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|| SportsShooter.com: Member Message Board
Newspaper may begin to charge for online content.
Jon L Hendricks, Photographer
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Hobart | IN | USA | Posted: 11:45 AM on 05.07.09 |
->> From CNN today:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/BUSINESS/05/07/murdoch.web.content/index.html
Oh geez....it's really almost too late to start charging for content unless everyone does it or you're providing a radically different product. A precedent has been set and the bullet hole in the foot is already bleeding. Advertising should always be secondary to quality content and it's finally being realized. |
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Richard Uhlhorn, Photographer
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Chelan Falls | WA | USA | Posted: 12:54 PM on 05.07.09 |
->> According to NPR this morning, the big three: The NYT, Washington Post and the Boston Globe are willing to subsidize the purchase of the new, and larger, Kindle DX if the consumer will sign-up for a long term subscription. Each newspaper would then be downloaded to the Kindle and ready for perusal when you wake up each morning. Not a bad idea actually, but not the business model that will kept them out of financial harm.
The business model that will keep them profitable and keep journalists and photojournalists employed is quite simple really. It's called charging real money for advertising on their websites, but to charge, they will have to provide an exciting site with great content that people will want to visit regularly and then prove it to the potential advertiser.
Rich |
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Alan Rogers, Photographer
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Hickory | NC | USA | Posted: 1:15 PM on 05.07.09 |
->> CEOs and publishers have been boasting about their innovations in online journalism for a decade, but in general the actual content is a byproduct of the print edition and an afterthought of the journalists. Any move towards making the news profitable while still accessable is a positive step.
But Richard said it right: quality is the only thing that will keep advertisers and readers coming back. |
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Michael Fischer, Photographer
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Spencer | Ia | USA | Posted: 1:53 PM on 05.07.09 |
->> As I have said many times before, quality is the only real option unless you're WalMart. Only one player gets to be the cheapest.
Quality means hiring or continuing to employee real professionals. FREE is not part of the equation.
Let's hope this is the beginning of the end for drinking the free koolaid.
Michael |
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David Harpe, Photographer
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Louisville | KY | USA | Posted: 2:00 PM on 05.07.09 |
->> http://gizmodo.com/5244171/amazon-wants-70-of-newspaper-revenue-for-kindle-...
"According to James Moroney, President and CEO of the Dallas Morning News, Amazon demands a ludicrous cut of newspaper sales for distribution on the Kindle. From his talk with the Senate:
The Kindle, which I think is a marvelous device, the best deal Amazon will give the Dallas Morning News-and we've negotiated this up to the last two weeks-they want 70 percent of the subscriptions revenue. I get 30 percent, they get 70 percent. On top of that they have said we get the right to republish your intellectual property to any portable device. Now is that a business model that is going to work for newspapers?"
Apple is really the only one who can make this work. There are rumors of a tablet-sized iPhone device, and Apple has a knack of pricing things at just the right spot to make it all work. If Apple releases a tablet that can do newspaper content, Amazon's kindle will end up in the closet next to the Sony e-reader. |
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Nick Morris, Photographer
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San Marcos | CA | United States | Posted: 2:21 PM on 05.07.09 |
| ->> The Kindle will never work or become mainstream. Their asking people to lug yet another devise that is a bit too big to just slide into your pocket. People already lug around laptops and cell phones ALL of which already have the ability to do everything the Kindle does and more. So ask yourself why would you drop another $500 + another subscription fee for the Kindle when everything you need is already in your pocket or laptop??? If I were Moroney I'd point Amazon to the door with a 80-20% counter offer putting 80% back into the paper! |
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Thomas E. Witte, Photographer, Photo Editor
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Cincinnati | OH | USA | Posted: 3:01 PM on 05.07.09 |
->> Jon, I thought the same thing too and wrote a lengthy diatribe about it in my parallel thread - but then I deleted it when I realized that if websites start charging and people refuse to pay, they actually aren't loosing any money because you can't go lower than zero.
One of the most ironic things about all of this is that everyone has failed to see that multimedia and online photo galleries have played a huge role in this predicament. Hear me out...
Papers realized they could make a little bit of extra money by putting ads in their online edition, but that ad prices would be based on hits instead of circulation. Online ad rates are micro-miniscule compared to hard copy rates, but income is income. So to drive up hit totals, they started offering online photo galleries to give people a reason to go to the website after reading the exact same story in the paper. Some papers required each photographer to submit at least one gallery a day while others ramped up their freelance coverage to cover social events strictly for the online editions... Spending more money on projects that weren't pulling in much income.
A few thousand readers realized they could get the same paper for free online and not have to worry about the paperboy not arriving before they left for work or better yet, sliding it across your driveway, tearing the bag and letting water get in. They didn't need to hang their laptops over chairs and railings to dry out. So the circulations started to slip a little leading to a slight decrease in what they could charge for ads, impacting the bottom line and leading to brainstorming sessions about how to make more money.
"Well, online ad sales are rapidly increasing (even though they were still responsible for less than 10% of the revenue stream) so what can we do to keep driving that up?"
"What if we took a page from CNN.com's book and start putting some videos online? This is the MTV generation, people need bells and whistles to keep their attention."
So pretty soon even the smallest daily was doing at least one video a week. Now-a-days I know of several papers that put out 3-8 videos a DAY. Is that a bad thing? Yes. Why? Because they weren't just pulling photogs off of other assignments, they were also hiring on video shooters meaning that a huge chunk of their salary budget was being spent on employee time devoted to providing content being given away for free, i.e. a catastrophically disproportionate return on investment. Images from the shoot were still used in the newspaper, but with all the new bells and whistles online, several more thousand people gave up their paid subscriptions because "look at all this stuff that's here for free."
Circulation continues to plummet, they're pulling in 60% of what they did 4 years prior while dealing with inflation and operating costs associated with staying on the technology curve (computers, software, camcorders, mics, audio recorders and again, employee time).
All along they said that the websites were "interactive" which was a fallacy. Saying a website is interactive because readers can click around and read the stories they want to is like saying is newspaper is interactive because the reader can turn the pages manually. They truly made it interactive when they gave people the power to provide reader comments. This gave people more reason to check in online because they wanted to see what other peoples reaction was to their comments. A few thousand more people wised up and realized they were getting the same thing for free online while at this point some people had a week's worth of papers still in the bag under the end table. This also is about the time when the "quality always wins" argument got thrown out the window. Have you ever read some of the reader comments? Even the most innocuous articles end up with some offensive jerk posting a comment. You would think that would drive people away in droves but for every person that stops going to the website, there are 5 more go to it to see the fight because what do you do when you know two kids are going to duke it out by the flag pole after school? You go to the flag pole after school to watch.
Circulations continue to drop, ad rev continues to drop and the suits continued to watch their online hits skyrocket leading to higher online ad rates (even though they were still a far cry from hard copy sales figures); "screw it, it's the only the only thing posting positive numbers right now, what else can we do to spice it up?"
"Let's start blogging!"
Rather than wait until tomorrow morning to pay $0.50 to get their favorite sports writer's take on how their team blew a four run lead? They could read the exact same story an hour after the game - for free. But why wait until the end of the game when they could get the gist of the article in two paragraph chunks every inning or so? Plus now they could post comments to the blog updates and maybe get a quote used.
Somewhere around there they also started inviting people to submit their photos at first, and then content. This further caused more people to flee the hard copy and flock to the free copy.
I would say that the cycle keeps continuing but it's not a cycle - it's linear.
I had more points but I think you get the drift. |
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David Harpe, Photographer
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Louisville | KY | USA | Posted: 4:47 PM on 05.07.09 |
->> The one thing newspapers have done better than anyone else throughout the years is long form, research-intensive journalism. A reporter who costs the company $50k+ a year has to be able to spend two or three months on something that results in only a few pages of content. All of the online models - paid circ included - do not have the kind of money in them to support this type of journalism.
Without long-form journalism, newspapers are simply competing in the churn with everyone else. By doing distilled bite-oriented stories they're just competing with TV and radio stations doing the same thing. TV has a decent (yet shrinking) offline revenue stream which pays most of the bills. For them the online component is basically value-add...a promotion vehicle. They have reporters, editors, photographers and an entire infrastructure designed and refined over decades to do this type of production. They win this battle, hands down.
I honestly think the only way what we think of as "newspaper journalism" will survive (regardless of the distribution medium) is through subsidies...basically transitioning to a non-profit setup. Foundation support, local benefactors, that sort of thing. It's hard to say whether the broadsheet-ish print product will survive. I kinda doubt it. Broadsheet worked when the daily regimen consisted of breakfast at the table with the family before heading off to work. A newspaper with coffee was natural and easy. People just don't do things that way anymore.
A weekly magazine format might survive, but the daily print newspaper is pretty much a goner. |
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Aaron Rhoads, Photographer
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McComb | MS | USA | Posted: 4:55 PM on 05.07.09 |
| ->> How bout implanting a device in our brains allowing subscribers to see, hear and smell the news. |
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Peter Wine, Photographer, Photo Editor
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Dayton | OH | USA | Posted: 6:41 PM on 05.07.09 |
->> While I'm not ready to go out and buy a Kindle yet, I wasn't able to buy a $3,000 VCR or $ 5,000 PC when they first came out either.
I like the idea of the Kindle, maybe the form factor will need to be similar to a magazine size or open paperback book to gain some traction.
A tie-in to newspapers is, to me, a natural progression.
Perhaps what we need is a Kindle tie-in to an X-rated web site or magazine.
Quit laughing. The 'adult' industry is one of the things that made the both the VCR and PC the viable things they became. Many 'adult' theatres went out of business after the VCR became widespread.
How many people would have a VCR if they still cost $500? How many would have a PC (or MAC) if they still cost $3K?
Perhaps the Kindle can provide the portability of the print edition, with the up-to-date of the web, making the idea of subscribing to newspapers and magazines a good long term proposal again.
The Kindle will be a loss-leader at the beginning, the way that razors (you know, shaving devices without motors) were sold at a loss to get you to buy that brand of blades, over and over again for (potentially) years.
Whether it's in print, online or on-a-Kindle, people want content, and when desire, convenience and price are in the right mix you have a winner.
And (I think) that people want news 'portals' whether it's a newspaper or a web site.
Sure anyone can now blog, but 50 years (or more) ago, anyone could publish a newspaper (or news sheet.)
Newspapers that were successful over time developed a variety of content to draw people to their 'portal.' They were the place to look when wanting to answer the question 'what's happening?'
Though the time frame was longer (waiting until tomorrow now seems so difficult) the society in general moved at a slower pace.
If all the newspapers go away tomorrow (god forbid) there would be a vacuum of content, and something would be created to fill the void.
Yahoo news, the DrudgeReport and other 'headline' portals would have nothing to link to without actual content.
I hope the recent steps by AP (protecting content producers) and others (subscription based web sites) are going towards a positive goal.
I don't work for a newspaper, but I do freelance work with a newspaper, and hope to continue doing so for a long time as they generate revenue from the many sources (variety of print and web publications) they are cultivating. |
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David Harpe, Photographer
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Louisville | KY | USA | Posted: 10:58 AM on 05.08.09 |
->> http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_conten...
"Delivering the Thursday keynote at the annual E&P/Mediaweek Interactive Conference in New Orleans today, Michael Wolff -- Vanity Fair columnist, Murdoch biographer and Newser.com founder -- again predicted the "death of newspapers," adding that he'd been having "fun" pushing the proposition in recent months to the point of being considered a "Dr. Doom.""
I find it fascinating that the man who founded newser.com (a site consisting of aggregated content from mostly newspaper and wire web sites) trashes those same sites with such reckless abandon. If the content is so useless, why does he bother aggregating it? |
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N. Scott Trimble, Photographer
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Lake Oswego | OR | USA | Posted: 12:37 PM on 05.08.09 |
->> Richard, I have been touting that kind of concept for years. The Kindle isn't the best device though. Flex screen technology is the answer to helping newspapers and with the right biz plan, can keep them running.
Its a Kindle on a flexible mylar-like flimsy screen. You could roll it up, stick it in your back pocket, whatever. Either stick it in a kiosk to download material or have a wifi ability, but the ease of use and transportation would be ideal. And, if publications treat these things like cell phone plans, give discounted or even free flexies for two year agreements, then it would be a viable plan.
I played with a very rudimentary flexi screen a few years back, imagine a black, with green text DOS screen. I don't know where work in it is now, I would hope color screens. I do know the military was looking at weaving it into uniforms once.
But anyway, mix flexible, durable technology with a cell phone-like plan, and I think that could help possibly make strides in boosting the industry, unless its already too late. |
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Eric Canha, Photographer
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Brockton | MA | United States | Posted: 1:28 PM on 05.08.09 |
->> First off I personally think that the horse cow pig and whatever other animals were in the barn are LONG gone. With the exception of very VERY niche oriented content general news either on a local or national level is too easily had for free. Whether through one of the local TV stations that runs a website or via any number of aggregation sites there are too many 'options' for people to NOT pay for content.
On a mass market front getting people to adopt another piece of hardware will be a VERY tough sell. Plus if the market does develop I would expect that the growing number of iPhone/Blackberry devices would be better positioned and suited to deliver TV news clips in a video format and beat out the 'papers' at every step.
I just think that the need to have yet one more device to read what is essentially already available via the web or on devices that we already carry (iPhones/Blackberries) won't fly. I'm with Alton Brown just no place for a uni-tasker of that kind. |
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David Eulitt, Photographer
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Kansas City | MO | USA | Posted: 1:30 PM on 05.08.09 |
->> Thomas makes excellent points, as usual. As a consumer of news along with working at a paper, once you stop requiring paying for your news, you'll never ever get that back. You can't charge, then give away, then charge again. The galleries topic that Thomas made is at our paper too....cheap, easily counted hits but no corresponding ad revenue rise coming in. The numbers look great...except the financial ones.
Sadly, the whole business model is doomed, which began by giving away content for free, then dumbing down stories to appeal to readers that couldn't care less about what's in that paper thing in the boxes on the street corner, which in turn alienates the exact core of readers who WILL pay for their subscriptions. Add in reducing the number of pages and sections...wow, what a bargain! Less for more!
No other business actively woos a demographic that is completely uninterested along with angering their loyal customers. It would be like Apple targeting ALL of their products sales exclusively to the Amish and the Luddite communities.
The sad part is ALL of these newspaper companies all did exactly the same thing, advice from the same consultants, all like lemmings...jumping off a cliff. |
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Allen Murabayashi, Photographer
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Aaron Rhoads, Photographer
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McComb | MS | USA | Posted: 1:39 AM on 05.11.09 |
| ->> “and no American, for the first 30 years of television, paid anything for their rabbit ears. Now they pay $60, $70 a month for better content.” |
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Fredrik Naumann, Photographer
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Oslo | Oslo | Norway | Posted: 6:28 AM on 05.11.09 |
| ->> We all read about photography on the internet, for free. Yet so many of us think it's worth $25 to be part of this community and get all the SS.com content. I think that can be indicative of what the future can hold for paid content: niche products. |
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Richard Uhlhorn, Photographer
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Chelan Falls | WA | USA | Posted: 10:49 AM on 05.11.09 |
->> Fredrik... At least their is compelling and useful content on Sportsshooter.com. Not so for television anymore. I'm getting really tired of paying $50 a month for television services.
Unfortunately, there are several channels I'd miss if I didn't; SPEED, FOXSports, ESPN, sometimes the Travel Channel with Samantha or Anthony. Oh yeah... the newest SOAP OPREAS called "Countdown with Keith Oberman" and "Rachel Madow."
Cheers Rich |
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Kohl Threlkeld, Student/Intern
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Monroe | MI | USA | Posted: 11:45 AM on 05.18.09 |
->> About the Kindle,
Who really wants to carry around that thing. The people who want the NYT, Washington Post, and Boston Globe, the most are probably people who already carry laptops and an i phone or blackberry. And they assume people will want to carry one more piece of equipment that only lets us read the paper. Once again they are thinking like a a newspaper and not like a business. I can check NYT.com,any time of the day, i get its twitter feed, and us the AP app all on my i phone. If your used to getting your news this way,and many people are, this thing aint gonna work. |
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