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|| SportsShooter.com: Member Message Board
OT: How to save the Newspaper Industry
Albert Brown, Photographer
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Washington | DC | USA | Posted: 11:19 AM on 01.28.09 |
->> The chief investment officer at Yale University, David Swensen, wrote in the New York Times today about how to save newspapers from the economic turmoil and what we all know to be a failing business model:
"By endowing our most valued sources of news we would free them from the strictures of an obsolete business model and offer them a permanent place in society, like that of America’s colleges and universities. Endowments would transform newspapers into unshakable fixtures of American life, with greater stability and enhanced independence that would allow them to serve the public good more effectively."
Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/28/opinion/28swensen.html |
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Vincent Johnson, Photographer
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Chicago | IL | USA | Posted: 11:34 AM on 01.28.09 |
| ->> The idea has merit. Would be nice to see if it could be implemented. Also, isn't PBS & NPR kinda of like that? I know they have donations from the public, but they also get gov't money as well. |
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Andrew Sullivan, Photo Editor, Photographer
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Kissimmee | FL | USA | Posted: 11:40 AM on 01.28.09 |
->> Great, so then papers will abandon all the hype of being the 'Most Trusted' news source in favor of being the 'Most Endowed'?
Sorry, but thats where my mind goes...
Andrew Sullivan
http://www.picandrew.com |
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Clark Brooks, Photo Editor, Photographer
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Urbana | IL | USA | Posted: 11:58 AM on 01.28.09 |
->> I firmly believe newspapers can save themselves.
The question is do they want to survive? The problem is management, leadership and even the employees themselves are locked into a business model they refuse bury and embrace business models that would ensure their success and the abilty to serve their communities. To survive or even excel papers must reengineer their business model.
The current model is filled with fat and useless practices that require unnecessary amounts of capital to finance the overhead. Papers can run much leaner, more efficiently and with less waste of resources.
I've seen the future for successful operations. A client I had, before he sold his weekly paper to a larger area newspaper, ran a profitable publication that supported a staff of six employees, mostly press folk, and a handful of reliable freelancers. The community was proud of the publication then; now its reputation is falling faster than its weekly page count and the community pride it once enjoyed fading fast as fast its circulation.
Newspapers, the industry can save themselves. Unfortunately, the closer you get to the top of the management, the more you see those individuals willing to make cuts rather than positive changes to maintain their salaries. |
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Wesley R. Bush, Photographer
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Nashville | TN | U.S. | Posted: 12:27 PM on 01.28.09 |
->> I don't think there is a way to save an industry outside of it saving itself. People secretly love newspapers. They love knowing what's going on, politics, sports. What they don't love doing is paying for something they don't need to. When they can go online and get the same information for free that they get on their doorstep for a fee, they aren't going to keep doing that for long.
But now papers are in a strange place. What they've lost in print ad revenue, they've partially replaced with online ad revenue, so they can't just stop the free online access and have everyone sign back up for a subscription again the next day. It's already too far gone. People expect it to be free.
What I see is a viable option is to have subscribers have access to the online versions of the paper. The links to all the stories will still be accessible, but now only the headline and ledes will be available for free. To access them, a person would be able to subscribe or pay for day-use, much like buying a single paper if a story interests you. And I know this is a simple suggestion for a complicated problem, but the obsolete business model is that of a free product. |
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John Pavoncello, Photographer
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York | PA | USA | Posted: 8:06 AM on 01.29.09 |
| ->> Shut down the Internet? |
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Michael Fischer, Photographer
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Spencer | Ia | USA | Posted: 8:42 AM on 01.29.09 |
->> 70% of the problem is the result of the media companies borrowing heavily from Wall Street to fund purchases to buy newspapers and build media giants.
Funny how that worked out, isn't it?
They wanted 30% margins in a industry that yielded only 22%-25% and thought that being bigger would gain them enough to make up the 5-8% difference.
Worse than that, they had so much debt, they had nothing left to make investments in the future.
My mentor taught me a million years ago that "those who don't invest in the future have no right to expect one".
My marketing degree tells me to do what isn't being done. In the age of the internet, you go deeper into local news. You do the things that others don't that brings value to them.
Not making those investments kills.
I believe that the future has opportunity for those smart enough to seize them. I also believe that when the mass media holding companies throw in the towel and begin selling off assets on the cheap, there will be opportunity.
Nothing I haven't said on here before.
M |
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Dominick Reuter, Photographer, Assistant
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Boston | MA | USA | Posted: 9:51 AM on 01.29.09 |
->> Maybe I read differently, but but I don't know if the Yalies were advocating a mandatory change across the board. If local newsmen can run a profitable enterprise and don't want to give up the right to political advocacy in their pages, they should be able to.
But the mechanisms should be in place to allow papers large and small to shift into the endowment arrangement. As those of us with heavy student debt can attest, an organization's non-profit status does not mean it is not lucrative.
This model is not a silver bullet -- non-profits still need good management -- but at the very least this would stem the attrition of the fourth estate. |
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Steve Ueckert, Photographer
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Houston | TX | USA | Posted: 9:56 AM on 01.29.09 |
->> Or have a history making, landmark presidential election once a week.
I don't believe that newspapers, as they currently exist, can be saved. Ad dollars that have left due to the economic downturn or to be redirected to new media (the internet) will not return to newspapers.
Once a Circuit City is gone, their ad revenue is likewise gone. Whoever eventually jumps in to fill whatever void might be lost by the closing of something like Circuit City might analyze why that venture failed and likely consider that the ad budget could be better spent in other media than display ads in daily papers.
Newspapers must come to grips with the reality that they no longer are the dominant driving force in their community that they once were. Circulation drops coupled with population increases spell that out in bold face type.
Questionable business practices only compound the problem but aren't singularly to blame. Newspapers need to accept that they have to fit into a new model of the distribution of the news that includes many more opportunities for the news consumer. It's not out of the question that they will follow the way of, the once giants of media, weekly magazines such as LIFE, Look, Saturday Evening Post, etc. Likewise, the news weeklies such as Time, Newsweek, US News & World Report, etc. have shrunk to mere vestiges of what once they were. The Houston Chronicle is now physically smaller and much thinner in page count than at any time since I first started reading it 36 years ago.
The Brave New World is upon us and the role of the daily newspaper is very much yet to be determined. |
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Doug Holleman, Photographer
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Temple | TX | USA | Posted: 1:16 PM on 01.29.09 |
| ->> Encourage more people to buy parrots. |
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Wesley R. Bush, Photographer
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Nashville | TN | U.S. | Posted: 2:44 PM on 01.29.09 |
| ->> What's strange is that hardly anyone I work with subscribes to the paper, but I bring my copy to work with me every day and it's devoured in less than an hour and I do good to keep the Living section at my desk past noon. |
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Rob Kerr, Photographer
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Bend | OR | US | Posted: 11:31 PM on 01.29.09 |
| ->> i don't think advertising funding newspapers has ever been the appropriate fit...it seems nature running its course in imo. endowments or pay-to-get [itunes, book publishing] business models will have to finally sever the ties from advertising and marketing. there are no shortages of great minds working on this problem as we speak. |
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Sean D. Elliot, Photographer, Photo Editor
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Norwich | CT | USA | Posted: 12:35 PM on 01.30.09 |
->> the only problem with the idea of a complete change-over of how newspapers (or local news web sites?) will be funded is that the patient probably has to die before it can be revived.
I don't see how one makes that change without starting from scratch. Everyone has to stop getting paid, the expense stream has to cease only to re-start once this new funding system can be created.
I suppose one could hope that the new system could be set-up in parallel to be slid-into place when it is ready. But even with all the cuts and fire sales ... I don't see a groundswell of corporate newspaper owners ready to cut the strings. Too many think they can ride this out and re-establish that profit-making business. |
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Rob Kerr, Photographer
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Bend | OR | US | Posted: 4:02 PM on 01.30.09 |
->> not my first 'huh?', probably not my last.
+1 on what sean said, but i'm not going to agree that the patient has to die ... i mean, how are we going to define death? brain, heart, eyes closed...how 'bout just declining ad revenue and increased downsizing to the point of no revenue? how about debt greater than attainable revenue?
its the birth of a new business model that i care about. |
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Steve Ueckert, Photographer
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Houston | TX | USA | Posted: 9:00 PM on 01.30.09 |
->> Rob, Sean--
A business is typically a for-profit enterprise.
A service might be a not-for-profit effort.
Anything that depends on advertising, newspaper, radio, TV, website, is a business. Even PBS, in this era, is a business.
A not-for-profit news service would probably have no external motivation for success. And internal motivation to succeed is typically short lived. That's why most students work for grades and not the satisfaction of gaining knowledge.
--Steve |
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Michael Fischer, Photographer
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Spencer | Ia | USA | Posted: 9:42 PM on 01.30.09 |
->> Trust me Rob, you will get your wish.
It will take time. And to many, when it "arrives", it will seem so "obvious".
"We must all obey the great law of change, it is the most powerful in nature". - Edmund Burke
I keep typing Burke's quote for a reason. Implicit is that if you don't change - you die. Too bad the captains of the industry lacked the guts, and leveraged themselves to the hilt, so they couldn't change.
I'm involved with two not for profits, have lead one as Chairman and will lead the other if I get drunk enough one night. Trust me when I say that even not for profits want and need profit. They just call it something else. ("excess revenues over expenses")
How important are those excess revenues? The one time the CEO of one of those not for profits told me that not for profits were different, they could spend more than they took in; I knew what I had to do.
My last official act as chairman, I gave her a choice: Give me your resignation, or be fired.
I had her resignation 24 hours later. The sad part was, I haven't been able to take the organization to where it needs to be and it's future is questionable at best.
Not for profit or for profit; the ink HAS to be black at the end of the day either way.
M |
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Walter Calahan, Photographer
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Westminster | MD | USA | Posted: 9:47 PM on 01.30.09 |
->> Give a man a fish he eats for a day.
Teach a man to fish he will have to buy newspapers to wrap his catch in.
Thus the industry is saved. |
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Kevin Clifford, Photographer
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Reno | NV | United States | Posted: 2:52 AM on 02.01.09 |
->> Here is what readers thought about the issue: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/31/opinion/l31endow.html?_r=1
FTA:
"We certainly cannot afford to lose the careful reporting offered by American newspapers, but sending a check is not the answer.
Even if we were able to financially ensure the continued existence of American newspapers, how can we ensure citizen engagement? It is far easier to browse oversimplified headlines on the Internet than it is to pick up a newspaper and read an article in depth.
This is why only a small handful of students at my boarding school read newspapers. The failing newspapers are a reflection of our failure to keep my generation interested in issues of national and international importance." |
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Jeff Brehm, Photographer, Photo Editor
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Charlotte | NC | USA | Posted: 4:09 PM on 02.02.09 |
->> Kevin:
Your anecdotal observation -- that few students read newspapers -- highlights what Michael and I and others have been saying. It's not that they don't read, or don't want information. It's that newspapers often don't offer the content they want. And when the papers do have it, they give it up for free via the Internet. Why would you pay someone for something that they are giving away?
The answer is to put information on paper that people want to read and that they cannot get anywhere else. Tease them with a little of it on the web if you want. If it's good (and by "good," I don't mean yet another big story and photo essay on the new children's reading program at the library; I mean REAL journalism), they'll buy a paper to get it.
The reason Gannett et al are dying is because they are following a model that would not be successful in ANY business (except government) -- they are asking people to buy a product of little perceived value that they can get for free. And even the Postal Service can't get away with that one. |
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Rob Kerr, Photographer
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Bend | OR | US | Posted: 9:37 PM on 02.02.09 |
->> Jeff wrote ... >>The reason Gannett et al are dying is because they are following a model that would not be successful in ANY business (except government) -- they are asking people to buy a product of little perceived value that they can get for free.>>
review how newspaper corporations make money ... the content is important for circulation #'s in association with the ability to charge higher advertising rates. it has been a long time since newspapers have survived on subscriptions and rack sales. its the death of ad revenue that drives the financial implosion. |
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Wesley R. Bush, Photographer
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Nashville | TN | U.S. | Posted: 12:06 PM on 02.06.09 |
->> http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1877191,00.html
"There is, however, a striking and somewhat odd fact about this crisis. Newspapers have more readers than ever. Their content, as well as that of newsmagazines and other producers of traditional journalism, is more popular than ever — even (in fact, especially) among young people.
The problem is that fewer of these consumers are paying. Instead, news organizations are merrily giving away their news. " |
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Michael Fischer, Photographer
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Spencer | Ia | USA | Posted: 7:25 PM on 02.08.09 |
->> Rob,
It's a chicken and egg problem. The ad revenue declined because the eyeballs left and went to the internet. Why did they go to the internet?
Because it was FREE, and because it mirrored what they read in the newspaper. Hmm ... let's see... FREE versus PAYING for the SAME THING. Wonder which one the average person chooses?
This is why I keep harping on the fact that you have to dig deeper into local news and then give the potential reader/customer a value choice. If it's compelling enough, they WILL pay for it - whether it's printed on newsprint or available at additional charge on the internet. Exhibit Z: I pay the NYT $50/year to read their op ed columnists. Tom Friedman is worth it, along with Paul Krugman, who just won a Noble Prize for Economics. And, I'm not alone. Thousands of people do it.
Let's put it another way: Let's say you had $10M and you had to start a profitable news hub in Bend. You assemble the reporters, photographers and editors.
HOW do you distribute the news to readers???? There's the 64 dollar question.
I've posted before how I feel, so I'll not do it and bore everyone to death.
The problem IS, imho, the fact that the readership isn't being given what they will pay for, and the way that potential readers get the news, and the way advertisers are forced to choose, is totally screwed up.
Lower costs - improve efficiencies - deliver more value. It would be SO doable if these clowns hadn't leveraged their asses to the hilt. No way to do it when you're bleeding money to pay Wall Street.
THAT IS THE PROBLEM. |
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David Harpe, Photographer
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Louisville | KY | USA | Posted: 9:15 PM on 02.08.09 |
->> People do not want to pay for things made of bits and bytes. For some reason when it goes from the physical world into electrons, people just don't see very much value in it. Software, music, any form of content, really. They'll pay for the devices to access it, the bandwidth to transmit it and the space to store it. But the bytes themselves they want for free.
The main reason lies in the fact that duplicating electronic content is "free": It does not "use up" the original, and it does not take any resources other than bandwidth and hard disk space. The number of possible copies is not constrained in any physical sense - you can make a million perfect copies of a song as easily as you can make a single copies. This also adds to the devaluation - a piece of content is not rare in any tangible sense.
Because of this, people just don't want to pay for it. They do not believe that just their one copy will make or break the viability of producing the content...whatever that content may be. It is the psychology of the masses and it will not change, no matter how "good" you make the content.
News content is the worst content in the world for reusability. You read it once and it's done. No one wants to read news stories over and over again. If people will *barely* pay a dollar for a song they like to listen to multiple times, what makes anyone think they'll pay a dollar to read a news story that they will only read once?
Newsprint has never been a particularly efficient medium for delivering content and advertising. But that isn't it's job, really. Newsprint is a way to give the content perceived value. The content printed on the page used to be UNIQUE. You could only see it there, you could only view it there. If you wanted to read the story, you had to buy a copy, and you had to buy a copy before they all ran out. If you wanted to make sure you had a copy, you bought a subscription.
The cost of the paper has always only pretty much covered the cost of distributing it. Didn't matter. The person willing to pay for it was also someone who you can bet was going to read it. And that makes it a GREAT advertising medium.
This is why newspapers are doomed if they go all electronic. The electronic version - regardless of whether the content is the same or not - does not have the same perceived value. There is no physical uniqueness, there isn't even virtual uniqueness. There are only bits that are copied, duplicated and distributed a thousand different ways on a thousand different sites, and people don't pay for bits. So you can't charge for the content and you have to give it away.
When you give the content away, you have to rely on advertising. But online advertising suffers from the same lack of uniqueness. There are a billion different web sites and each one has a billion different pages, and you can always make more. You have commodity pricing and you get pennies per thousands of views...nowhere close to the amount of money needed to run a full-out news operation.
Newspapers would be far better off focusing on making their print operation as efficient and cost effective as possible, and creating as unique an advertising vehicle as possible. But you HAVE to eliminate the online component completely and get back to roots.
You may not be able to make a print publication big enough to satisfy Wall Street, but you can make it viable using this method. With the hybrid or all-online model, newspapers will be out of business as standalone properties. Most likely they'll be rolled into television operations because they will not be able to generate enough revenue to survive on their own. |
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Mark Loundy, Photo Editor
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San Jose | CA | USA | Posted: 9:55 PM on 02.08.09 |
->> David,
Suggesting that newspapers optimize their print product as their primary medium is akin to recommending that horse breeders target commuters as a primary market.
News is going to be distributed electronically. The cultural, economic and market inertia driving instantaneous online media is beyond irresistible. Outside of very tiny niche markets, print news is over.
Money will be made from the production of news. If only because there is demand professionally produced journalism and such a product can only be made for pay.
While I don't know the exact form the market will eventually take, I do know that it won't involve primary delivery on paper.
--Mark |
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David Harpe, Photographer
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Louisville | KY | USA | Posted: 10:07 AM on 02.09.09 |
->> Suggesting that newspapers optimize their print product as their primary medium is akin to recommending that horse breeders target commuters as a primary market.
Amusing, but missing the point.
To take the horse analogy further, newspapers put the cart before the horse. They started giving away their content online, free, with no revenue and no developed business model. They were doing this long before the Internet was populated by the masses in any significant number, and they continue to do so to this day. In short, they lost focus and stopped thinking, and they did it for the poorest of reasons: Me-too-ism.
->> Money will be made from the production of news. If only because there is demand professionally produced journalism and such a product can only be made for pay.
By your logic long-form journalism is dead. What we're left with is what is distributed electronically. Basically, video and interactive multimedia - things that can be digested in a minute or two at most. People do not read long-form journalism online with any regularity (long-form being defined here as lots of paragraphs of text with supporting pictures). Anything that doesn't fit on one screen has a very low chance of being read end to end. Which leads us back to the point I was making above.
Print is the best medium for reading long-form journalism, by far. If you want to read something in depth, with lots of text, it's very difficult to beat reading it on the printed page. A screen doesn't cut it - ebooks don't cut it. The impact of a six-column photo on a printed page is far different than an 800-pixel wide image on a screen. Integrated with text and it's a completely different ballgame. Newspapers forgot this. They mistakenly decided that the same picture and the same blocks of text blasted onto a web site is the same story. It's not. The medium, truly, is the message. You can't just cut and paste between the two and think it'll have the same impact. In doing so you end up with grey mush that doesn't work in EITHER medium, which is what we have today.
A reporter writes a story "for the web" and "for print", both at the same time. They are going to choose a far different path since they know they need to hit a deadline in an hour versus one at 10pm. Photos will be chosen differently if they aren't destined for six inches tall but instead a 300-pixel sidebar square. It is a far, far different message, with different impact, and newspapers have stopped designing their papers with that in mind.
Nobody in the newspaper audience said, "Hey, stop doing high impact, well-designed, long-form picture and text stories." It came from the other side. Page counts being reduced to boost margins. Reporters not being allowed to spend time on long stories because they now have to do two jobs instead of one. Giving away content for free, which reduced or eliminated perceived value. Loss of focus, a death of a thousand cuts.
There is definitely a market for realtime, as it happens news. But newspapers don't need to be the ones producing it. TV has it covered. Radio has it covered. The traitorous Associated Press and Reuters have it covered by way of Yahoo and Google and everyone else that distributes it. They've had it covered for a long, long time.
This is not new. What IS new is newspapers thinking they HAVE to do the same thing. Did they just "miss the boat" when 24-hour news came along on cable? Why didn't they all start doing 24-hour news channels? It was a new medium - a new way of distributing news. Oh that would be too expensive, I hear them say. It takes time, money, effort and resources to do a television network. You have to have different toys - cameras and satellite trucks. You have to script it, cram everything into two minutes, and someone has to READ it.
But the Internet is different, right? Newspapers can do the Internet EASY. "Repurposing" the content is almost free. All you need to do is pipe it out of the newsroom computer onto the web site. Just resize those already digital photos, glob it up over here, wedge it into the template. See? That wasn't so hard. And we didn't have to buy a satellite truck.
This is why they fail. |
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Mark Loundy, Photo Editor
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San Jose | CA | USA | Posted: 2:11 PM on 02.09.09 |
->> David,
Long-form journalism may just be dead -- or at least relegated to "book" form.
The dumbing-down of newspapers cannot be laid solely at the feet of newspaper management. While vision in media companies was sorely lacking, the demand for long-form treatments has dropped considerably over the past few decades. Why provide something that people don't want?
The problem with long-form on print is that while a given individual might want to curl up with a 100-inch story, they only want to do it occasionally with a story that meets their particular interests. There is no way to economically provide that sort of product on paper for millions of interest sets.
The micro-fracturing of content dictates that electronic delivery is the only possible way to manage such information products.
Possible future universes might include "newsrooms" consisting of one or two topic experts whose work might be distributed exclusively or non-exclusively by big-brand aggregators.
We'll see.
--Mark |
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Andrew Katsampes, Photographer
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Melrose | MA | USA | Posted: 2:57 PM on 02.09.09 |
->> And in the 1920s, should we have set up endowments for "The Buggy Whip" industry?
