Slashdot Mirror
Free News Unsustainable, Says Warren Buffett
Koreantoast writes "Warren Buffett, whose Berkshire Hathaway recently purchased 63 newspapers and plans to purchase more over the next few years, noted during an interview that the current free content model is unsustainable and will likely continue pushing toward more electronic subscription models. This coincides with moves by other newspaper companies like Gannett and the New York Times, which are also erecting paywall systems. Buffett notes that newspapers focusing on local content will have a unique product, which would succeed even if they lose subscribers, because their services are irreplaceable. Is this the beginning of the end of 'free content' for local news?"
Maybe, but if it's good local news (well researched and useful to me), I'm willing to pay reasonably for it.
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
Why would anyone pay to be lied to
So much of news is propaganda for TEAM BLUE, TEAM RED, CORPORATE GIANT, or SPECIAL INTEREST...
You know what, nevermind. Paywall all that shit.
...to be paywalled.
I am not willing to pay for news. I am also not willing to look at or click on advertising to subsidize the news. I am theoretically willing to pay for long-form journalism, although in practice I don't. I use Readability to share articles with friends. I would never subscribed to a newspaper. I am educated (multiple university degrees; one in science, one in humanities, one in social science) and politically engaged.
I know I'm the face of the problem, and I don't care.
I'd wager a lot of the price of media companies now reflects their control, not their profitability. Sure, making money by selling news is great, but the power to set society's agenda, and frame events for the history books, is infinitely more valuable.
If you think of that as the raison d' etre of the big media companies, it becomes obvious why they offer "news" free on the internet. Also, that Buffet will pay a premium for these shares...
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
.. When real life becomes indistinguishable from The Onion. (Seriously, replace "Warren Buffet" with "Area Media Mogul")
Guy buys a lot of newspapers and now is discovering that he can't make money with them?
He doesn't think they have a viable business model?
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
But it is the beginning of the end for Warren Buffet. He won't be around in 10 years. And like Steve Jobs says "Death is nature's greatest invention" so good riddance to the old geezer.
I'd venture to differentiate between online news and offline news. A paper magazine, sure, I'd pay for it more than the paper it's written on if I consider it a collectible. But online... I'm more interested in the hard data itself rather than the way it's written, and with all the portals publishing user-generated content (and some of those are REALLY good), I am not afraid of lacking any news sources any time soon.
So what if I won't get informed about Justin Bieber's latest deeds right now? Some blog would republish the news in some way or another, if it's important enough, and Google's your friend. And of course, there's always Slashdot. As a matter of fact, I'm regularly visiting just Slashdot, Wikipedia, Wimp, Failblog and a couple local news sites (which are both awesome). Everything else can go to hell, as far as I'm concerned, and if any of the above go to hell themselves, well, I'll look for the next best thing.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
...which is funded by the British licence fee. As long as the current BBC-hating government don't cripple the corporation beyond repair.
Local news coverage is abysmal in most American towns. Subscription support would at least allow them to hire a handful of professional reporters, and might even breathe life back into the field of journalism. God knows we need better journalists at all levels. Rebooting the minor leagues might eventually benefit us by trickling up to the national level too -- but let's not get ahead of ourselves. I would be ecstatic if Philadelphia had some quality reporting instead of the wasteland of fluffy features and regurgitated national news service stories.
That's why smart people don't watch FOX News. They leave that to the people they want to control.
"Free" is increasingly becoming the new thing; free-to-play models are starting to rise and succeed in video games, free steaming tv shows and other video are becoming increasingly popular, and naturally there are companies that operate in a way someone-like Google does. How many android/iPhone apps are free? And then we see various music services cropping up that allow free streaming music..
Why would the news be different from this trend? It's harder and harder to prevent the dissemination and replication of information
(pirating etc) and companies are finding creative new ways to still make money even in light of that. And the news is subject to the same problem; a paywall is not a big deal if one person has a subscription and can pass the text of the article around elsewhere.
All it takes is for one competitor to shit in the pot and go free or next-to-free to ruin the market for everyone else; I don't see pay-for news being a viable or stable strategy in the long-term.
