news tailored to their cultural values and that means "real news" never really gets at truth but only what makes them money and doesn't piss off their viewers.
Want to see where the money trail leads in the bank bailouts? You'll have to subscribe to our premium service. Want to hear which of your local politicians is taking kickbacks from government contractors? That'll be a one time fee, or free to our subscribers.
Want to keep us quiet about where the money trail leads? Just give us a cut of that kickback larger than the sum of one-time fees we'd collect to spill the beans.
You can't take the sky from me...
Just by briefly mentioning this, you are proving that Slashdot adheres to narrow groupthink and forcibly squelches dissenting opinion! Why do you hate freedom? Why do you want to silence us free-thinkers?
NPR's obsession with gay "issues" is so pervasive we don't play the local NPR affiliate in our house. Sorry but we don't want our kids hearing what we jokingly call "OUT Radio" on a daily basis.
I just don't think that will work. Twitter has killed the concept of first access to anything. This is the age of instant information spreading like wildfire. There are lots of good blogs out there doing in-depth "investigative journalism", or at least good enough that it will suffice for people much more than something they have to pay for. A new business model must be invented. People don't want to pay to know something is happening when they know that they can now get that information for free.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." --Mark Twain
Norwegian newspapers have managed the transition and are now making almost half their money from the online version.
How did they do it? You make it free and accessible, you add services and features. Exclusive video content and articles. The online and print divisions are separate, with dedicated staff and management.
Obviously it helps that Scandinavians read more newspapers than the rest of the world, and that high-speed Internet is widely available and affordable!
Advertising is the most important revenue source, however they now make more money from services like social networking etc. People pay monthly fees for services they actually want.
So at least in Scandinavia online news will continue to be free, hopefully the US and UK will find business models that work for them.
Here are my sources:
http://whatsnewmedia.org/2007/09/23/newspaper-v-internet-if-you-cant-beat-âem-join-âem/
http://abluteau.wordpress.com/2009/04/01/european-newspapers-find-creative-ways-to-thrive-in-the-internet-age/
Are any newspapers actually delivered by paperboys and girls? Or is it just adults throwing them out of a moving vehicle?
20 years ago I was a paperboy for The Boston Globe, I had 30 houses on my route and the daily paper had to be delivered by 7 while the sat/sun had to be delivered by 8. Paper had to be placed in the location of the recipients choosing. Most wanted it behind the storm door so it was dry. On Sundays we had to assemble the paper as it was delivered by The Globe to my driveway in three piles (Ads, news, sports). If the weather permitted, I could ride my bike, otherwise I walked it (had a cart or an orange/white bag).
I had to "collect" from the customer's on the route and then pay the paper office, I could collect weekly or preferably monthly, as this reduced my trips to the office.
Great way for a kid to make a few bucks a week (tips were where it was at, especially at X-Mas time). Plus if you delivered your route nonstop for 3years, the Globe gave you a $5,000 scholarship to any college.
The problem is that news needs to be critical information, and not just entertainment, in order for democracy to work. Even a truly free market requires critical analysis of products, because it only functions if consumers are making informed decisions.
Let's say we just let the chips fall where they may and cable news becomes the de facto standard for journalism. When you have a handful of corporations whose job is to sell advertising to another handful of corporations, the amount of self-censorship would skyrocket. Common sense tells you that outing your highest paid advertiser for having a sweatshop or poisoning a creek that's giving children cancer is a bad business move.
Imagine this scenario: two journalists approach their editor with a story. One is a fluff piece about a local sports star getting arrested for hiring a prostitute. The other is an investigation into alleged union busting at a major local employer, who also happens to be one of their biggest advertisers. In a purely capitalist model, which journalist gets the green light? Does the editor who cranks out huge profits for less money get the promotion?
A book was written about the subject, with a nice summary on Wikipedia:
According to the book, the pressure to create a stable, profitable business invariably distorts the kinds of news items reported, as well as the manner and emphasis in which they are reported. This occurs not as a result of conscious design but simply as a consequence of market selection: those businesses who happen to favor profits over news quality survive, while those that present a more accurate picture of the world tend to become marginalized.
Manufacturing Consent, by Herman and Chomsky
For a concrete example, check this out this article on the coverage of the genocide in East Timor.
Basically, if you let market forces totally control news media in any form, you will end up with entertainment that distributes what is popular but not what is true. It's the difference between the BBC and Fox News. Both are biased, but as far as the quality of news they provide, Fox isn't even in the same dimension.
1) Fewer writers serve more readers and make more money (Rowling)
2) Fewer writers serve more readers and make the same money-- news is cheaper for the rest of us.
3) Fewer writers serve more readers and make the less money-- (the offshoring/outsourcing/underemployment model forming in large parts of the economy).
