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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."
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
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.
Honestly, I disagree with most of these reasons.
Most of the news on a 24 hour news cycle is old, too. The same stories get endlessly rehashed. Despite the fact that there's more frequent updates and coverage, there's usually not even enough NEWS to fill a 24 hour news cycle. Watch any cable news network for more than an hour and you're liable to hear the same stuff over and over again.
The point about liberal slants may be true for the editorial sections of a few specific, national newspapers, but most small-town newspapers - the ones that are really suffering - are and have always been fairly conservative, particularly in more rural and conservative areas. Admittedly, this may not be the case with the Rocky Mountain News (I'm not familiar enough with it specifically to comment). But for most local newspapers, the people doing the reporting are just that: local, not so-called "mainstream media elite" from the big city, or what-have-you.
The reason newspapers are failing is because advertising revenue has fallen in print media, while the price of advertising online is simply too low to sustain the sort of large organizations traditional newspapers have required. That's it. It's not people defecting from dying traditional media to seek the new golden horizon of genius online reporting or sad dinosaurs who can't keep up with the new times, it is a business issue and little else. It's also the fact that the internet is inherently an international medium, and people want national and international news online. And there's simply no way the Bupkisville Free Chronicler can compete with the NY Times, WaPo, and The Times of London on that front.
I skimmed it. In other words ignore the end users of your product at your peril. If you think you know better than the end user your usually wrong. Sure there are tons of examples of dumb end users. But in the end if you do not do what a majority of your end users want they will find/invent something that does. What are they asking for now vs 10 years ago? If you do not keep re-evaluating what you are selling you usually end up selling something people no longer want. Do people still want a pet rock? Probably a small few do. But you do not want a factory cranking out 300k a month to satisfy a demand that is not there.
With newspapers people want more 'local' stories. Less AP/Reuters shoveled at us. So sites like drudge/fark/slashdot and so on took over that market.
We wanted a place to list our junk for sale and do it cheap. Instead eBay and Craigslist took the market away from them at low costs and better interfaces.
We wanted news to show up instantly as it happened. So sites put up RSS feeds to shove them at us faster. Instead with newspapers you find out tomorrow.
We wanted a way to read just our comics instead of 2 pages we ignored. So we went to the individual comic sites and just read them.
They forgot about the 'why' the people who pay their bills were around. While advertisers probably paid a large portion of the bills. If there is no audience the advertisers will go elsewhere.
The internet dismantled ever reason a person would want a paper piece by piece. Papers let the genie out of the bottle and there is no way to put him back in.
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.
Actually, I'd argue just the opposite. The success of Fox News from a large number of viewers who watch nothing else speaks more to the fact that people will go out of their way and become loyal consumers of "news" that has a distinct slant that confirms the viewers' already conceived ideals. People like news that doesn't give them facts so much as comfortable facts. People like Websites where they can talk to people who don't challenge their ideas and don't make them put in any effort to determine the truth.
Fox News is the epitome of this and is far more focuses on entertainment than journalistic integrity. Heck, they went to court and argued they have no legal obligation to not fire people for refusing to lie on TV and for refusing to kill a story about a health danger to the public. They're legally right too, they have no obligation not to lie to their viewers, but any organization that makes that argument in court is not "news" any more than a Frootloops commercial is. That's not to say some programs on the network don't have some integrity, of course, but the corporation does not.
At one time I thought the internet might open up the world. People would be able to hear views from around the world and directly communicate with those people inexpensively. People could thus gain a wider perspective and understanding. In truth, human nature is such that it has allowed us to self segregate more. People don't even have to talk to so diverse a range of people as live in their neighborhood because they can find an online forum that fits exactly with their beliefs and preconceived ideas and spend all their time talking to people without the discomfort of disagreement. It's much easier to complain about one's favorite villainized segment of our society when one does not actually have to hear them and can just attack strawman arguments one poses on their behalf. There are forums for people who thing the earth is flat or is literally 6000 years old and the people there can safely discuss their nonsense knowing the moderators will ban and remove posts from anyone who challenges it with facts or controversy. People don't want unbiased opinion and Fox is another example of the consumer getting what they want and not what they might need.
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.
So why do these edited sources keep making factual mistakes, write misleading stories, bury stories that do not suit their political line etc?
Read Reuters for neutral factual coverage and blogs for opinion and analysis. That said I do read a few newspapers and the BBC online.
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.
That's a myth concocted by the right to explain why they don't win every election even though they claim they represent a majority of Americans.
Yep. It's a self-serving myth that's been pretty thoroughly debunked.
(And, correspondingly, the far left claims that the news has a significant conservative bias. Both are very self-serving myths for the fringe, since they justifies their telling people to ignore the news, and only listen to their carefully shaped and trimmed news, without those inconvenient facts that might disturb the ideology.)
In fact, the actual data shows that newspapers almost always turn out to be very well matched in political slant to their readers. (As should be obvious, since if they weren't, they'd lose readers even faster than they now do.)
Many of the large newspapers that people point to in the US stem from big cities, which have multiple newspapers-- for the most part, these newspapers split the political spectrum, with one newspaper favored by the more conservative readers, and the other favored by the more liberal (e.g., the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald).
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
And a piece of newsprint will never have links embedded in it to get more background on the subject, doesn't have tabs so you can be checking local, regional, and worldwide news with a click, doesn't have video of the event, doesn't let me whip over to Wikipedia to get a quick introduction to topics I'm not up to date on, doesn't let me compare prices between Home Depot/Lowes/Ace Hardware vs. ordering it from Amazon, etc. All while drinking my morning beverage and trying to keep the cream cheese off the keyboard.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine