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Print Subscribers Cry Foul Over WP's Online-Only Story
Hugh Pickens writes "The decision by the Washington Post to publish an article exclusively online has angered many readers who still pay for the print edition of the newspaper and highlighted the thorny issues newspaper editors still face in serving both print and online audiences. The 7,000 word story about the slaying in 2006 of Robert Wone, a young lawyer who was found stabbed to death in a luxurious townhouse in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington where a 'polyamorous family' of three men lived, is the sort of long-form reporting that newspaper editors say still justifies print in the digital age and many editors agree that print is still the place to publish deep investigative reporting, in part to give certain readers a reason to keep paying for news. 'If you're doing long form, you should do it in print,' said newspaper consultant Mark Potts. 'This just felt like a nice two-part series that they didn't have the room to put in the paper, so they just threw it on the Web.' Editors at The Post say they considered publishing the article in print, but they concluded it was too long at a time when the paper, like most others, was in dire financial straits and trying to scale back newsprint costs. 'Newspapers are going broke in part because news can be read, free of charge, on the Internet,' wrote one reader in a letter to the editor. 'As a nearly lifelong reader of The Post, I could not read this article in the paper I pay for and subscribe to; instead I came on it accidentally while scrolling online for business reasons.'"
Can someone explain what this means in English? I've read parts of the Feynman physics lectures in a digital format - there's nothing special about bits of paper when it comes to conveying information. Sounds like the paper equivalent of 'vinyl sounds better than CD'.
The only reason left to by a physical newspaper is because it is easier to do the crossword on one.
I for one continue to enjoy the ability to read the paper while dropping a long-form turd from the depths of my bowels.
I stare at Excel just about all damn day.
The last thing that I want to do when I get home is stare at a screen for the 40 minute it takes to read an article that is as long as this one. As a matter of fact, I'd probably print that article out if it weren't in the paper that's delivered to my house.
Say what you will about vinyl, but there is a huge difference in the experience of reading on a computer screen that sits a foot in front of you and a paper you can hold in your lap while kicking back on the couch.
ya like how they also put "polyamorous family" within the classic value-reducing single quote marks? Gotta love such open, progressive use of language.
I hold my computer on my lap as a kick back on the couch - they call them laptops.
I could write more about why it sucks, but I think everyone gets it. Unfortunately, I have no answers for how to help the transition to online papers, or how to keep the print papers going. I totally see a need for both, but... what are you going to do? It doesn't look like they can co-exist.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Why would they put long stories on the web, the sanctuary of the short attention span, and not in print, where people pay to spend a lot of time reading it?
'As a nearly lifelong reader of The Post, I could not read this article in the paper I pay for and subscribe to; instead I came on it accidentally while scrolling online for business reasons.'
Who else thinks he came across it with a "gay polyamorous" Google search instead of "business reasons"?
It seems to me that the print media wants more eyeballs for greater ad revenue and it wants subscriptions at the same time. They pretty much have to choose one or the other. They can have a hybrid, but they have to put part of the website behind a paywall. And they'll have to give up some advertising money in exchange for subscription. With the Google lawsuits, it seems that a lot of newspapers expect Google to cover their red ink.
The Wall Street Journal has been doing this for a while now. Lots of newspapers put movies on their websites. I admit I was kind of annoyed by it at first too, but after a while you just deal with it, and get your information where you can. There are still benefits of print.
Qxe4
The last thing that I want to do when I get home is stare at a screen for the 40 minute it takes to read an article that is as long as this one.
I found this earlier today: http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/8uffa/online_journalism_a_few_years_ago_vs_today_pic/
The real gems are the comments on how to improve your online readability with bookmarklets that change font & backgrounds.
Seems to me like long form would be perfect for the digital version, since there's infinite space.
Make the print version short form instead, to make the production cheaper!
You can hold a laptop in your lap while you're kicking back on the couch. Or a smartphone. Or a Kindle thingy. Although from the name, I assume you're supposed to burn after reading.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
I hold my computer on my lap as a kick back on the couch - they call them laptops.
I know, but there's something about the feel of a physical paper that's so much more pleasant than a bloody screen. I hate not being able to see the whole page in one view without having to scroll. It's like when I worked in a drawing office as a CAD draughtsman. Sure we'd long ago dispensed with the drawing boards and all the design work was done on screen, but when it came to reviewing drawings and looking for potential problems, checking calculations etc. it was time to run a plot and pore over the thing flat out on the desk. There'll always be a role for paper.
