Comments
Posted by Diana Raab on March 9 at 10:02 a.m.
Hi Jerry ~
You need to write a book (hint hint) because you have some great stories to share!
Cheers,
Diana Raab
http://www.dianaraab.com
Posted by Ged Carbone on March 9 at 12:19 p.m.
The one thing newspaper companies own that every two-bit blogger does not have is a printing press. Local newspapers were the whales of their own little ponds. When they step away from that onto the web they are as guppies in the sea. I don't see why newspapers keep pouring resources into the web, feeding their guppies as you will, while starving their whales.
As a medium, the internet has a couple of problems. As Marshall Mcluhan said, "The medium is the message" and the message sent via the web, be it on twitter or on a constantly updated blog, is: This information is ephemeral.
A newspaper says: This information is important, worth committing to print.
The web also fails people when they need it most -- in hurricanes, wars, and earthquakes when the power goes out, sometimes for weeks. I was in New Orleans after Katrina, and though the Picayune was putting out news for much of the country to see online, those in the Gulf coast could not see it.
If I owned a newspaper I would not embrace the web until someone showed me how to make money off it. I would expect to take huge cuts in my classifieds, I'm sure everyone already has, and I would no longer expect to make profit margins of 25 percent. But a nice nine percent profit margin in a small market daily would keep most families very happy.
The big media companies -- the New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times -- they can compete in the wide open seas, but your average daily newspaper ought to commit to print and leave the blue water sailing to the big guys.
Posted by David Jensen on March 9 at 10:42 p.m.
The breakdown of the newspaper business did not begin 10 years ago. Like the problems in the auto industry, it began decades and decades ago. For those of you not familiar with the economics of the newspaper industry, what it sells is audience -- readers. Advertisers are the ones who pay the freight and they want potential customers. Readers have been leaving since the 1970s. Editors and advertising execs persisted in delivering products that readers did not want. Expensive circulation efforts were mounted. Advertisers fled to things like auto trader. Industry responses were feeble. The Internet performed the coup de gras. It may be that nothing could have changed what is occuring today. However, another newspaper company, Thomson, moved away from its traditional print product to become an electronic publisher of high value information during the same period. Newspapers are a business, first and foremost. If you want to have the kind of journalism Jerry wants, you have to figure out a way to get somebody to pay for it.
Posted by Raymond Chuang on March 10 at 4:18 a.m.
The big problem with newspapers was 30 years ago, futurist and author Alvin Toffler warned in his seminal book "The Third Wave" that as communications technology improves, the days of "mass media" will come to an end. Since he wrote that book, the rise of home video systems, multichannel cable and satellite TV systems, and the public Internet has made his prediction a 100% reality. Because of the Internet's ability to deliver news from almost any source in real time or near real time, why read the newspaper once a day when you can get the latest news updated constantly around the clock? And if you have the latest "smart" cellphones such as a Blackberry or an iPhone, you can even get -real time video- of news events as it happens.
Even more scary to the big newspapers, the Internet has democratized newsgathering, too. Nowadays, it's more likely that people get their news from weblogs, and this little service called Twitter has made it possible to send short messages to be broadcast to a huge group of people from any SMS-enabled cellphone (we knew much of what happened at the Mumbai terrorist attacks from people trapped in the hotels affected by the attacks sending "tweets" (Twitter messages) from their cellphones). However, the biggest killer for newspapers is the rise of Craigslist, which has essentially killed off newspaper classified ads in favor of a much less expensive (and frequently free!) alternative.
Walter Isaacson, who heads TIME magazine, has suggested that newspapers work to develop a single standard for micropayments you can you buy daily access to a newspaper web site for about 20-25 cents per day. If they had done this maybe 8-10 years ago I think newspapers would have likely have survived a lot better, because frankly most readers don't read every daily edition of the newspaper.
Posted by Perry Gaskill on March 10 at 5:12 a.m.
A thoughtful commentary, Jerry. And somehow I keep wondering what Herb Caen would have to say about all this.
I don't always agree with Alan Mutter. For example, his paid subscription ideas for content seem to be off by not taking into account the all-you-can-eat broadband pricing of the cable/telco duopoly. Still, Mutter can write and in doing so helps his readers line up mental ducks. What's sad is that voices such as Mutter's are so rare.
Mutter aside, what seems to be happening in the newspaper business now as it relates to the business side of things is a fundamental flaw in how things could be made better. To use a baseball metaphor, it's an inability to understand that a successful base hit is better than a failed home run. And the result is that we keep seeing these jaw-dropingly bone headed ideas trotted out to save the newspaper business. A recent example is one of MediaNews deciding it wants to resurrect the idea of offering readers proprietary home printers for news content delivery.
http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/03/back-to...