Anyone else see the irony here?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Buffett's right, of course. No business can survive without making a profit. I am skeptical, however, that local news is going to save the day. Why? Because people are not as interested as they say they are in local news. My local daily paper publishes a weekly section targeting my suburb. I don't see much news in it, but I do see a lot stories about clubs, schools, kids, and churches, I once had the chance to ask the editor why they went with that rather than hard news about town government, politics, etc. The answer: We print the stories that sell newspapers. The local news market is not a hard news market. It's a feel-good gossip market.
When a newspaper shrinks and fires newsroom staff, news production in that market drops and is not replaced by online sources. We are all more ignorant as the result, and it's an ignorance that's spreading.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
When the quality of newspapers has been going down, and the shear quantity of news is going up, I fail to see how newspapers are going to be able to compete.
Compare a guy who is willing to post news to his blog and get the generated ad-revenue to a newspaper, who has a reporter, editor and all the other associated overhead of a newspaper I would say no contest.
If newspapers did good reporting, they may have a shot, but right now I don't see that happening.
What's wrong with Warren Buffett? He's made a lot of money for himself, true, but he's made a lot of money for other people besides. And as for his own wealth, he's in the process of donating it all to charity, to the tune of billions going toward important causes that governments are too broke or shortsighted to fund. He was instrumental in convincing Bill Gates to do the same. If you're going to demonize some successful, wealthy American, I can think of a lot of better targets.
Breakfast served all day!
News is, by definition, anything new or recent. Regardless of how frequently it happens or has happened in the past.
There is no strict mandate that news be interesting.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I find it totally ironic that just as my local newspaper is hitting rock bottom their parent company, Gannett, is erecting a paywall.
For a few years now the editing has been absolutely horrible, with daily stories missing tons of content (e.g. there was a story last month about a political fight in the State legislature, sans any mention of what legislation they were actually fighting over, and more recently I found an article about an issue involving the police department that gave absolutely no background on the event), an alarming increase in the number of grammatical and spelling mistakes, etc. Even the paper's calendar of local events pales in comparison to the listings on Craigslist, to the point that I haven't used the paper's calendar feature in two years now.
This is ass-backwards marketing.
Shouldn't that be "Free and Accurate News Unsustainable"?
The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny - Aesop
This just in: having someone collect facts, check them, and then present them takes time and money. Free news was never sustainable, it's just that until recently it wasn't attainable. News will always have a price, be it paying for your paper or having someone else pay for it by inserting ads. Unfortunately advertisers are discovering that online advertising doesn't work, so we'll probably have to settle on the former.
The vast majority of "news" is reprocessed news hey pulled off the news wire. If the newspapers do investigative reporting and generate unique content that people actually want to see they won't have a problem. If they have interesting or knowledgable people that contribute or comment on the news they can probably build a business model on that. If all they're doing is reading internet news and then republishing it as their own then that isn't going to work.
Is free news really not sustainable? I don't know if even that is true. Companies especially local businesses are DESPERATE for relevant advertising options. Absolutely desperate. Radio, newspapers, park benches... anything. And that has always been a big part of newspaper revenue. When newspapers started they were little more then glorified classified ads. Maybe one or two pages of local news followed by forty pages of classifieds.
And yet crag's list exists. Why is that? How could Crag's list have a viable business in cities with major newspapers? Because they offered a better classified ad. And that sort of thing is evident throughout the newspaper business. They're generally bad at the internet. Even their ipad apps are bad. Seen the new york times app? Horrible. When most people bring up a news paper app they want it to be the actual newspaper and not what is basically a webpage configured roughly into the shape of a newspaper. It would be really easy to do this. Hell, you could literally scan the pages vertabim jewelry ads and all into the system. A lot of people would prefer it that way... especially those willing to pay for an online new york times subscription.
Anyway, Buffet just bought 63 news papers across the country. So we'll see how he does but I'm predicting epic failure. This is sort of like the time Bill Gates tried to reform American public schools and found so many useless dicks in the system that he figured it would be more practical to cure Malaria in Africa.
Have fun with the newspapers Warren... at the very least then you can say it was entertaining.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Yeah, free news is unsustainable, right Mr. Buffet!
Oh, you must mean don't buy Gold because gold isn't money too eh Mr. Buffet? (As he secretly uses proxies to sell off ETF's to drop the price so he can buy _physical_ gold for low prices.)