See also, from The Atlantic (which I happen to buy in print form) on why The Economist newspaper is doing so well. The Economist uses long form reporting, doesn't charge for online content (except for the archives) and is still growing strongly.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
"Long-form reporting" and "deep investigative reporting" means "reporting the way it used to be done before we just started ripping the stories off newswire. Since now everyone can read the newswire, once in a while we have to send a reporter to actually do some... [gasp]... reporting."
End anonymous moderation and posting on
Laptop.
Quoth TFA:
In one letter that The Post published after its article ran online, a reader wrote: "Newspapers are going broke in part because news can be read, free of charge, on the Internet. As a nearly lifelong reader of The Post, I could not read this article in the paper I pay for and subscribe to; instead I came on it accidentally while scrolling online for business reasons."
A story about three polyamorous men living together and you found it while surfing the net for "business reasons?" Yeah, right!
Drill baby drill - on Mars
there's nothing special about bits of paper when it comes to conveying information.
No, but there is something special about the difference between the people who read the bits of paper and those who don't. The people who read the paper want the news in a longer format that takes more time. They want to read the news enough that they pay for it. When you put something on the web, it's usually accompanied by a place to put comments, many of which will cheapen the experience and provide a very shallow or biased viewpoint on the article. It's like saying that there's nothing special about the china cabinet when it comes to storing priceless antiques: you're correct in one sense, but mistaken in another.
Even with a subscription you're not paying for the paper. The nominal cost of the subscription or the news stand price covers approximately the cost of the physical paper (roughly; more or less depending on paper size and price). The reporters, staff, printing press, etc., etc., are all paid for by advertising, which is a much larger cost than $1.00 or so per day.
The only difference with the online version is that no one has managed to get the advertising revenue to match costs yet. And in fact, this is becoming more of a problem with the print version, as the ad revenue falls due to falling circulation.
But the point is, even folks who "pay for the paper" aren't doing so; it's a specious argument.
Terrorist, bomb, al Qaeda, nuclear, yellowcake, kill, assassinate. Carnivore is dead... long live Echelon.
To really know what's happening in northern Delaware, you need to haunt the Wilmington News Journal's Web site. They post breaking news all day, including many stories that will never make it into the paper... and the links to those stories vanish when the dead-tree edition hist the driveway.
"Businessreasons" :)
Good one. Mod tagger up.
Exception Duck - may or may not contain chicken.
tl;dr version:
http://readable-app.appspot.com
Ever since they fired Dan Froomkin a few days ago I haven't found a reason to read the Washington Post at all.
Need Mercedes parts ?
The reader who complained should simply bookmark washingtonpost.com and skim it daily for content that is not provided in the print edition. For example, many of their articles have very active talkback forums or blogs that obviously are not possible in the print edition.
Really, today's news market is subdivided into many categories--traditional print readers, casual online skimmers, and serious online readers come to mind. Then there are news aggregators such as Yahoo and Google that present a portal format to readers (like myself).
I read the online WaPo just about every day, plus WSJ, NYT, and a couple of the prominent aggregators. That's about all I need and have time for. I wouldn't have time to read a paper edition, and plus it's full of junk that I wouldn't normally click on. I suspect there are millions of others with needs similar to mine.
Probably print will shrink while online grows and diversifies. Ultimately we'll likely have news feeds into our handhelds that will be aggregations of various news syndications. There will still be plenty of demand for "deep" reporting, but it likely will not be in print eventually. And the trees will celebrate this fact.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
Smartphone.
I'll get off your lawn now, grandpa ;)
... but last week they fired Daniel Froomkin who was one of the more fearless critics of the power that be. He was pretty merciless to the Bush administration across a range of issues including torture. Then to show he is a class act he was starting to be a pretty merciless critic of the Obama administration too. I think he was having some kind of spat with the Post's resident right wingnut ... Krauthammer but I would be interested if anyone knows the dirt on why exactly he was fired. To fire Froomkin and keep Krauthammer has dramatically diminished my opinion of the Post and I am not reading it at all lately.
Even prior to firing Froomkin my impression is the quality of their editorials, and original news reporting in general, has been in steep decline lately.
@de_machina
You know what's ironic - I went to read that article and the first thing I looked for was the "Print" view so that I could read it without all the crap around it. So print isn't dead!
I would like to know many is "many"???? Are we talking 20 people?
Did the paper actively seek out people to add to this "many" count by saying polling with misleading questions?
Sounds like a case of people bitching just to bitch, which people love to do. I pay for XMRadio so I can listen to Foxnews. But NO, I can't stream it through the online XMRadio player, and I have to pay an extra $3/mo to even stream XM on my iPhone. Wahh. Yet Fox News is free to stream through iTunes under radio stations. This seems like a much more interesting story than, OMG, a new paper published one article online which was not in print.
My favorite was:
instead I came on it accidentally
Of course not. And there's no way you'll stare at Slashdot long enough to read through the deep investigative long form reporting we get here...
Find environmentally and socially responsible products on http://buy-right.net
The article was actually a series of three articles about the bizarre circumstances surrounding the death of a young man in DC, while he was staying over at the house of three gay friends (who were involved in a three-way relationship) in a wealthy section of DC. The three friends reported being asleep and waking up to find their guest murdered (I'm greatly simplifying.) The police think the three gay men were involved in the murder and have concocted a bizarre (not saying wrong or right -- but it is bizarre) story that the guest was accidently killed in sex game run amok, and that the three .
Honestly, the story wasn't very good. There was no lede. There were no breaks in the case reported for the first time by the paper. The main thing it had going for it was group sex. The strong implication of the article was that the police thought these three guys were guilty because they were into kinky group sex and S&M. Then when it came time to actually prove something, there was all-too-common in DC story of police labs losing evidence and screwing up.
I'm sure the Post editors compared this sensationalist story with the Chandry Levy expose they printed maybe a years ago (which I understand actually led to someone being arrested), and found it lacked oomph. There was no there there as an old boss used to say. Combine that with the obvious homophobia of the police detectives initially assigned to the case, and the whole thing was a muddled morass of conflicting information. Clearly the housemates were not entirely forthcoming and that their stories were not entirely consistent, but there was no clear evidence that they committed murder either.
Instead of a table sized plot, I'd go with high resolution multitouch table display
A newspaper subscription doesn't entitle you to everything the newspaper company publishes. For example, you don't automatically get the various foreign language editions. Regional editions often contain different material. It seems to me that the only problem here is the subscriber's attitude.
Good for them; the idea of "polyamory" is bullshit. You can't love (in the romantic sense) more than one person. Try and it will always end in disaster.
Reason #937 why most keyboard have far more fecal coliforms on their surface than the average toilet seat.
I don't care why you're posting AC
"I came on it accidentally"
Ha, could have chosen better words!
Film at 11.
Don't you mean "Streaming digital video at 11"?
Film at 11.
Don't you mean "Streaming digital video at 11"?
Or "Streaming digital video when you have some free time to watch it".
Of course not. And there's no way you'll stare at Slashdot long enough to read through the deep investigative long form reporting we get here...
There is a difference between reading slashdot online and reading long news articles.
Obviously it is impossible for me to participate in an online forum with a paper copy of the Washington Post. For some things a computer is great -- like providing interactivity. But interactivity is the last thing I need when I'm reading a long article telling a story of convoluted characters.
My point is that a paper copy does that function -- long-form reporting and analysis -- better than a computer screen.
Yeah, yeah, laptops are exactly the same as paper. I am 100% with you on this one. But, say, what happens if you casually drop your laptop on the floor, or use it to kill a fly, or ... fold it??
While there are two sides to this, those "stragglers" seem to be the ones footing the bills for the web presence - short of the ads that they are selling on their site, which are unlikely to be bringing in enough cash to buy a icypole during lunch.
Having said that, I doubt there is anywhere in the paper that says that ALL content online will also be in the printed format.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
Paper has better resolution
No ink costs & no layout worries. As a former reporter, I gotta say, almost all problems I see with the newspaper industry, as with the U.S. auto industry, are of their own making. *shrug*
Calling it a more efficient medium misses the essence of this.
If you're talking about the National Enquirer, then you might have a point...I'm not sure, I don't read it. For genuine newspapers... No.
The problem is that newspapers need to return to their roots...and there doesn't seem to be any way to do that. Most newspapers don't HAVE investigative reporters, so they don't have anything special to offer. So they not only are dying, they deserve to die. The ones that do, though, have a problem:
Those investigative reporters cost money and require influence. And their results are sporadic.
1) How do you cover your costs in the interim?
