Slashdot Mirror
Postmortem for a Dead Newspaper
Techdirt points out a great postmortem for the Rocky Mountain News, a newspaper that ended up shutting down because they couldn't adapt to a world beyond print. While long, the talk (in both video and print) is incredibly candid coming from someone who lived through it and shares at least some portion of the blame. "It seems like pretty much everything was based on looking backwards, not forward. There was little effort to figure out how to better enable a community, or any recognition that the community of people who read the paper were the organizations true main asset. ... The same game is playing out not just in newspapers, but in a number of other businesses as well. Like the Rocky Mountain News, those businesses are looking backwards and defining themselves on the wrong terms, while newer startups don't have such legacy issues to deal with."
But, contrary to rumors, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer is still alive and well.
They just don't kill trees to put out their paper, sacrificing electrons instead.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
MPAA/RIAA, to name a few (that we love to hate.)
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
Can't we link to the original source in the article summary? http://www.johntemple.net/2009/09/lessons-from-rocky-mountain-news-text.html
That RMN and Denver Post were essentially owned by the same parent company. Wasn't really a loss, given that neither paper has been particularly good for quite a while now.
Why on earth is this a link to a tiny summary of the actual article?
Here's the article http://www.johntemple.net/2009/09/lessons-from-rocky-mountain-news-text.html
Techdirt doesn't deserve the ad revenue for such pathetic summary spam
The demise of the print newspaper has a few causes. 1. We live in a 24/7 news cycle, with 24 hour news on tv, cellphones etc. 2. By the time a newspaper is printed & delivered, the "news" isn't new anymore. 3. Most print newspapers have journalist with a very liberal slant, and people don't want that anymore, witness the success of Fox News and online bloggers. 4. You could learn VOLUMES by the stuff they DON'T put in a newspaper.
Here is the actual article. The link from TFS is a short, three paragraphs that don't say anything the summary doesn't.
TFA, unlike the link from TFS, is actually worth reading.
Free Martian Whores!
Do you know why people are moving away from traditional media? Because it acts like it's better than we are. Blogging has become popular because it's there in plain english, the way we look at things -- and it's accessible and free. I can share it with my friends instantly -- unlike a newspaper which is physical and takes time. With the digital age, all of my friends are only a few feet away from me most of the time. Cell phones and laptops are like spiders -- there's always one within a few feet of you.
Traditional media has forgotten that the most important asset they have is trust -- and accessibility. There is still just as much need today to know what's going on in the world now as there was fourty years ago. But most media is awash in a crapflood of advertisements and profit-oriented behavior, which when people see they reflexively numb their senses. Seriously -- hold a normal conversation with someone and in the middle of it toss off a marketing slogan. If they don't strangle you, did you notice they're about half as smart as they were a second ago? They recover, but the momentum in the conversation is now gone. We don't trust traditional media (GenX and GenY) because it's full of crap and irrelevant to our daily lives -- so we blog and we talk to our friends, and they filter stories they find relevant back to us.
I have friends on facebook that post links of personal interest to their feeds so the rest of us can see and comment on it, and this is the foundation of the new media -- peer relationships. Journalism needs to mesh with this, and the journalists themselves need to get out there and put their reputation on the line in a public and accessible way. I want to 'friend' journalists I like and trust on facebook and then see their stories -- separate from these stupid constricting media websites and the constant crap-flood of advertisements that go with them.
Okay, but how do the journalists get paid? I mean, it costs them time to do the job, right? I don't have all the answers there, because it's not my industry, but I know that having a hundred friends that listen to me about anything related to computers is worth something. And a lot of people here on slashdot are in the same boat.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
I bet Rock Mountain Bank just gave away their info and someone robbed them, case closed.
There are a handful of leader-types.
- The conservative (like this guy). He understands his company's strengths only as a function of what it currently is. He can fortify the company's business in good times.
- The forward-thinker (like *gack* Larry Ellison). He understands not only his own company's strengths in regard to what it is, but also in regards to the changing environment. He can take action to position the company well for the future.
- The visionary (like Steve Jobs or Sergey Brin). He understands both his company and the changing environment and can perceive the changes within the changing environment. He is able to not only strengthen the core competences of his company but drive new business and create new markets.
- The idiot (like Woz (sorry)). They grab on to anything that looks like a good idea and drive it forward without care for business, competition, longevity.