For decades the papers had the news created once by AP or Reuters and then they sold that same news over and over in different cities. With the excess money they paid a few columnists whose ultimate goal was to get syndicated across a lot of papers.
Now with the web, if AP/Reuters news is available anywhere for free- then why would you pay for it?
The columnists can still make money- they needed to go the blog route and take over their own destinies.
But there is a ton more competition for columnists and hard news won't support 2500 papers any more- in the end it supports 1 news source on the web.
And then there is cable TV that repeats the news every 30 minutes so you do not need a paper for a large swath of news.
I subscribe to my local paper but it is not doing well.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
The survivors are determined solely by market demand -- by what the consumer wants to read. What does the typical consumer want to read? Go to the local supermarket and behold the intellect of the typical consumer. He wants to read stuff like the "National Enquirer" and "Star".
If the 4th branch of government becomes only tabloids, what will happen to our American society? Be afraid. Be very afraid.
I'm afraid it's not Google killing the news sites. It's the Internet itself. The Internet made it possible for anybody who wants to to publish cheaply and get read by a world-wide audience, and in the process killed the mere reporting of news as a paying job.
Why should I go to a news site to read a reprint of a press release from a company when I can go to that company's own Web site and read the original press release? Why should I read a news report of the latest scientific breakthrough when I can go to the scientist's own site and read his own paper on it? Why should I read the news reports of a disaster when I can go to the Twitter feeds and Livejournals of people who're actually there and read their first-hand reports, or go to the web sites of the emergency-services agencies in the area and read their updates on the situation? And in all of those cases, those first-hand sources aren't in the business of reporting news. They don't particularly care whether they get paid for generating their content, they've got other reasons of their own for wanting that content visible. And, as in so many things, the Internet's making it harder and harder for those middlemen whose business model is to get between the source of something and the eventual consumer and charge for transferring that something from the source to the destination.
Now, news sites aren't doomed. But to survive they're going to have to do something more than just report the news. They're going to have to start pulling together many sources of different information, analyzing all of it and putting together the pieces that it isn't immediately obvious fit together. Of course, that's going to be kind of hard seeing as they've spent the last decade or so wiping all traces of that out of their organizations because investigative journalism of any quality doesn't produce the Holy ROI.
The amount of noise out there would make it tough to get useful information like that. Local news won't be nearly as vulnerable to that either.
100% correct. unfortunately, since the fall of the CCCP, the news industry has slowly collapsed into a sensationalistic grab bag of titillation and distraction.
Here's a nice short documentary on this by Adam Curtis.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
That's why filtering the noise (aka Google) has become such an important business. If realtime services, such as Twitter, can figure out how to get relevant and useful information to the top of search results, this is how news will spread.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." --Mark Twain
listeners support it, so do underwriters like ford foundation.
Newspapers have always relied to one degree or another on advertising revenue.
New model. Take your general content online free, let the faceless mobs out there send in content/contributions, and charge a monthly fee for in-depth coverage. Everybody reads your rag (ad revenue), and if it's really good, people will pay for the extra content. Tack on some subscriber bennies (coupons or some such nonsense), keep ads to a minimum in the premium content, and charge alot more for ad space there.
Someone else has already said it, but NO, it's not worth CNN/New York Times staff and reporters salaries for garbage that Bubba can twitter, blog, email, or myspace. There is PLENTY of money out there to support real reporting on relevant issues. There are PLENTY of real issues which require real reporting, instead of the infotainment trash. Newspapers are going to have to ....OMG, here it comes.....CHANGE in order to survive. Welcome to the future. The future is now.
I'd pay for real news, unfortunately all I get is "OMG the market is up.", "OMG the market is down", and "OMG this celebrity (insert random amoral and insane celebrity shenanigans here)"
BBC
But there should be a "-1, Stupid" option.
I remember reading in the Utne reader back in the 90's and editorial lauding the DOJ's attack on Microsoft that software providers should not charge for their product because it had no physical manifestation. I wondered at the time how a news magazine could make such a claim. Were they selling paper and ink? It is interesting and satisfying to see the value crisis come back around to their industry. Do you remember the movie with Ryan Phillipe saying "Human knowledge should be free!!!"? Most of us think that those who profited from Bernie Madoff's ponzi scheme should have wondered why and how they profited from so little work. But now as we read news online, listen to free music, and enjoy all the open source free software at our finger tips shouldn't we too wonder how to support the producers of our rapidly expanding information wealth? Should we assume that these increases will continue of their own accord? Or will we look back on these days as a lost golden age and wonder where all the software developers and content providers went?
Do you work for Twitter or something? Are they paying you to post this? Twitter hasn't killed anything except time wasted talking about it. Talking about twitter in a story about news strikes me as odd, given that all I can communicate via Twitter is a headline. I like reading stories, not tweets.
Then you've completely missed the point.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." --Mark Twain
With the incredible spin and propaganda exemplified by any "News" agency anyone could name,why would anyone with an intellect above retarded expect me to pay for my disinformation?