2) How do you maintain public support when nothing special is coming out?
3) How do you catch people's attention when you have something significant to report?
I'm not in the industry, so I haven't been looking, but I don't see any answers. Many to most stories are now being broken by bloggers, but that has the problem that they don't have significant political support, so unpopular results are subject to suppression...sometimes by unpleasant means. (Newspapers had this problem too, but they had a larger power-base behind them.)
Unfortunately, most non-local newspapers (and some of them) *deserve* to die. They don't fulfill their role in the social contract, and haven't since they were bought out be big businesses. (Think of how Hearst started the Spanish-American war.) It's always been a rather shaky deal, as by it's nature the role they were supposed to play could not be enforced, but newspapers were supposed to inform the public about the significant political events that were happening. When "significant" gets defined by a small group of people, even if such a group contains divergent ideas about what's significant, then the deal isn't being kept. And the contents of the newspapers (& network broadcast stations) is defined by such a small group. There are divergent voices, but they all speak to the opinions of the rich. Some are liberal, some are conservative, but they're RICH liberals and RICH conservatives. The only moderately wealthy don't have a voice....but when they become bloggers they do.
Somehow a method needs to be found to fuse the strengths of the mass media and the bloggers, but what way would work isn't clear to me. The Slashdot model shows promise, but it needs LOTS of refinements. Note that Slashdot has significant financial backing, but empowers diverse voices. But also note the weaknesses...Few to no original stories, excessive noise from trolls, etc. The lack of strong editorial controls is a necessity for this to work as I think it should, but perhaps there should be either community control of which stories are significant, or, perhaps better, agents for each member that learn which stories are interesting. (But SlashDot2 already has too much JavaScript. I've got a fast computer, and my browser occasionally asks if the JavaScript hasn't gone into a loop, and should it kill it? So this needs to be done in a faster language, and should probably be mainly done as background processing....at a *very* nice priority--- say a niceness of 18 [unless I have the priorities backwards].)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
"Comments from fucktards nitpicking insignificant bits of the story"
Well, from that diagram there it's clear that slashdot has made it's mark on journalism.
Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
Today the MainStreamMedia once more reported that: "Don't worry about unemployment, it's a lagging indicator."
2010: Don't worry about all those dead CEOs, lying dead in the streets after being brutally slain, that's just a lagging indicator of the economy.
Film at 11.
Don't you mean "Streaming digital video at 11"?
Or "Streaming digital video when you have some free time to watch it".
No you mean... buffering... buffering... buffering... buffering...
Tell me again when we are going to get anywhere near the bandwidth of the rest of the civilized world?
I think you have the correct idea with where the current generation is going. Only thing to add is, newspapers print day old news reported first on the net then on TV. I used to subscribe to both the Denver Post and Colorad Springs Gazette, they had different comics. I started to see that the Gazette would reprint the same stories that were in the Post, 1-3 days after they were in the Post. Then I started reading online news. I found the newspaper was printing 1-2 day old news as it was, unless it was super current(a disaster or some sort of political thing), then a day old at most. THey are a fossil of when it was ok for the newspaper to take a week to get to you in the Ohio valley from the east coast. Doom on them.
I was just reading an article that suggests doing it the other way round is the correct way.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Please get me a monitor with the resolution, contrast ratio, portability and battery life of a magazine. Laptops are uncomfortable to read in bed, cannot be rolled up and shoved in a trouser pocket, and are harder on the eyes then newsprint in good light. When electronic distribution matches these advantages for print, I'll jump at it. But for the moment, for non-interactive, non-urgent, long-form information where you don't want search functions, print still rules. Which is still a large niche.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
Last post!
I know, but there is something about the smell of a horse that is so much more pleasant than those new automobiles.
See ya later, grandpa...
Geeks will naturally jump on the digital vs. paper angle, but actually, this is about a much larger ethical issue: whether exclusives should exist at all. I've always considered exclusives to be unethical, since they're effectively a (relatively bad) form of DRM: you can know about an important issue in your society, but not if you get your information from our competitors. Now, they're taking it one step further: you can read the story, but not if you got the information in a certain format.
Dang.. I didn't know Wikipedia had print subscribers....
Do they mail in the edits they want to make to articles, or something?
I agree. That is why I only love myself.
[Masturbation joke here.]
Virginia is for lovers. EVE is for griefers.