What happens is that every once in a while the idiot will strike it big (Jeff Bezos). Most of the time, these guys go out of business. On the other hand, the conservative leaders will do what they can and most of the time it pays off. Markets really don't change very much, and there will always be winners and losers. All they need to do is try to stay on the winning side as much as possible.
But RMN stuck to what it knew and failed. This is what happens in business. But to look back now and to analyze the failure is a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking. Of course it's easy to see all the trends after they've passed. It's easy to see where mistakes were made and how easily it probably could have been to avoid them. But at the time it would have been much more difficult to make the same judgment call.
It was a failure of management to fail to adapt to the changing business environment, but not every leader is going to be a forward thinker and even fewer will be visionaries. You can academically analyze these business cases from now to eternity, but unless you're actually in the leadership chair at the moment of crisis, you'll never know whether you would make the right choice.
the community of people who read the paper were the organizations true main asset
Bingo. The same is true of many types of businesses including big blogs and sites like Slashdot. Marketers usually understand this, but it's an easy point to miss.
This game will waste your life. Don't clicky!
The main value in newspapers previously was their distribution network. They had a system in place to distribute information. Radio, TV, and the internet all compete with them for information systems. Each one added more competition, lower latency, and broader reach. In short they provided better value. A daily delivery of dead tree is a non-optimal delivery system. It is getting boring hearing about newspapers and TV news dieing. Why care? The replacement is here. It is better, faster, cheaper. It is the internet.
...well, you know. Hey, I'm a big fan of print newspapers. In fact, when I subscribed to the Wall Street Journal Online, they included a handy print copy for me 6 days of the week. Now, of course the print copy is always a day behind what I've already read online. However, just the other day I sold a few items on eBay, and without my print copy handy, I likely would have had to dole out some serious cheddar on bubble-wrap. True story.
We're in a unique part of history where there is a huge upheaval in technology - mostly centered around computing. Newspapers are biting the dust, film cameras are biting the dust - digital cameras are basically computers with lenses; new weapons are being developed and I'm sure in my lifetime, guns that use gun powder and bullets will not be used by modern militaries; music playing and purchases is changing dramatically; and there's more. Sure, many of those old technologies will probably stay around, but they won't be mainstream: they'll be something that hobbiests use. There will be a few folks who still use film cameras and there will be a few niche camera producers that will still make the camera, film and supplies. There will still be gun makers for those that still or have to keep using gun powder - or the government will outlaw the new weapons for civilian use. And there may be some traditional newspapers around here and there. But the thing is, things are changing at a fast pace now and eventually will slow down. If you look at progress throughout history there are times where their are huge leaps and changes and then things fo back to a baseline of progress. Some past examples: the Industrial Revolution and the Renaissance,
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
can someone please mod Rupert's Astroturfing down, it's making me nauseous
After the Rocky Mountain News merged operations (printing, delivery, offices) with the rival Denver Post, the Rocky got the Saturday edition and the Post the Sunday edition. Saturday is the big car-ad day, while Sunday is houses and department stores. Car ads migrated to web sites more easily and dropped faster. The real estate cabal still limits how much information the general public can find about houses on the web.
The AJC is trying their best here in Atlanta to prove the point, that they are out of touch with their readers.
Case in point, earlier in the year they were looking for a "conservative" writer and asked for opinions. Needless to say they struck down most of the suggestions. All the while claiming they wanted to present all views they were damn sure well not going to allow certain people to express them.
The best summary of just how bad the AJC was, their former editor of the opinion page moved to Washington DC to report directly on how such an amazing election and person will affect Georgia, I kid you not.
and these people wonder why those in the suburbs rarely subscribe.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I read TFA (more specifically the speech transcript) and I don't believe that the Rocky Mountain News would have been much better off even if they did everything right. There aren't any city-specific news web sites out there that are making anything like the kind of money that newspapers made in their heyday. Like the buggy whips, the telegraph industry, and home coal delivery the business is gone and the new industry that is replacing it is too far removed for a transition to be possible.
From a printing standpoint - they had a newspaper that was printed and folded in a book format - so you could grab a copy, open and read like a book without having to pull sections out etc. Something which I thought was unique at the time (compared to other newspapers in the area). Personally I had purchased more copies of the Rocky Mountain News due to this factor alone... which made reading the paper experience a little more convenient.
Dead-tree newspapers are dying for one simple reason: All the news anyone could ever want is available for free on the internet. Just a Google search away. The whole idea that a newspaper can survive by catering to the "community" (either in real-life or online) is stupid. It's something to make the investors/owners feel better as their doom inevitably approaches.
I've thought about it a lot, and I don't think there is any workable "defense" against free news sites. The newspapers are all going to die, or at the very least, shrink radically. Even if they start really producing some great, exclusive content, it isn't going to help for long, and it isn't going to help them regain their fortunes.
The news world has changed.
I prefer to get news from edited sources. There might be some fact checking then, less bias, and better writing in most cases. Blogging tends to be more like newspaper columns where assume a certain bias and literary style in whom you chode to read.
This is the most succinct description of the problem that I have read.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Marketing 101:
Define your company based on the needs of your customers that you are satisfying, not on what you do.
Sorry, this is the first day of first year marketing. If you don't know this, you deserve to go out of business.
Caution: Do not eat the Rocky Mountain Oysters.
(Hint: They're not shellfish.)
MmmmooooOooo!
They big argument against newspapers on Slashdot is this perception that they are low tech. I know personally the reason I stopped reading a daily paper had nothing to do with the internet. I stopped years before the internet got relevant for a few good reasons. First was far too many ads. In a major city like LA or New York you got a daily paper the size of a small phone book for a handful of stories you actually wanted to read with the bulk of it being ads. The Sunday papers were even worse. Also newspapers were where you went to get the whole story and not the fluff you tended to get through television. That changed and the quality of stories and reporting dropped like a rock. I saw it happen early on with my hometown paper, I come from a very small town. Back in the day they covered national news stories but by the end they were more like a high school paper. I found gradually with the newspapers I was reading the relevant stories got rarer and rarer and the quality of the information wasn't as good as I was getting on the evening news. I often found there were no more than two or three stories that interested me and some times there were none. The internet was the death blow for the papers but they were weakened before the internet came along. The decline was apparent back in the 80s and revenues have been falling for 20 years or more. The reasons for the decline are hard to put a finger on because blaming even TV doesn't make much sense because TV news was decades old when the newspapers started their fall from grace. In the end it may be more the newspaper's fault than technology itself. Focusing more on ad revenue and not on news itself weakened them and made them open for failure. Once they were the only source of news, then they were still the best source of news and finally the became a poor source of news. Their final death blow was easily available news and the need for news on demand but those things weren't the root cause of the newspaper's fall from grace. Most people on the site probably don't remember a time when newspapers were your primary source of news. Most thing things are better now but the truth is the quality of news is appalling. Things have gotten so bad most consider blogs a source of news, they don't in any way report news they are purely predigested information and mostly opinion and not news. There are no standards for blogs. Even web sites like CNN are shockingly bad. It's hard to find an article without typos. In an age of spell checkers they actually post most stories with typos. That's beyond embarassing. In the old news days a single miss-spelled word or mistake in a story was a black mark for an editor. On line news is largely free of editorial oversight. The death of newspapers shouldn't be celibrated but mourned. TV news has become news bunnies and male models and on-line news is so chaotic that there's no way to separate fact from fiction. The death of newspapers is in some ways the death of news.
Is this problem with traditional newspaper a US-only phenomenon? I heard yesterday of a recent study of newspapers in Canada which actually showed growth in their industry. What do others see in their country?
In the USA you have three major players and a who lot of little guys all fighting over the same pie. The big guy's strategy is to buy up the little guys and the little guys just duke it out until there is one per area. Then they start all over as the number of jobs in the service are shrinks and they need to expand. Eventually there will only be two huge printers specializing in one-to-one mailings and labels and a whole lot of little mom-and-pop copy shops running presentations, reports, and books. At the end there will be nothing and the end is near, brother.
That is true for both the time your paying for and the money you are asked to pay.
A blog dashed off in a few minutes (or hours), will never compare to the in-depth reporting that most newspapers still actually deliver. For that I'm willing to pay (and do).
If newspapers ever died, they would drag all the other mediums that have news down with it... most tv/cable/radio/internet copy I've ever seen is lifted from an old dead tree newspaper.
Not to mention - some of us LIKE real news. You know, stuff that isn't about sports, or celebrities, or the horoscope, or the comics, or crap like that. The only hard news you get out of blog posts are just glorified wire reports - sure I can find out about big events like an earthquake, but where am I going to find out about corruption in China? Or inflation in Zimbabwe? Stuff that is ongoing, slow, and less sexy - that require coverage over years. Cable news gave up stories like that a long time ago - all that's left for that in the US is PBS, NPR, and the big print (NY Times, WSJ, etc).