One of the things I also wonder about is this: Is it possible that at some previous point in time, while news side folk were distracted by the Sisyphean effort of getting a paper out the door, there was a subtle shift on the business side of things no one is generally aware of? What if, for example, the best-and-brightest of business school graduates stopped being attracted to the newspaper business not because it was risky or non-lucrative, but instead because it was simply not interesting compared to other alternatives? What if, in their perception, they wondered why they should spend a career haggling over the price of newsprint instead of inventing the future at a startup?
It seems to me such a shift would explain a lot about the current lack of business talent, creativity, and innovation available. Or, for that matter, what motivates the home run mentality. But I could be completely wrong, and even if correct haven't a clue what could be done about it.
Posted by Jay Ballou on March 11 at 1:56 a.m.
Geb Cabone's comments are nonsensical. It's not the newspapers who are starving their whales, it's the marketplace.
"the message sent via the web, be it on twitter or on a constantly updated blog, is: This information is ephemeral.
A newspaper says: This information is important, worth committing to print."
Utter rot. Newspapers, once read once, are tossed in the trash, burned, used to line the bird cage ... only people with OCD horde them, and finding anything in old newspapers is hopeless. Material readable on the web is not a "message sent" -- it stays right where it is, on the provider's server, as well as being replicated in backups and archives ... sure, one can find old newspapers on microfiche, but that was a far inferior technology. The claim that being published in a newspaper says that something is important and not ephemeral is simply a fabrication, a bit of sophistry, a product of intellectual dishonesty. It sure isn't made of the sort of stuff that can keep the presses rolling.
"The web also fails people when they need it most -- in hurricanes, wars, and earthquakes when the power goes out, sometimes for weeks. I was in New Orleans after Katrina, and though the Picayune was putting out news for much of the country to see online, those in the Gulf coast could not see it."
As opposed to fishing out of the water a newspaper that was never delivered? Even with current technologies, one is more likely to be able to get information electronically than via print, and that will only become more true over time. And that electronic information is *timely* -- the kind of information that people want and need "when they need it most" is not available from newspapers, and that was true before the web -- radio is an old technology. But now, anyone can report on the spot, at the moment, via the web, providing a flow of information that was never before available -- an that flow is two way, allowing entire communities to interact and support each other, as we saw during the Tea Fire.
Posted by Bevan Manson on March 11 at 3:32 a.m.
When I go out of town, I like to read local newspapers, big and small, daily or weekly, for their connections to what is going on locally. Somehow there is information not covered in even local websites. You get a different, often more personal feel for the place. So I think Jerry is correct on the "news" emphasis and the in-depth analysis focus that newspapers should look at, regardless of whether we are talking about local readership or the curious traveler.
For example, in L.A. several weeklies (like Citybeat) provide information on local arts listings for instance that the big dailies do not cover anymore. If you never read these papers, you might think very differently about the arts scene in L.A.
Raymond Chuang's point about the 24 hr. internet news update is well taken. But the Internet may not tell you about the community event or concert that could be really valuable to you.
Posted by J.J. Perry on May 27 at 8:23 a.m.
I agree with Ged Carbone on only one thing:
"A newspaper says: This information is important, worth committing to print."
Think about the hard decisions we've had to make to replate for an error or -- heaven forbid -- stop the presses. The second guessing, the mild panic attack. It's not cheap to print a newspaper, let alone stop and ask for a "do-over."
However, we have no qualms earlier in the day about paginating some of the most worthless, out-of-date commodity copy just to fill holes.
Every column inch should be treated as gold -- if it doesn't have smart local copy, analysis or explanatory graphics, then the "extra newshole" should be filled with pictures of folks around our community. As a matter of fact, that is a much better use for sports sections than agate.
Harness the power of that big beast; don't just feed it garbage. Local local local!
Posted by DAVE PHILLIPS on August 31 at 5:28 a.m.
Months ago before leaving CA a post was made to "Cal Buzzer" blog raising the following question: What if real competition was given to the current Canadian newsprint monopoly, the single highest cost of producing a daily to the streets? There was only silence in reply. SO IN ADDITION to the 'in-house' questions Jerry raised months ago herein and in public forums reported (ironically) by on-line "SB Independent" alternative weekly and "NOOZHAWK.com" blog = Have Americans, as a society, also slowly lost our capacity to communicate with each other today?
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