Or maybe Mr. Buffet really means in translation: We need to put the alternative media out of reach of the internet because too many people are connecting the dots and realize how much of a scam our government is and how the political system really works.
(ala Rothchild shenanigans via the Federal Reserve and how all this crisis crap with the Euro is stage one to crash paper currencies so they can introduce a one world government coinage.)
Euro is going to crash. Van dipshit, I mean Rumpy or whatever the guys name is, already has the plans laid out too saying, The Euro Union is doomed because the power wasn't concentrated enough into the fewest hands possible. So we just need to make all of these european governments go away, destroy the citizenry and have absolute dictatorship style government. You know like those Chinese we admire so much.
Only then will the Euro Union succeed!
Go Van shithead and the rest of the Warren's friends he hangs around with at the G20/Bilderberg and other crap they do behind our backs.
Well, it is going to come to an end very shortly, because too many of my friends, as well as myself know the deal with the banks, the loans forced on populaces to pay after the banks gut the countries pensions then claim austerity is required.
This bank crap fostered on the poor Greece people by a setup deal by Goldman Sach's is going to be there undoing. Including Goldman flasifying huge numbers of financial documents to get Greece into the EU to begin with.
If there is any justice in this world, Goldman Sach and its entire workforce that engineered that criminal takedown of Greece will eventually get exactly what is coming to them.
They do that crap here in the USA and there is going to be a gigantic response.
They better have the portable Furnaces setup in mass because the body count is going to be gigantic as the USA military culls the citizenry for the bankers.
and Oh, by the way...Mr. Bernanke and friends who stole 17 trillion of our tax dollars for over seas friends and well to do families.
YOUR DEBT IS NULL AND VOID.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
Companies especially local businesses are DESPERATE for relevant advertising options. Absolutely desperate. Radio, newspapers, park benches... anything.
True to an extent, but if you have a cute local restaurant you're not going to want to put an ad for it right next to a write-up of a recent child murder. Around here, that kind of advertising goes into the weekly papers, along with the live music listings and the coupons for discount spa treatments. None of that stuff is underwriting the actual news reporting.
Breakfast served all day!
Buffet bailed out his local paper first. I worked there. It was "employee" owned in that you could buy stock, but the stock had to stay with the company and usually when the company got rid of people, the executives kept just awarding more and more stock to themselves. They kept paying themselves huge bonuses and talked publicly about record profits, but they maintained the profits by layoffs and pay cuts followed by more layoffs and pay cuts.
The publisher/CEO told me that the thought the internet wouldn't affect the newspaper industry at all. It was the same as radio and TV before it.
He also bragged about how proud he was of the newspaper's legacy of enacting change in the community via propaganda. When Nebraska was being considered for the first legal casinos outside of reservations, Atlantic City and Vegas, the World-Herald ran front page stories daily about how gambling was evil and would immediately destroy any metropolitan area it was in. So the casinos built right across the river in Iowa. Iowa has been rolling in tax revenue since then, while all the money comes from Omaha. The casinos haven't destroyed our city, but we missed out on all the tax revenue thanks to the paper. I also spoke to a reporter whose assignment was literally to slander someone running for city council in Lincoln, Nebraska as much as possible. He owned a sex toy company, which was against the morals of the paper, and they felt it was their duty to bury the guy. Oddly enough, the paper didn't have morals when it came to abusing employees and laying them off.
The company was run exceedingly poorly. Oddly enough, most of the suggestions I made to improve the company were implemented about two years later when the newspaper was somewhat forced to embrace the digital era.
Google News has said they'd share revenue with newspapers who feed them stories. And I specifically frequent news sites that have good writers and good view points. You can run a successful newspaper, though the physical product may eventually die out. It is a shame that Buffet is bailing out poorly run companies, because the same corrupt executives who lined their pockets as they laid everyone off just got rewarded for their behavior so it can continue some more.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Who said anything about it being uninteresting? News is actually very fucking interesting. That's the problem. Only the interesting rare wtf? stuff gets reported on and the shit that is happening everyday eating our society alive don't even get 2 words. Think about it.
They're paid for by politicians, corporations, and other organizations with agenda to push.
Does it matter what Buffet says? For one, Buffet has been wrong about many things in recent years, he's getting old. Second, what he says often serves a purpose. More often than not influencing the market is more important than sharing his true thoughts.
Now maybe the garbage we are subjected to in mainstream media will go away behind these paid subscription walls and independent media sources will gain the spotlight for a time.
Maybe I'm being too optimistic here....
Well, if your classifies page is crap then someone is going to do it better. A lot of the free papers... totally free papers have no news in them at all. They're just ads and classifies... and sometimes real estate stuff.
Every single ad dollar that went into those papers is a dollar the big main paper didn't get. Possibly the big paper could publish both and publish them separately. That way you can fund your unprofitable news charity with real business dollars from the ads.
Whatever... the reality is that there is a lot of money for newspapers to grab and they're not because they're sucking at their jobs. I'm not even talking about news. I'm talking about basic newman concepts like getting some advertisers on the pages. Maybe this means you have to increase the ratio of ads to news? So what... they used to be a lot higher then they are now. Is it the end of the world if it goes back a bit? The only wrong answer is the answer that causes you to go broke.
If people are using business models that are driving them into the poor house then do something differently. Don't just tell me you've changed nothing and it's the big unfair world that changed on you. Welcome to the club. It's changed on everyone. Good and bad. Grow a pair and fix it.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
You are paying by watching ads.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I get all of my news from weekly magazines: The Economist, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books. They actually report on things that are important (that is, things that I consider important), because I am paying them. Free online news exploits my psychological weaknesses to present me with ad impressions, because the advertisers are paying them. I think what Buffet is saying is that there are (at least) two different markets for news: people who want a distraction, and people who want insightful journalism. Free/online news is perfect for the first market, but unsustainable for the second. I'm part of the second market, which is why I subscribe to weekly magazines. I find that articles get better if the writers have a few days to think about the issues, rather than a few seconds.
You want subscription money? You're gonna deliver a product free of ads.
There is no such thing as "free" news. It's supported by advertising. So much advertising that I've taken to getting my news from the sources. If I want sports scores I go to the sports websites. If I want to know about local crimes, I go to the police website. If I want to learn about local politics, there is a website for that.
I do not want a talking head on TV to give me the news because then I literally have to watch a 30 second advertisement for every 1 minute of news. I do not want to read the newspaper because then I have to wonder if what I read was an infomercial, special supplement, advertorial, etc., etc.
At work we're overwhelmed with trade magazines, you know, exciting stuff like "Food Processing", "Solid Bulk Powder Magazine", stuff you don't even ask for but get in the mail. They make all their money from advertisers, they desperately TRY to give their product away free to get alleged readers to base their ad rates on. Almost all of a magazine's money comes from advertisers, not readers. I remember 10 years or so ago I saw PC Mag was getting over 100K per page per issue, and remember it was a weekly with 100's of pages of ads. How much does FTA TV charge for watching their programs? There are lots of ad supported businesses out there that don't need subscription fees, although I'm sure they'd all LIKE subscription fees if they could get them
Free news is not sustainable?
Somebody better tell CBS, ABC, NBC, Fox and CNN soon. They and others have only been doing that for 90 years or so. I wonder how they pay the bills??
Or perhaps Mr. Buffet is not in the right business.
Everybody knows 3 people with my name.
Old rich guy buys up a bunch of struggling newspapers at fire sale prices, claims free news doesn't work.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Maybe this means you have to increase the ratio of ads to news? So what...
Believe it or not, there are laws about that, at least if you plan to sell your product through the U.S. Post.
Breakfast served all day!
Traditional journalism in the US is dead. It's been years since I've read an objective and balanced piece from a mainstream news source in the US. My method of finding out what is going on in the world consists primarily of overloading on info and then applying my own critical thinking to read between the lines. I barely have time to watch/read the "news" now, why would I pay for it?
There are newspapers that are 100 percent ads... so I don't see how there is a law about this... if there is there shouldn't be... what right does anyone have to tell the paper how many ads they can put in it? that's just silly.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Even people who are glued to devices still pick up dead tree editions of our local free papers. You can find out things there that you wouldn't otherwise know--like the fact that the local bowling alley is going to be replaced with a condo.