Interestingly - I have noticed that some print media is doing well (at least round me), the hyper-local weeklies that cover individual towns and villages in my area (as opposed to the area at large). Another area completely un-served by the web.
RMN and DP had issues years ago, so what happened is that they combined the printing/marketing/ads together. It allowed the news portion to compete while it supposedly lowered their costs (obviously not).
You will see that they are owned by 2 different companies:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Denver_Post
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocky_Mountain_News
RMN died because DP outlasted them. DP is in serious trouble as well. Neither of them had a clue about how to make money except on print.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I used to read the paper every day. I had a ritual: Comics first followed by editorials, national/world news and then local news.
Then I began reading my comics online. You can get all of the major newspaper comics for free online via comics.com or gocomics.com. Then, of course, there are tons of great Web Comics authors that don't appear in the papers. I'm definitely reading more comics now than I ever did during my paper reading days.
For editorials/opinions, nowadays, I end up going to blogs. By reading various blogs, I can get a wide range of opinions on a subject. Heck, even social networking sites like Twitter are good for this. Though the opinions might be only 140 characters long (or might be a link to a longer opinion), I get opinions from many more people than just my local newspaper's staff.
For national/world news and local news I browse Google News and some local blogs. Again, I get many more stories than my local paper would usually print.
In the end, the only thing I really keep my subscription for is the Sunday ads/coupons. I know I can get the ads online, but it winds up being easier to get them in one easy to flip through pile. And electronic coupons exist, but haven't overtaken newspaper coupons just yet.
We get our paper on Thursday through Sunday only because the paper gave us Thursdays and Fridays free. Otherwise, we'd be down to weekends only. (Sundays only didn't save that much money.) However, if we could buy a "weekly ads and coupons only" packet instead of having our paper subscription, we definitely would!
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
We're new at this socialism thing, man. But we're trying to get up to speed as fast as we can by the looks of things.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Take any daily paper, from any city in the U.S. and measure how many column inches are actual news articles.... now subtract the number of inches that are from A.P. or direct pulls/quotes from other news papers, blogs or web sites, leaving only the news actually written reporters employed at that paper. Is that number greater then zero? If not - enough said, but if it IS some real content, do the same thing from the same newspaper, but from an edition from 10 years ago....then 10 years prior to that...notice a trend?
"There was little effort to figure out how to better enable a community, or any recognition that the community of people who read the paper were the organizations true main asset...."
Let me make this abundantly clear: The above statement is 100% bullshit. My local paper, the Ann Arbor News, also went tits up. Over the last two years, the paper had opened comments sections on the majority of its stories to enable the aforementioned pipe dream. End result? The trolls moved in and feasted like rats in a corn silo, the nut jobs flooded the forums with "facts" on every story from free republic and the knock offs, and the signal to noise ratio plummeted. Now the paper has relaunched as annarbor.com, and the solution to the above has become: censor comments, and allow the newspaper staff to wade right into the thick of the mud. Fantastic.
When I see what has happened to old media sites that get into "Web 2.0" I feel like a WW1 vet being told by a fresh out of west point grad that "trench warfare 2.0 will revolutionize war as we know it!"
I don't really *want* to engage with the community when I go hunting for local "news", I don't *want* to hear from the friend of the victims brother-in-law who got arrested for B&E two blocks from my house. And most of all I don't want the most most useless section of the newspaper (Op-ed) to become the foundation of our "new media." Report, and leave me to use my gray matter to formulate my own opinions. If I'm at the site, the I'm there because I want local news. Period. Well researched, well reported, well digested, local news. It doesn't exist on TV anymore, i don't think it will ever exist on the web.
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
the very concept of "the news" (as opposed to the olds?) is philosophically a liberal phenomenon
if liberalism is change and conservatism is stasis, you can make the easy deduction that a system in stasis generates no news: nothing changes, so there is nothing to communicate or talk about anything that is "new"
so indeed, the entirety of news generation is entirely the realm of liberalism. even fox news, through the simple act of giving voice to something changing out there in the world, is in the service of liberalism. no matter what the propagandistic slant, merely giving attention to some process of change makes people think about the subject matter, and therefore at least begin the cognitive process of acquiescence to and understanding of change that is necessary, even if they don't like the change
in fact, the most socially conservative groups in this world are distinguished by a conscious effort to protect themselves from "the news": the amish, hasidic groups, funamentalist religious cults in a compound out in the woods... they all wall themselves out from the world, the larger society that is undergoing the healthy, liberalizing processes of change
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Running your business like it's 30 years ago is not a Legacy Issue. It's just plain stupidity, you'll find it in plenty of businesses, and the business doesn't have to be 30 years old to have someone at the helm who wants to run it that way.
A legacy issue is having to support customers (or vendors) who insist doing things the same way they did 30 years ago. The reason this news paper failed was they they were the "Legacy Issue" to their customers; hence they were replaced.
FreeBSD.org - The power to serve
Blogs are all about the comments. Yes, it may start with a wire feed. But soon after, you'll get a post from someone who is much closer to the situation than the original poster, who can share real insight on the topic. Then someone else with familiarity comes and corrects a piece that the knowledgeable commenter got wrong. As the comments on a well-read blog build, the real story emerges. THAT is real news - input from dozens of intimate sources, aggregated into a whole. Figuring out what is really happening takes effort - but a good blog can do the work that a single reporter would take months to do in just a few hours.
For example, it was reported a couple of days ago that the public option was defeated in the finance committee. Major news sources pushed it as a real story, when the truth was it was known by insiders that the public option was never going to come out of Finance for weeks or months. There are 4 other committees in the senate that have passed bills with the public option in it. Bloggers on sites like Dailykos can give you all the inside baseball of what is happening with health care reform, far better than any of the main stream media.
I find it amusing that you misspelled celebrated as "celibrated" right after ripping on CNN for their typos. If you are an editor type, I expect you to give yourself some lashings for that...
The demise of the print newspaper has a few causes.
1. We live in a 24/7 news cycle, with 24 hour news on tv
2. By the time a newspaper is printed & delivered, the "news" isn't new anymore.
Frankly, the day-to-day machinations of government, war, and business are largely irrelevant to most people. Do I really care what congress said about the President's health care proposal today? No, it's not as if I'm going to write a letter to my congressman or to the White House everyday to give them a piece of my mind.
What really matters is the trend -- what's going on with this story in general. Who is for it, who is against it, the arguments for, the arguments against, whether or not one side is full of BS over time is what really matters. I want to know what is happening with the story and TV news' focus on daily press conferences and across-the-aisle battles through press releases are just a distraction from the real story.
I sit through cable news loops whenever I'm at the airport and it's just little sound-bytes of this and that -- I have no idea what the story is by the time CNN moves on. Some guy comes on and says something. Another guy comes on and refutes. I have no idea of who is credible -- the written word has the luxury of time and long attention spans to pull the thread and illustrate whether this guy's point is at all reasonable. TV just doesn't.
TV news is just a distraction.
Newspapers died because they gave away their content online. You can read a reasonable-length, non-long-form online with as much ease as with the print edition. When you give it away for free, people don't renew their print subscriptions. It has nothing to do with bias or some 24-hour news cycle mumbo-jumbo.
They had already merged business operations and sharing of weekend publishing duties. The only thing left in competition was the news and printing operations so in a downward spiraling industry it was both logical and inevitable for them to "combine" those too. They were in bed together, so it not as much a matter of DP outlasting RMN, it was inevitable for one to be closed at some point due to declining readership. In 99% of the rest of the country competition had already been eliminated.
The local newapaper here mostly consists of AP stories, which are several days behind the internet. The comics page often repeats the same comic over several days, or even in the same day.
They also use intresting hyphenation schemes. I dislike hyphenation, but this paper has frequently hyphenated the word "the".
Then, when go get to the end of a column, you get a "continued on page B14", when there are only 6 pages in the B section. If you manage to find the continuation, it's often only a couple of lines.
Also, they find some articles so intresting that they'll put them in several times, just changing the title in each repeat.
This paper is "updating" everything, so the paper is about 1/4 the size it used to be, for a increase in price.
And they don't understand why they have lost so many subscribers.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
The problem is paying for reporting. "News is what someone doesn't want you to know. All else is publicity". Free news has destroyed newspapers, but hasn't created a new source of revenue to pay for reporting.
If you don't pay reporters, all you get is PR, punditry, and dreck, plus an occasional video of a disaster. Unfortunately, this creates the illusion of news coverage. Look at the top news stories on Google News right now:
Only one of those stories comes from actual reporting, as opposed to publicity.
That's the problem.
They big argument against newspapers on Slashdot is this perception that they are low tech. I know personally the reason I stopped reading a daily paper had nothing to do with the internet. I stopped years before the internet got relevant for a few good reasons. First was far too many ads. In a major city like LA or New York you got a daily paper the size of a small phone book for a handful of stories you actually wanted to read with the bulk of it being ads. The Sunday papers were even worse. Also newspapers were where you went to get the whole story and not the fluff you tended to get through television. That changed and the quality of stories and reporting dropped like a rock. I saw it happen early on with my hometown paper, I come from a very small town. Back in the day they covered national news stories but by the end they were more like a high school paper. I found gradually with the newspapers I was reading the relevant stories got rarer and rarer and the quality of the information wasn't as good as I was getting on the evening news. I often found there were no more than two or three stories that interested me and some times there were none. The internet was the death blow for the papers but they were weakened before the internet came along. The decline was apparent back in the 80s and revenues have been falling for 20 years or more. The reasons for the decline are hard to put a finger on because blaming even TV doesn't make much sense because TV news was decades old when the newspapers started their fall from grace. In the end it may be more the newspaper's fault than technology itself. Focusing more on ad revenue and not on news itself weakened them and made them open for failure. Once they were the only source of news, then they were still the best source of news and finally the became a poor source of news. Their final death blow was easily available news and the need for news on demand but those things weren't the root cause of the newspaper's fall from grace. Most people on the site probably don't remember a time when newspapers were your primary source of news. Most thing things are better now but the truth is the quality of news is appalling. Things have gotten so bad most consider blogs a source of news, they don't in any way report news they are purely predigested information and mostly opinion and not news. There are no standards for blogs. Even web sites like CNN are shockingly bad. It's hard to find an article without typos. In an age of spell checkers they actually post most stories with typos. That's beyond embarassing. In the old news days a single miss-spelled word or mistake in a story was a black mark for an editor. On line news is largely free of editorial oversight. The death of newspapers shouldn't be celibrated but mourned. TV news has become news bunnies and male models and on-line news is so chaotic that there's no way to separate fact from fiction. The death of newspapers is in some ways the death of news.
Amen brother.
There is one newspaper that has managed to buck the trend by keeping the ads unobtrusive, concentrating on quality journalism, and keeping writing standards high. It can be heavy reading if you're not used to it since the articles are longer than your average newspaper piece, but they are detailed enough to be concise and informative. It is augmented by a witty application of cartoons and illustrations that help to get the point across. It is published weekly, and there is an actual benefit to reading it since the focus is on analysis of what happened instead of making a futile attempt to beat the internet to the punch of informing you about what happened. It is also available online for free, but the sheer quality of its work is such that they can afford to charge a bit more for online ads. This paper is continuing to grow.
It's called The Economist.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
The best he can do in hindsight is to recommend that local and regional newspapers model their business model after the New York Times. The New York Times can't make the New York Times' business model work, and he thinks his newspaper could have?
The only way for these second and third tier newspapers to be successful is to recognize that the objective of a company is not to be prestigious, not to be respected, not even necessarily to be large, but rather to make a profit.
Second and third tier newspapers that are unable to make the transition to serving a niche markets will not survive. Print is a niche market. You can be profitable there, but when your organization has as much overhead as it did 5 years ago, you will not be profitable.
And second and third tier newspapers that are unable to target a broad range of niche markets will not approach the revenue they had under the old model.
Republicans at the time were not a conservative party so you've made something of a disingenuous argument, given the turmoil of both parties at the time. Both parties come from the same roots, but at the time of the Civil War abolitionist Democrats split off and joined the Republican party. At the same time, the remaining members of the Democratic party in the North split into two factions, those who backed the war (and voted for Lincoln) and the Copperheads, who were strong State's rights supporters. Neither was a strong supporter of abolition of slavery, and in the case of the Copperhead leadership actively opposed it. At this time, the Republicans were a liberal party and both had similar economic policies (free market) and supported the common man over wealthy, moneyed interests. It was after the Civil War's resolution that the parties began to establish their current identities, though it wasn't until the Great Depression that the modern Democratic party established an economic policy that is at least nominally different than their Republican counterparts.