Newspapers need to reinvent themselves or perish. The news industry is in a state of transition. Almost everyone has a cell phone, however, they sit on the subway talking and talking. They should be paying a fee and reading some sort of "newspaper" on their phone on the way to work.
Newspapers have drifted from reporting the facts and report opinions to suit the political bias of the newspaper or the "reporter." Concise, informative, fact reporting may draw readers, as opposed to just being propaganda sheets. |
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David Harpe, Photographer
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Louisville | KY | USA | Posted: 4:27 PM on 02.09.09 |
->> The problem with long-form on print is that while a given individual might want to curl up with a 100-inch story, they only want to do it occasionally with a story that meets their particular interests.
This is true of any medium, any market, any business. Not every business is Wal-Mart or McDonald's, and not every business needs to be...or SHOULD be.
Local newspapers used to have a solution for this. It was called "knowing your audience." You can't hit every niche in every issue with a 100-inch story, but you can hit 95% of your audience with a long form story over the course of a week or two...and enough shorts to keep the rest interested in the meantime.
Focus. Local, specific, focus. It's something that has been missing in local news for quite some time, primarily due to corporate ownership. They try to be McDonald's.
It is NOT because readers stood up and said, "Hey! I want less local content, shorter stories and more generic tripe!" It's because being McDonald's is more profitable at a corporate level, and they thought they could get away with it. It's about the money, plain and simple. |
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Michael Fischer, Photographer
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Spencer | Ia | USA | Posted: 11:05 PM on 02.09.09 |
->> Don't want longer form stories?
Anyone ever pick up a copy of The Economist magazine?
It's subscriptions are WAY up.
Long form isn't automatically the problem. Stories that mean something to people .... there's the rub. |
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Matthew Hinton, Photographer, Assistant
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New Orleans | LA | USA | Posted: 11:53 PM on 02.09.09 |
->> In Japan the top newspaper has 10 million in circulation almost 10 times the NY Times and 5 times that of USA Today.
Japan Newspapers have 2.5 times more circulation than the US.
Why?
"We only put 20 percent of our content on the Web," said Masaki Satsuka, manager of the circulation section at the publishers and editors association. "
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/24/AR200810240...
But that probably won't happen here because just about every newspaper is owned by a media conglomerate in the U.S. with conflicting interests in Television, cable, and the internet.
In many cases websites and newspapers are separate subsidiaries within the same company and have separate offices with different addresses. There are few if any solely newspaper companies anymore and the internet subsidiaries are fine with leeching content off of their newspapers. |
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Mark Loundy, Photo Editor
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San Jose | CA | USA | Posted: 1:29 AM on 02.10.09 |
->> Andrew,
There was no public interest in preserving the buggywhip industry. There is considerable public interest in preserving a vibrant news industry.
I personally couldn't care less whether newsPAPERS survive. In fact, I wish they'd hurry up and die and make way for news organizations that aren't burdened by the enormous costs of supporting press facilities and distributing tons of ink-stained newsprint.
Once the costs of print delivery are eliminated, news companies will be able to be equally profitable at much lower revenue levels.
There is a great deal to be said for maintaining scarcity in the interest of supporting demand. But there are a whole lot of "you go first" hurdles to clear before that can happen.
Michael,
Is there really any wonder why "The Economist" is seeing circulation gains?
Matthew,
I would love to see a return of cross-ownership rules.
--Mark |
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Kevin Coughlin, Photo Editor
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Freeport | NY | United States | Posted: 2:57 AM on 02.10.09 |
->> I tend to agree with what Mr. Harpe is saying...which is what Dallas Mavericks owner/billionaire Mark Cuban has been saying all along....
You're on a 22-hour flight to Austrailia and your laptop goes dead (you're not in first class & don't have a power converter). What do you do?
Mr. Cuban sees a renaissance back to traditional newspapers - especially in the long form. Mr. Harpe is correct when he states that long-form news DOES NOT look the same on the web as it does on a well-designed printed page. Many of us overlook the fact our printed work is in fact FRAMED by very talented page designers. That itself is an art. Headline writers are also artistes. They are the ingredients that form the perfect package of news.
In the latest issue of TIME magazine (I actually bought the PRINTED version), "How To Save Your Newspaper" Feb. 16. 2009, there is a proposal to charge news "a nickel, dime, or quarter at a time". The meaning being that NEWS IS NOT FREE....Meaning photography is not free either. Although every Perez Hilton/Napster bandit out here is trying to take as much for free as possible.