They're online too, and they're advertiser supported in both cases. What does Buffet think is unsustainable about this? Advertiser supported media isn't going anywhere. Local advertiser supported media with "stringer" reporters are alive and well. I don't look at it much, but there's been a lot of buzz about Patch.com lately. Even if that particular site doesn't survive, I don't see free advertiser supported, or even volunteer (community supported via donations) news going away.
That's right Mr. Buffet, people can just volunteer to throw up a server. Retirees, students, anybody with time on their hands. You know, like college radio or PBS?
Maybe what he means is that you aren't going to make big money with free news. Yeah, that might not be sustainable; but local free news ain't going away, and when you aggregate it from Indonesia to Iowa, you've got world news for next to nothing, with more reporters than the old model could ever dream of hiring, and probably with better objectivity.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Replace Rupert Murdoch with Cmdr Taco.
If an old man says something's possible, he's almost certainly right.
If an old man says something's impossible, he's almost certainly wrong.
"Warren Buffet proof that rick people are not smart", says Lumpy.
Honestly, the old fart has no clue at all. there has been free news for thousands of years. I think the man needs to get a clue as to how the world works and step outside his ivory tower and see how things have been done for the past 200 years.
free news has been king for over 50 years now. I dont pay for my TV news.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Free News Unsustainable, Says Warren Buffett
Billionaires Unsustainable, says Free News...
Almost without exception, newspapers started out being free and entirely ad-supported. Several small papers in my area still are.
Of course, many newspapers moved on to a pay-per-issue model, while still containing all the advertising, if not more. That does not mean it is necessary. Clearly it is not, as the counterexamples demonstrate. It merely means they are greedy. News is a lucrative business.
I see absolutely no reason why news cannot continue to be ad-supported. I stopped reading the New York Times when they erected their paywall, and I don't miss it. (Their paywall is a very shitty implementation, by the way. It is full of errors. It continually asks me to log in to read articles, even after I am logged in. Evidently it is a cookie-based system. I finally just said "screw it, I don't need this". And I don't.)
He knows that, but if he doesn't make it sound like he thinks he can make money from the actual sale of news (rather than from getting people to support whatever government policy one of his other companies will make a profit off of) people will catch on and it will stop working.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
So if you think you're going to get me to pay for it over the internet, you have another think coming.
Want me to pay for news? Print a real newspaper. Deliver it to the box out front of my house.
On the net the screen is too small, the ads are not easily distinguished, and neither are the news articles. I don't want to spend my time clicking/waiting, clicking/waiting, clicking/waiting to scan thru the news - I can scan my eyes across newsprint 5 times as fast as I can across a computer screen. I see stuff in my newspaper I would NEVER have found online. And of course the newspaper has LOCAL news, not the news in NYC or LA or even Atlanta.
TV news broadcasts work on the free news model, already, and it works. Ask CNN, Fox, and MSNBC. Ask your local TV stations if they will be an alternative news source to the paywalled locked local newspapers when Buffet comes buying.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Paying for well-researched, intelligent, original analysis is one thing.
Unfortunately, the example that much of the written media is currently setting is to present articles predominantly of these forms:
- vacant churnalised reproductions of press association reports;
- advertorials disguised as news articles ("Recent research suggests that 3 out of 4 women prefer to receive chocolate for their birthday.... According to recent research commissioned by the Deliciously Chocolatey Chocolate Company Inc, which sells chocolate by the way, women like chocolate for their birthday.")
- misrepresentations of scientific research which is available for anybody to read, albeit possibly behind a paywall, in the original journal in which it was published, or possibly free of charge by e-mailing one of the researchers for a copy of the manuscript.
If it comes to the point of PAYING for this content, how strong is the motivation? What guarantee is there that paying will lead to better journalistic content?
Face it, we need at most less than 10 english language papers.
There is no need to have 63 copies of the same AP articles and random articles about someone 1,000 miles away getting robbed or murdered.
Plus, the news is so CLEARLY propaganda these days, that the people pushing the propaganda better pay for it, or why bother consuming it.
There is a huge glut of news (and every other form of entertainment.) It must fall in price.
It can do so now because instead of selling to 100,000 readers, it's selling to 1,000,000 readers. But it can't make 10x the money. It's not sustainable. The profits are too high and someone else will come in and undercut you.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
> For centuries we have been paying for news by buying
> newspapers - paying for news sites is pretty much the same thing
Fact... your subscription comes *NOWHERE NEAR* the full cost of a newspaper (buying paper, paying reporters, editors, printers, delivery trucks, janitors, secretaries, etc, etc). The vast majority of newspaper revenue has been from advertising. Newspaper ad revenue in the USA has fallen from $49.4 billion in 2005 to $23.9 billion in 2011 http://newsosaur.blogspot.ca/2012/03/newspaper-sales-slid-to-1984-level-in.html The last time it was that low was in 1984. That's *WITHOUT ADJUSTING FOR INFLATION*.
Just like Facebook, subscribers were never the real customers. Advertisers were the real customers, and subscribers' eyeballs were the product that newspapers sold to advertisers. In "the good ole days" newspapers had a virtual monopoly on advertising. They were able to charge extortionate rates for advertising. This allowed them pay for correpondents in Baghdad, London, Moscow, Washington, and at state/provincial legislatures, and at city halls, and still turn a big fat profit. Department stores, auto dealers, and home sellers were effectively paying an "advertising tax" to sell their products.
Where there's a tax, someone will look for tax loopholes ("advertising tax avoidance").
* "Auto Trader Magazine" was established in 1977. See...
http://www.manta.com/c/mmj727f/auto-trader-magazine It had one major advantage over newspaper classifieds... it did not have the overhead of paying for the salaries/accomadations/airline-tickets of reporters all over the planet. It was an advertising "pure play", that had a lot less overhead than a newspaper, and could make a profit while charging much lower ad rates. It ate newspapers' breakfast, lunch, and supper as far as used-car ads were concerned.
* Right now, where I live, there are 2 or 3 free weekly employment "papers" (to use the term loosely) that can be picked up at newspaper boxes around the city. They're 1/2 tabloid size. One reason they can use the free model is that they don't have to pay for reporters, etc
* Back in the mid-1980's, "The Real Estate Weekly" came out in Toronto. It was a free 1/2 tabloid put out by the local MLS (Multiple Listing Service), a co-operative venture of local real estate firms. It had a lot more leeway that Auto Trader or the employment weeklies. Auto Trader and the employment weeklies are put out by for-profit corporations. "The Real Estate Weekly" could break even, or even lose a bit of money. But as long as it cost the the member real estate firms less than running ads in local papers, the real estate firms came out ahead.
* Major national chains began printing their own advertising flyers and having newspapers insert them ("advertising inserts"). This cost less than having the newspapers print them. Next step was, with falling newspaper circulation, it became obvious that the newspaper deliveries covered only part of the target market. The only way to cover all of a market was to either...
- have a private firm deliver the flyers door-to-door (suitable for single-dwelling units)
- or send the flyers as 3rd-class "junkmail" to all units in rental and condominium buildings
Notice something about the 4 examples above? There is no mention whatsoever of the internet or the World Wide Web. Even in a pre-web world, newspapers were losing classified ad revenues for used cars, employment, real estate, and retail advertising to non-newspaper competitors. The competitors have now expanded to websites, but the first losses were occuring before the web existed.
To summarize newspapers main problem... their business model requires selling advertising at rates way in excess of cost, and using that margin to pay journalists. That works only as long as you have a monopoly/cartel situation. Once newspapers lost
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
Unless of course you consider the crap you find on line today. On the other hand, that isn't free either. You have to pay for an internet connection.
Wuddooeyeno? IITYWYBMAD? Like nuts? eclecticallyincorrect.com
In a matter of days perhaps months Warren Buffet will be dead. Good riddance. Such a wasted life Warren Buffet will pass into nothing and in short time be remembered for nothing. The Peoples of Earth are better off without your brand idiocy and thievery. Fitting.
If you put up walls to stop the wind it will just blow around your house...
Plus, if the bulk of papers are like a couple that I read, they give you free access to a limited number of
stories to read, then restrict you unless you pony up. ldiots that set it up, aren't smart enough to figure
out that if you code it by cookies, simply dumping the cookies will give you unlimited access again until
the cookies tell it to stop, then simply dump the cookies. You can't block the cookie, because if you do,
it won't display correctly, so I just have pale moon dump em on exit.
Many "for profit" newspapers are are the wrong kind of "non profit", and quite a few have gone under. The vast majority of newspaper revenues are from advertising. The sum total of USA newspaper advertising revenue has dropped from $49.4 billion in 2005 to $23.9 billion in 2011.
Subscriptions are peanuts in comparison. Subscriptions might pay enough to have the paper delivered. They come nowhere near enough to pay for newsprint, printing machines and printing staff, secretaries, janitors, phone bills, office equipment+rentals, let alone correspondents in Baghdad, London, Moscow, Washington, etc. Newspapers have lost their monopoly on advertising, and can't charge the extortionate rates they used to.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
A) Opinions, propaganda and press releases / ads, all disguised as "neutral" "news", so I can't tell their bias/agenda... And have to pay for it..., or...
B) Opinions and news relevant to my interests, with honesty about the bias/agenda... For free from fellow bloggers...
Hmm... What do I choose...? ;)
The press has the same problem as the rest of the "media distributors": There is no physical "medium" to reproduce and transport anymore. So nobody needs them anymore. And as before there are plenty of people who want their news to out for other reasons than money for distribution. Their own former sources!
Those people will now just put it in a blog, advertise that blog to aggregators (like Slashdot) and be done with it.
But hey... There are still a lot of idiots out there, who believe that a "neutral" human being is physically possible... LOL
Too bad they don't have any money to waste either.
No, it's the equivalent of the whining you see from the other old corporate clowns whenever a technological paradigm shift happens. It's akin to the *AA and their histrionics about home video back in the 1980s and filesharing today.
Liberty in your lifetime
Warren Buffet is in court over not paying his taxes.
HE was on tv several times talking about taxing 'rich' people more, taxes he doesn't pay.
Also, taxes that won't impact the way he makes money .
Taxes are fun, you should study them and their application so you don't sound like a useful idiot.
No brain, no pain.
The truth is simple: people won't pay for trash.
Trouble is, the content today invariably sucks, and there invariably is a better source, free, somewhere. Newspapers are toast.
For starters, you've tweeters, bloggers and social networks. Nevermind Joes and Janes posting cat videos. I mean citizen journalists who tweet, blog, connect and react through Facebook on local events, etc. who provide grassroot coverage. Muslim revolutions would never have occurred where it not for them. And we'd barely know what's going on in Syria if not for them.
Next, you've aggregator sites like Google News, Facebook in some ways, Slashdot, Reddit, Twitter trends, buzz monitors of all sorts, the list is innumerable. These must stay free to retain eyeballs, and attract eyeballs they do.
One might want to argue at this point that the journalist adds value over the latter channels, in the form of story background, fact checking, and good analysis. If anyone needs convincing that the contrary is more often true, consider reading a few pieces by the Macalope. Or think about this study from last year, that showed that people who regularly followed Fox News tended to be less well informed than people who didn't follow the news at all. The situation will likely get worse, since revenues are low, eyes are fickle, advertisers demand eyeballs, and click-baiting requires sensationalist garbage. It would help the journalists' case, too, if they actually broke news every now and then, and if they reported news on a same- or next-day basis when they don't.
Last week was quite illustrative of how journalists do everything wrong. A backdoor was identified on ZTE Android phones. It got posted on Pastebin, picked up on Reddit the same day, by ZDNet shortly after. (ZDNet presumably reads Reddit or its reader tips, contrary to the few IT sites I sent the story to; I learned about the backdoor the same day on a finance blog, of all places.) And then... nothing. The story eventually went mainstream 5 days later. Don't even get me started on the analysis part: the above-mentioned finance blog is the only place that chopped through ZTE's BS autoupdater excuse and mentioned the obvious, i.e. that having root access on your dissidents' or ennemies' phones must be convenient indeed.
In the end, I suspect the real problem is that you can get the fact reporting from all kinds of places; the only question is then how much analysis you want with the facts. Just about raw is good enough for the bulk of users, which the Internet allowed to become fickle. For these, any place goes, including raw news feeds on Yahoo or Facebook. So forget trying to make them pay. What remains are the more sophisticated readers. Most are sharp and, to put it mildly, underwhelmed by journalists. Some eventually turn to a few blogs run by sharp engineers and don't look back. So, on the one side you need to go full blast delivering garbage; on the other, you need to attract the best columnists, bloggers and commentators (who take their readers with them).
