8 ms·

Newspaper Industry Is Running Out of Time to Adapt to Digital Future

72 points by daegloe 14y ago

jbarham 14y ago
> ...newspapers are being clobbered by paltry returns on underfunded pension plans. So that would be "defined benefit" pension plans then. The markets have no obligation to meet absurdly optimistic forecasts of returns on investment. If you're looking for someone to blame, consider that 10-year Treasury yields are under 2%, of which the single biggest buyer is the Federal Reserve. > The bread and butter for most of the [newspaper] industry is local information. No, the bread and butter of the newspaper industry is celebrity gossip, which is the very opposite of local information, and is a commodity product, which is why people are unwilling to pay for local newspapers.
- philwelch 14y ago
  I wouldn't call celebrity gossip a commodity product. People usually pay for commodities.
  - nl 14y ago
    The term "commodity product" in this context refers a product that has been commoditized[1], and thus no premium price is possible. From Wikipedia: The more specific meaning of the term commodity is applied to goods only. It is used to describe a class of goods for which there is demand, but which is supplied without qualitative differentiation across a market.[2] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commoditization http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commoditization [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity
    - philwelch 14y ago
      Yes, I know what a commodity is. Thanks for insulting my intelligence. I was distinguishing between a commodity product and a non-product, which is something people don't even bother paying money for because it's practically free. A commodity product can't earn a premium price, but a non-product earns approximately epsilon.
      - nl 14y ago
        Thanks for insulting my intelligence I have no opinion on your intelligence. However, given that you were getting down votes I think it is clear I wasn't the only one who thought your writing could be clearer.
- derleth 14y ago
  > the bread and butter of the newspaper industry is celebrity gossip, which is the very opposite of local information, and is a commodity product, which is why people are unwilling to pay for local newspapers. This directly contradicts itself, which is probably your point. Focusing on local news is a necessary but perhaps not a sufficient condition for local newspapers to survive: They don't have a monopoly on any other product, but there's no guarantee they'll be able to survive on that one. Or maybe they can create local celebrities to follow around and gossip about. (They might run up against tougher defamation laws that way, though.)
  - jbarham 14y ago
    Celebrity gossip is fungible. E.g., suppose I cared about the gory details of the Cruise/Holmes divorce. A quick search tells me there are almost 2600 articles on Google News for "TomKat". Clearly there is very little incentive to buy a local newspaper when so much information is available for free from so many different suppliers online. Anecdotally, I live in Melbourne and get a weekly local newspaper, but I don't pay for it since it comes with a bundle of advertising flyers. We sometimes glance through the newspaper, but I wouldn't be willing to pay for it. I'll wager that given the choice, most people would rather ditch the newspaper and keep the flyers. FWIW the future of journalism will probably increasingly look like http://www.dailymail.co.uk/ http://www.dailymail.co.uk/. It's trivia and gossip mainlined straight to the optic nerve. Addictive and profitable? Sure. "Great journalism"? No.
  - jeffool 14y ago
    >Focusing on local news is a necessary but perhaps not a sufficient condition for local newspapers to survive: They don't have a monopoly on any other product, but there's no guarantee they'll be able to survive on that one. I disagree. I think we'll still have local coverage. I just don't think it'll be very in depth for a long time, and it will be very understaffed. (And in case there's any doubt, I mean these statements from a personal, moral standpoint, not an economics one.) My city (Albany, Georgia,)has one supremely dominating TV station, one tiny one, one dominating newspaper, and one that puts out 50 issues a year. The neighboring, largely rural, Worth County, has a news site called WorthIt2U.net Sure, that's an infuriatingly bad name to me, but to the people of the community there, who kinda new AOL, and got faster Internet when it came bundled with their TV and came with their phones? It's where they go. And often times, they beat the larger places to stories that get hits (wrecks, arrests,) because they're local. People have responded. People that stereotypically would be considered as "not online" have a new primary source of local information, it's just ran by a much smaller crowd. What's not able to survive is an old model, and I don't think anyone on HN has a problem leaving behind old models. The only thing missing is this same thing targeting the prime demographic.
damian2000 14y ago
I often see an article appear in a newspaper a good 2 or 3 days after I first found out about it on HN or twitter. For me, that's the main reason they are losing customers - they are not doing the job they used to be good at, i.e. coming up with news or in-depth reporting you can't find anywhere else.
- minikomi 14y ago
  On the other hand, good storytelling and in depth radio journalism in the form of podcasts seems to be going from strength to strength.
  - draggnar 14y ago
    Exactly. I'd like to see this issue from the perspective of Vice Magazine or The Atlantic, who seem to be finding a way.
- Aloisius 14y ago
  Odd. I mostly see articles in newspapers linked to on HN and twitter.
rmason 14y ago