It costs money to open up a news bureau in Baghdad, cover the Olympics abroad or photograph a Presidential Inauguration. Does this money come out of thin air? Do these little banner ads that charge pennies on the print advertising rates cut it? The answer is unequivocally NO.
I'm very surprised my good friend, Mr. Loundy - who has championed my causes in the past (I thank you) is actually waiting for newsPAPERS to die off. I think to kill them off completely would be catastrophic - if at least to form a system of NEWS GATHERING CHECKS & BALANCES.
The United States Government has three branches: Executive, Legislative and Judicial. I think the news industry NEEDS the printed arm as a point of record, history, and accuracy. How many times are web bulletins recalled? (answer: more often than you think!) While the web and electronic news gadgets are a great way to get short, fast news instantly, you can just as quickly get the WRONG news.
More importantly - say for local news: Your nephew scores the game winning touchdown in the HS football game and you want to remember that MOMENT for posterity. Are your going to print the web story with the tiny thumbnail photo and frame THAT? What are you going to line your bird cage or kitty litter box with or wrap fish with when all you have is your iPhone? Despite what anyone says, there will be a place for actual newsPAPERS. How many left after this year? Anyone's guess... |
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David Harpe, Photographer
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Louisville | KY | USA | Posted: 7:00 AM on 02.10.09 |
->> Mark,
You keep bringing up the "buggy whip" analogy and it just isn't appropriate here.
What is happening in print media is much more like what is and has been going on in the construction industry with computer integration. Architects and engineers design buildings on computers now. They do not spend hours slaving on drafting tables with mechanical pencils and scales. They design, revise, collaborate, model and review, mostly on computer.
But when it comes to presenting things to a client, they always do boards. Powerpoint is in the room, but the design, layout, finishes, etc. are all done hardcopy, like it's been done for decades, because it's the best tool for the job.
On the construction site, the supervisor has a laptop...and big rolls of hardcopy plans that he spreads out on the hood of the truck to tell the guys where to sink the pilings. A hardcopy on the hood of a truck is the best way to communicate that type of information.
Computers and the Internet are just another tool in the toolbox for these guys. Drafting tables are gathering dust in the back room, and if the only skill you had was drawing plans on a drafting table with a pencil and you didn't learn autocad, you're out of a job. Drafting tables have been replaced with monster printers and plotters, and CAD operators replaced draftsmen. Architectural firms use almost as much paper as they did previously - save a few rounds of revisions.
In that industry, computers and the Internet have augmented print, not replaced it. It's exactly what is happening in media. Workflows have to be redesigned, and thought has to be given to figure out which medium is appropriate for what stories.
To use the architectural analogy - what should be in the powerpoint versus what should be on the board? Designing a powerpoint is an art and a language almost completely separate from designing a board. It is the same for web sites vs. printed page. Newspapers are trying to print out the powerpoint.
Hardcopy distribution of information is far from dead. It will change, things will be different, some information will not be distributed in print anymore. But a lot will.
Our local news weekly recently changed their printing style from newsprint to a glossy magazine paper stock with gorgeous color. It looks like a completely different publication. It's beautiful. They also redid their web site and now do daily short-form updates to augment the print side of things. These are the kinds of changes that will happen in print to keep it viable.
The newspaper industry has to survive the "Clear Channelization" that has gone on over the past two or three decades. Clear Channel absolutely wrecked the radio industry. Yes, other competing technologies were vying for earballs at the same time. But the primary, single most significant element that decimated the industry was overcommercialization and genericizing local radio outlets due to centralized corporate ownership. Clear Channel goes so far as to synchronize commercial breaks across stations in markets so that no matter where a listener turns on the dial, they'll hear a commercial break. Local talent was replaced with voice tracks from Cincinnati. Formats change on stations once a year now - not once a decade as in the past. With that type of nonsense going on, why WOULDN'T listeners look for something else?
You can't just blame it on technology. If your original goes sour, technology just gives people an alternative. But the masses act in unison...once you start losing a few you'll lose a lot, and it takes work to get them back. People still like well done, long form journalism. But you can't fake it, and you'll have to do it for awhile, at a loss, to get people back. But it can be done...particularly if your feet aren't held to the Wall Street fire of double-digit year-over-year profit growth. |
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Mark Loundy, Photo Editor
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San Jose | CA | USA | Posted: 11:58 AM on 02.10.09 |
->> David,
I guess we'll see. I've been writing about the future of media for more than 20 years. My track record is pretty good.