Take a dozen sharp minds, then place them on the same site, make part of the content exclusive. That, I think, is tomorrow's "newspaper". For everything else, there are computerized news and social networks.
This many comments and no one mentions the rest of the deal? He bought the papers for about $140M. He also loaned the company he bought them from $400M at 10% annual interest. And Warren doesn't make loans like that unless the terms protect him in the event that the borrower goes bankrupt. So if the papers he bought just break even, he's still making a decent return on the overall investment.
It's the question of who pays for it and how much. Online news don't produce same amount ad of revenue than as print news does, so they have to shrink and maybe 50-80% of them will bankrupt in next 10 years. Many papers are already in less money -> quality suffers -> less readers -> less money death spiral.
The One Percent
47:45 Nicole Buffett describes her life, then gets booted from the family for good for having said not much at all. Her claim to the Buffett name was indirect, and it might not have been the first time she said more than Warren liked, but still it's hard to imagine such a cold business.
The old fart thinks poeple will actually pay to read coroporate-state-military-propaganda garbage? R.I.P. dinosaur media!
If you can fold a device, such as a pad or an e-reader, around it. Without a physical access barrier (which obviously has to be attractive in other ways) - forget it.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Who cares? My local paper is a left wing rag anyway. I'll just listen to the "free" local radio for local news and subscribe to content that has more quality.
Well... it gets complicated, but a newspaper that is 100 percent ads is not a newspaper, it's a catalog.
The only control the law really has over that (because this is, after all, a free country with freedom of speech), is over postal rates. Newspapers and other media enjoy special rates for mass postage, provided they maintain a certain ratio of advertising to editorial pages. If they exceed the ratio, they can lose the favored shipping rates, which can incur significant costs.
If you don't ship your publication through the mail, though, or you don't care what you pay for postage, you can put whatever you want in it.
Breakfast served all day!
who gets their paper delivered by the US postal service? I don't see the relevance.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
So-- there is this businnes model I believe is doomed! What do I do? Purchase 63 companies that rely on it! I'd say that is pulling a Homer as few other things could be.
-><- no
Re Newspapers having to stop providing free news. Our local radio stations read the news from the web, add some local content and report the interesting stuff every hour.
The web and news content must be giving Associated Press, Reuters, and other agencies indigestion.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
What next? Local TV stations making their newscasts pay-per-view events? But even the newscasts have a good degree of suck to them... 5 minutes of news, 10 minutes of the weatherman blowing his load in his pants over the weather radar's accuracy, 5 minutes of sports and 10 minutes of ads.
Fox, CNN, MSNBC, etc... is just infotainment with a bunch of bobblehead bitches arguing with each other... only Erin Burnett on CNN is worth watching -- but only because I'd love to fuck her. Hard.
Most local news is just regurgitated press-releases anyway. We only get the Sunday paper so the wife can clip her coupons... otherwise, it just gets tossed.
People who subscribe to the New York Times, and a lot of others besides.
Breakfast served all day!
Stranger to me is why you would support the idea of a newspaper that trades news for advertising. You don't strike me as the type of guy who actually reads a newspaper.
Breakfast served all day!
The day I found out (I was sixteen) that a newspaper would charge me more for my classified ad, depending on how much I was selling my car for, was the day they lost my loyalty. As and adult I can understand it. But online doesnt suffer from that either.
Do they? Most papers are actually delivered by a specialized private delivery service. Typically it's a pick up truck that drives through the neighborhood at 4 am slowly throwing a series of papers onto every front lawn.
It's just a modern version of the paper boy.
Is the paper boy an employee of the US postal service?
Do people honestly get papers delivered every day by the postal service? You're getting a paper after most of the day is done then aren't you? I get mail delivery around 4pm every day. Possibly others get it sooner but I live rather close to the post office so I don't understand how.
Papers though... they're delivered before the sun comes up. Can't compare with that... and it has jack all to do with the postal service.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
you realize we are talking about newspapers and not publishers in general?
In total US newspapers get 27% of their revenue from circulation.. To claim that this doesn't even rate on P&L statements is obviously wrong except for possible niche cases.