So you are absolutely correct, but as with many things in history and politics, it is more complicated than a surface reading shows. Especially when a large portion of one political party changes allegiance to another political party over a hot button issue. It makes things like the raising of Gay Marriage and Abortion at every election have some political context, hoping to lure people away from their party to join the other. It might even work... if the parties weren't so similar. Today's media is a (willing?) pawn in this scheme, reporting on what is clearly a political tool without calling the politicians (of either party) on it.
You know, looking back it is staggering to see just how far all of our political parties have fallen...
Sounds like someone there should have read "Who Moved My Cheese?" - an all time classic book.
Newspapers have never been the timeliest info delivery system since the invention of radio.
THAT said, the electronic media have a dismal reputation for depth.
Were I the owner of a newspaper, I would try for substance over flash. Take the stuff that was news last week, last month, last year. Do a followup. Figure out it's impact. Analyze the causes.
Many of these articles would have a useful lifespan far longer than the day or two that present "news" does. That amortizes the journalists' salaries over more time.
To make money:
* You sell ads that appear beside your articles.
* An article appears only as an abstract for non-subscribers initially. A tag line on it says when it will become free access.
* Subscriptions fees allow the following:
1. An ad free version.
2. Permanent links. (You can search for an article at any time, but the permanent link allows you to cite the article in a report or paper.)
3. Immediate access to articles as soon as they are published. "Hey did you read that article in the Tattler on nanofiber fabrication? Oh, that's right, you're not a subscriber. Look for it two weeks. Worth your time. Meanwhile here's a tip: Don't buy Almalgamated Nano."
4. Customizable mashups -- In the daily list of headlines, you tag them as "Important, Interesting, Significant, Yawnable" etc. When their system learns your preferences, the important stuff is at the top.
At the international level there may be only a dozen articles a day. But they may run several thousand words.
As an example: Some years ago Yugoslavia was in the news with all kinds of beastial things being done by the Slavs. The news was fairly one sided. I caught an episode of Ideas on CBC that went into the history of the region. I realized that it wasn't quite as simple as I thought.
The TV covers news of Katrina. The newspaper should cover what changes have been made to prevent the next one.
The TV covers the latest shuttle launch for the last refurbishment mission to the hubble. The newspaper gives the history of the Hubble, why it was designed to be human serviceable, where it fits into the big picture, how much that cost us, and what changes in astronomy have come about because of it.
Third Career: Tree Farmer Second Career: Computer Geek First Career: Teacher, Outdoor Instructor, Photographer.
As a small tree farmer marketing locally has always been a problem.
In 2008 I advertised for 5 weeks in the three closest weeklies. I received 1 phone call. $300 per lead.
In 2009 I kept a bunch of ads running on two Kijiji sites. I paid the $13/week to keep one ad as a top ad.
Net result 4-6 calls per week generating $20,000 in sales for the season.
The general model of dead tree advertising is also dead. The ad has to be targeted. There is no point in advertising trees on the sports page. Google adwords makes sense.
With the internet advertising and news will be separate. If you want a car, you go to a car site. If you want a washing machine, you go to an appliance site.
There *may* be a demand for advertising for marketing -- building brand awareness, building image. There may also be a demand for advertising for impulse buying.
But I think the conventional role of full page spread ads in the newspaper is going fast.
Third Career: Tree Farmer Second Career: Computer Geek First Career: Teacher, Outdoor Instructor, Photographer.
The content of the video seems interesting, but it is all undone by the speaker's stuttering, messing up of words and rattling of his papers. The monotone voice doesn't help either.
It's technology, stupid. How hard can it be to do a couple of takes and use the good ones?
The Houston Chronicle will no doubt go under soon.
They've raised their prices from 50 cents to 1 dollar under the ruse that they cost more to deliver, due to gas prices.
Then they cut the paper carriers paychecks, (the delivery people who actually are keeping them afloat), by about one third, take away their vehicle maintenance reimbursements, and make them roll papers in rat infested pole barns with the only bathroom being "the tree around back".
And I'll swear on a mile high stack of bibles that I am telling the truth.
I've been saying it for a while; It's the content stupid! Newspapers seem to universally suck. It's not that it's on a paper, it's that they suck. That's why fewer people buy them. I'm glad someone within the industry has been able to figure that out - if a bit too late.
http://www.unfocus.com/