This just in, there is stuff online that is not in the newspaper. Welcome to the 90s. You should also get upset at the hundreds of articles that were just tossed instead of going in the paper you pay for and subscribe to.
No you mean... buffering... buffering... buffering... buffering...
Tell me again when we are going to get anywhere near the bandwidth of the rest of the civilized world?
[Off-Thread warning]
I think things are improving. I'm in California and I just switched (back) to Comcast. I'm paying $19.99 a month (For 6 months, and then ~$44 a month) for 12-24mbps down and 1-3mbps up.
I get around 21mbps/1.5mbps during peak hours on speed test websites (means nothing, I know), and on average I get 10mbps down from sites that have the bandwidth.
The bottle neck for me nowadays seems to be the servers I'm accessing more than anything else.
Mind you this is in an older neighborhood that I thought was never going to get updated.
To me this is a huge improvement over last summer when I was paying Comcast $60 a month for 6mbps down and 768kbps up.
If you can't mod them join them.
Why the devil is this modded flamebait? Sounds like a legitimate question to me. Looks like parent accidentally burned a vinyl fetishist :P.
Again with the opinionated modding. If you don't agree with a poster, say so ffs. Don't abuse your modding privileges. The idea of laptops is quite a valid counterpoint to OP. Even if you think it is not, "troll" is a childish way to lash back. Sheesh, where're my mod points when I need 'em?
stamps used to host a nickle!
Wake up. Print is dead.
the only reason this is true:
. 'If you're doing long form, you should do it in print,'
is to sell more print;however the cost difference is so great it's hardly a long term plan.
WP is probably making plans to go all online. If they aren't they better be making plans it down size, and then go bankrupt.
Print is expensive. We will have groups who make money and pay people to report. This won't change; just the method of doing so will.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I know, but there's something about the feel of a physical paper that's so much more pleasant than a bloody screen. I hate not being able to see the whole page in one view without having to scroll.
I agree whole-heartedly! Unfortunately, the print version doesn't give me two VERY important things that I get in the online version: (1) Instant lookup of background I don't know - makes reading an article actually useful instead of a futile exercise in puzzle-solving; and (2) stories and content that I'm actually interested in instead of wading through a collection compiled for the national least common denominator. So, I would gladly trade the (secondary and frivolous) tactile and olfactory stimulation accompanying newspapers for the (primary and important) benefits I've outlined above. I do agree with the whole bird's-eye-view argument by parent and poster printing is the only solution I have for that. Surely, parent will agree that hand-drawing of CAD drawings is annoying beyond belief when it comes to editing said designs? So, I would (and do - I use CAD programs quite extensively) design the damn things on the screen, print it out, look it over for problems, re-edit and be happy :P. I don't see any problem with this hybrid solution - why must we all be philosophical purists? Hybrid != mongrel.
:P and I couldn't be happier about that mode of distribution dying out (of course I feel bad about the lost jobs and such so I wouldn't actively wish for it - but if it happens, fine...)
Aside from that, there's the greater portability in the digital version (smartphones/book readers anyone?) I have never been able to read newspapers while having food - just not dextrous enough perhaps. One-handed digital readers increase my available reading time dramatically by virtue of being able to include almost ANY damn 5-minute block where I'm not using both hands and performing an activity that doesn't require my full attention. There are many such short periods in a researcher's routine (waiting for a machine to do something, epoxy being degassed, parts being ultrasonically cleaned, etc.) and it is a pleasure to be able to squeeze some brain-time during these periods.
So, while my romantic side agrees with all the archaists in this (and similar) threads, the pragmatist in me recognizes why print media is essentially marginal as far as I'm concerned (I still like paper books for when I actually have free time - vacations for instance, or during the electronic embargo periods in airplanes). From an environmental point of view, newspapers are teh sux0rz
a computer screen that sits a foot in front of you
Umm, your sitting to close to the screen, you should be atleast arms length away...
Maybe he is very short.
Vinyl still makes a lousy couch
Eh. The opinionated troll ratings are no less prevalent than the "you say what I agree with, and therefore it's insightful," moderation.
I still prefer the troll rating to the overrated rating - that's just someone who want's to downmod and doesn't have the balls to call the post troll or flamebait.
Washington Post Digital is not the same as The Washington Post. They are both owned by The Washington Post Company, but the website makes its own money separate from the paper, and yes, it does support itself partly on ad revenue and not at all from print subscriptions.