I'll never pay Minitrue to continue to lie to me. Kiss my crusty butt,Rupert.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Yes, he did, because the point was in the body of the story!
The technical cause:
1. I think you have to be logged in.
2. Go to write a comment.
3. Click "Customize Posting Preferences".
4. Scroll to the last page of settings and there's a "Comment Post Mode." Mine is set to "Code" for terminal text.
The real cause: I'm a coder and this is the only font I read all day every day day in day out sun up sun down, so I think that the impact on my personality should be represented by my font as well as my grammar/sentence structure/etc.. kinda like wearing professional vs relaxed clothes I guess.
lets face it Americains have never had to pay for news and never will. That $.50 we paid for a news paper wasn't for the news, hell it probably didn't even cover the cost of the paper and ink. News whether in print, on radio or on TV has always been ad supported.
. web news competes with radio and tv news that are both free.
The newspapers are doomed because they no longer have the monopoly on the distribution and content. Where they used to only have to compete with maybe 1 or 2 other papers, now they have radio, TV and an internet full of other newspapers to contend with. TV Networks and local news are in the same boat because with cable and satellite TV we now have a choice to watch something else, or nothing at all. Does there really need to be 100 different newspapers, ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, ,Times, Newsweek, all echoing the same liberal content?? of course not.
Now that news information is fungible and generally accepted as free, if they want to survive they'll have to come up with a way to be significantly different from the rest or to provide something really useful or valuable. (though just reporting truthful and unbiased information would be a good start.)
In a way it's not too different from what the music industry faces with their over-priced crappy products. By making distribution easy for everyone, the internet has created the buyer's market - where WE now set the terms of what is a reasonable price for content.
You said it, Good Citizen anaesthetica:
"The Guardian, a paper that is further to the left than NPR,..."
And as a previous poster mentioned, it is indeed the product, not the delivery system, and NPR is most definitely a corporate McMedia outlet - seldom does one hear any real content, completely at variance with The Guardian, a fine newspaper. Now Fox, that's simply propaganda for the blithering idiot crowd, completely unworthy of any mention.>
In the USA, one becomes frustrated with the hopeles and mindless drivel of the moronic newsies who whine about the Zero-content newspapers going under --- who bothers to read such drivel? Counterpunch.org, economicpopulist.com, nakedcapitalism.com, globalresearch.ca, crytogon.com, btlonline,com, etc., etc., etc., provides the reality.....
Drive-ins disappeared when the demographic changed. No different from all those opera houses 10 miles apart in the mid-west in the days of the horse. Newspaper were originally freesheets providing information about ship cargos. Advertising used this platform and it was profitable. Not much cargo news in papers these days but then the platform is changing too in much the same way as the evolution from radio as a profitable ad platform to television in the 50s and 60s. The model is not really in hands of the newspaper magnates, it is in the hands of the consumers and the advertisers
Posts, MyBio or Sig, may contain satire, sarcasm, bolded nouns be sardonic or even witty & be Church of SD
This task is mission impossible. Murdoch's empire (Fox News, NY Post, etc.) all cater to rednecks, most of whom have little disposable income.
"Steven Johnson took Gibson's insight to heart and argued that if we want to know what the networked journalism of the future might be like, we should look now at how the reporting of technology has evolved over the past few decades."
Things are not only unevenly distributed, they're changing faster than people think. Not just the past few decades, but the last few years have seen a pandemic of text editor operators masquerading as journalists. Many stories are lifted whole or in chunks from a source that probably didn't verify their material, or as in cases such as science reporting, are simply quoting a press release. Secondary "journalists" sometimes rewrite parts of the original. Sometimes. The better ones (as in an impacted wisdom tooth is better than losing a limb to gangrene) pull pieces from two sources. Very few real journalists of integrity exist, partly because trying to fill the net requires enormous manpower, but also because it's cheaper.
And yes, Rupert Murdoch's outlets do it too. He wants to make money at it but won't pay to make it worth buying by hiring real journalists and letting them do real journalism.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Sometimes, a view that is one step away can be useful. Granted, this can be accomplished online, e.g. various scientific magazine websites, websites to do with "disaster management", written by guys with experience in the field.
Newspapers (to me at least, at least the good ones) have tried to be the universal magazine, that is, trying to interpret everything correctly. While everything that they can accomplish can be accomplished by background reading, almost noone has time to do the background reading to sufficient depth to understand something they are seeing for the first time, hence the journalists' utility. ("Blogs by scientists", you say.)
We all know Alexander literally marched millions of men around the world, right?
In my view, newspapers are functionally a mix of (in web-speak) (i.) a stable of bloggers, and (ii.) content agglomerators. That is, newspapers do the same thing as a paper blog and a reprint of various web pages combined.
"They are in trouble because of their antiquated delivery mechanism and their less than timely delivery."
Sure, by the time newspapers published their story on Paris Hilton's arrest, she had already been released.
The class of gadgets that the iPhone ..[is in,].. is something we don't really have a name for yet. Calling it a "smart phone" seems somehow inadequate. For one thing, we're used to our mobile phones being switched on, or off (at least, in standby mode). This gadget is never off -- it is in constant communication with the internet. It knows where it is, and it knows which way up it is (it's orientation sensitive). It can see things you point it at, and it can show you pictures. (Oh, and it does the smartphone thing as well, when you want it to.)
I for one welcome our Apple-branded overlords.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Some headlines from 1987 http://www.1980sflashback.com/1987/News.asp
i wish i could stop
The fact that he's a 'tard.
I pay about the same for news now as I did before the internet came along.
Or rather, my parents did. --They had a cable TV and newspaper subscription which, taking inflation into account, costs about the same as a high-speed internet connection.
The "How will it support itself if it's Free?" conundrum is a Living Paradox! --Like the question, "How can I get a credit card without a credit history?" or, "How can I get the required job experience if I can't get a job?", such paradoxes, while logically being impossible on paper in a strictly mathematical sense, are not restricted to a finite set of values and influences in the Real World. The Real World is big and infinite in nature, and there is almost always a Way. Indeed, lots of people have credit cards and jobs. In exactly this manner, there will always be media even if it happens to be 'free'.
Here's a "For Instance". . . I decided to give $50 per year to Amy Goodman and crew over at democracynow.com --Not by opting into a structured donation system, but just one day after being blown away by one of their regular hour-long pod casts. I said, "This is higher-quality signal to noise than anything I've seen on a network news channel in years. I'm going to give them $50 today because I feel like it. I'll do the same next year if it's just as good. Where's their 'donate' button. . ?"
Those who are stressed out about how Free Stuff will Ruin the World are simply locked into a linear mind-set; they need to accept that the nature of their reality is unpredictable and basically really cool. People who are politically Conservative usually have crap imaginations, which means they have trouble grasping complex notions which are not black and white, linear in nature. It is hardly surprising that such people are the most afraid of Free Stuff. --And generally afraid of giving and taking openly. Giving $50 because I felt like it was simply a particle of Pirating with a negative charge. There are ancient philosophies which discuss the nature of giving and receiving and there is a curious rule repeated in all of them which I will paraphrase thusly. . . "Systems of individuals who give openly create more energy than they consume."
There is a good chance you've never heard of the most potent of such philosophies, and there is an equally good chance that you've been inoculated against falling into such systems through the parallel media mind-control tactics which talk about the laws of conservation of energy, or the 'evils of communism' or such with a curious level of hysteria above and beyond that which is actually necessary to transmit those messages. That level of hysteria, when you see it in a subject, is usually a good indicator that somebody somewhere is trying like crazy to program you into some kind of limiting, slave-mentality without your actually looking at the real subject of concern.
There was a Slashdot article a couple of days ago where a writer posed the question, "See? My e-book is being stolen! The top 6 search returns on Google are for illegal copies of my book!"
There were many arguments back and forth, but there was something about that debate which nagged at me for a day or so, and it wasn't until the story had gone cold that I realized what it was. (And since I happened to be a moderator on that discussion, I couldn't have commented anyway.) But now seems to be a good time to bring it up. . .
The fellow's e-book was not the same as any regular bit of media. It was actually a coder's bible of sorts, a book about how to make computers and the internet work. It was being used as course material in classes which taught programming. --It struck me that this fellow's book was less like a movie video or a song using the web as a transmission medium to get its message from point A to multiple point B's, than it was actually much more like a packet of DNA for the internet. Expecting that it should NOT be pulled by the gravitational force of the internet itself seemed wildly wishful. I know when I am
Pay for Fox News - rotflmao - Ruperet, I wouldn't read that crap if you paid me!
Newspapers would make more money if they actually did some up to date journalism. They fail to do even simple research that any idiot can do on Google. For the most part they simply recycle stories they get off the wire. You could probably find a blogger that has more relevant information about any news event you care to mention.
These clowns want to get paid for the type of work they were doing 20 years ago, but it's just not worth anything. They are trying to compete in an information centric arena, but they don't provide any information.
Case in point. Recently a JAL 747-400 at LAX sucked an empty baggage container into it's engine. It is inexcusable for the LA Times to not have a picture of the 747 with a baggage container lodged in it's engine in their story. It's inexcusable for them to not have interviewed a couple of workers/bystanders at the airport. I would lay odds that you can get exactly that sort of info by looking around the web at people's blogs.
You can probably even get a discussion of the science surrounding the event. None of this appears in the local rag's story. There is no value added by looking at the newspaper.
Newspapers need to wake up and start doing some work.