--Mark |
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Matthew Hinton, Photographer, Assistant
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New Orleans | LA | USA | Posted: 2:37 PM on 02.10.09 |
->> To give you an idea of how convoluted things are. (Thank you deregulation)
Careerbuilder spent about $3 million per ad during the Superbowl.
According to the CareerBuilder site:
"Owned by Gannett Co, Inc., Tribune Company, The McClatchy Company, and Microsoft Corp., CareerBuilder.com offers a vast online and print network to help job seekers connect with employers."
Think about those companies and how many people they have laid off this year and think about Gannett's forcing of employees to take a week off without pay. Those layoffs and the week without pay probably helped finance those Super Bowl ads.
That's what happens when you have a conglomerate- there is a lot robbing Peter to pay Paul. One part of company gives money to another wing. But in tax law the companies maybe considered different LLCs or Limited Liability Corporations.
This is what happens in so-called internet news sites which are often separate LLCs from the newspapers they service.
I think the internet news sites are not good business models. They have little or no production costs. Why? Because they take content from their newspapers subsidiaries in the same company, but they don't get a bill for those services. The actual costs of production is for the newspaper staff. So the newspaper takes a loss while the internet wing of the company can say they are making money.
Yahoo news at one point had one news person who actually gathered news. Yahoo News is one of the top internet news sites. They don't need a news staff. They take content from the AP or other wire services for almost nothing. From the AP they get access to the news produced by thousands of newspapers across the company.
If those thousands of newspapers actually billed Yahoo what it actually cost to make the news, Yahoo would no longer exist. The same is true for just about every news site that newspapers own. There is no accounting of the true costs.
Also from the same article
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/24/AR200810240...
"'The reason we do not do this [put content on the web in Japan]is because there is no business model to gain sufficient revenue from a Web site, at least not yet,' Satsuka said.
In the United States, as printed newspaper circulation falls about 2 percent a year, major newspaper Web sites are attracting huge numbers of readers.
But the growth of online advertising revenue has stalled this year. Even when it was growing rapidly, online ad revenue was not nearly enough to make up for steep, steady declines in the more lucrative print advertising. "
The internet is not a good business model.
To save media weather it be newspapers or whatever you need regulation. You shouldn't be able to own a television station, a cable station, a radio station, and a newspaper in the same market like some companies now do. This same market monopolization happened mostly in the past two decades (thank you deregulation). Look at how lax the cross-ownership rules have become http://www.fcc.gov/ownership/rules.html
Employees already have or will end up having four presidents or publishers to report to in the same market with each head of the company wanting the best content. In the end robbing one part of the company to pay another part of the company like robbing Peter to pay Paul.
Summer Redstone one of the pioneers of conglomerates with Viacom said in an Iconoclasts documentary that he doesn't think mergers are they way to go anymore. This coming from the man who said "Content is King." He believes in copyright and finding ways to make money off of content.
His quote
"The time and effort spent creating and the months spent producing, marketing and distributing content is an investment; it is not intended to be a donation."
I think donating or giving away content is bad, weather it is to the public or some subsidiary of the same company.
The internet is not a good business model, yet. Conglomerates are not doing well as business models either. Giving things away for free is not a business model that will last. |
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Jeff Brehm, Photographer, Photo Editor
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Charlotte | NC | USA | Posted: 3:59 PM on 02.10.09 |
->> Mr. Satsuka has it dead right -- "There is no business model to gain sufficient revenue from a Web site, at least not yet."
That's because, as David and others have pointed out here, customers won't pay for something they can get for free. However, if they PERCEIVE you offer something of value they want and cannot get anywhere else, they'll pay for it -- sometimes a lot (I give you bottled water, Starbucks coffee, and basically anything "collectible.") Note the key word here is PERCEIVE. Whether the item in question is of demonstrably more value (i.e., bottled vs. tap water) is irrelevant; the crux is how desireable the customer THINKS it is, and the knowledge there is only one place to get it only enhances that perception and the sense of need to have it.
As David notes, newspapers never were intended to be your 24-hour source for news. Newspapers should do what they do best -- in-depth reporting and photography, that "Fourth Estate" role -- and only put enough of their unique content on the web to create the perception that a hard copy is worth having. |
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