The time is fast approaching where there will be few local newspapers, just regional ones. For quite some time the newspaper business has been a game of musical chairs for employees and the music just sped up.
- brandnewlow 14y ago
  Things may shift in the future, but at the moment, it's the regional guys who are going under. The local guys are getting bought by Warren Buffet. This is because the local guys still have their "effective monopoly" over local advertising in their communities. http://www.fool.co.uk/news/investing/2012/05/28/why-buffett-is-buying-newspapers.aspx http://www.fool.co.uk/news/investing/2012/05/28/why-buffett-... The regional guys and the guys covering large cities are the ones getting hammered hardest right now because they're being exposed as not being "essential reading" for any one thing. In Chicago, for instance, the Chicago Tribune covers Illinois state politics, but the real wonks turn to insider blogs like Capitol Fax for that news. So Tribune's not needed for that. Sports? ESPNChicago.com and all the Chicago-focused sports blogs have them beat there for resources and depth. City Hall news? They're untouchable there...but who wants to buy ads against that content? And who really wants to read it other than local wonks and older people who own homes. Entertainment? People find out what's going on from massive sites like FB, Twitter, Yelp, you name it. And on and on. So a paper like the Tribune is left with a great brand, lots of exclusive content, and the ability to out-execute just about any of their competitors at anything it wants in terms of quality. But none of that matters so much to consumers who have tons of more convenient options. Meanwhile, the internet hasn't really figured out hyper local yet, with the exception of Topix.com, which is huge in small towns. Everyblock might get there, and even Reddit eventually as geographic subreddits continue to grow.
ethank 14y ago
Newspapers are finally accounting for their assumptions of necessity throughout the last 15 years. My family was involved in what at one time was the second largest paper in CA (the OC Register). My mom was the CFO and I started there at 15 as their first webmaster. My mom would always bring home things for me to test as "threats" to the paper rather than opportunities. Delphi, Prodigy, Aol, compuserve, eworld, Microsoft blackbird, cd-I and finally a BRI ISDN PPP account. Threats. Not opportunities. When they finally put the entire newspaper online it was in PDF. I left in 2001. And then went into the music business in 2005. Hah.
- ethank 14y ago
  To be clear my mom was on the right side. The publisher was on the "threat" side.
  - natrius 14y ago
    The publisher was right. It's 2012 and we still don't know how to make newsgathering profitable online. It's easy to say that news organizations should have been on the forefront of adopting new technologies, but even today in the internet's adolescence, print journalism is significantly more profitable. Convincing people to stick with print as long as possible while staving off "threats" was the right strategy as far as I can tell.
    - ak217 14y ago
      It was the right short-term strategy. Would you rather be in charge of a media enterprise that is producing dwindling revenue, has a limited lifespan, aging workforce and no way to attract new talent, or one with smaller but rising revenue, sexy requisitions and massive future opportunities?
      - natrius 14y ago
        That dichotomy is convenient, but false. News organizations have no problem attracting new talent. It is difficult to get a job as a journalist. The only news organizations that both have had a print product and meet your latter description stopped printing because they'd squeezed all of the profit out of it that was there to have, and their "smaller but rising revenue" from their online operations are all that remain. Until you can point to an online business model that is more profitable than print, preserving print and its attendant profits was clearly the right strategy.
joering2 14y ago
But isn't it more like a medium that has changed? What stops those newspapers from running online versions? In fact, most or all already have an online presence. Wouldn't it be cheaper to run a website, versus running a printing press? In addition, the $ spent on ads in newspapers will surely shrink, but $ spent on online advertise continue to rise without signs of stopping. To me this whole rant about running out of newspaper business is like a rant of messenger going out of business. No, you don't have to ride your bicycle through entire city to deliver message from Mr. X to Mr. Y; we have email and internet now. At the end of the day, the consumption of news will not change -- people will still want to know whats going on in the wild world, whether it is economy, politics, science or celeb gossips. Sure the medium will change, but lets stop crying over the fact that 99.999% of population is not using an electrical telegraph anymore (if most never did).
- nhebb 14y ago
  Ken Auletta of The New Yorker spoke about this on Charlie Rose a few years ago. He explained that while the operating costs for online news is lower than printing press / hard copy distribution, the advertising revenues are even lower still. If a newspaper went to an all online format, the differential would be negative.
  - brandnewlow 14y ago
    And the advertising revenues are so much lower because on the web, advertisers measure actual impressions of their ads. They don't pay for ads that don't get loaded by a reader. Meanwhile in print, advertisers have always paid no matter if anyone paged over to their ad or not. The lack of measurement was the secret sauce that made print publications profitable.
  - prawn 14y ago
    Did any newspaper try maintaining budgets across the transition? e.g., advertiser goes from paying $500 for their print advertising, to paying $500 for their print and web advertising, to (in the future) paying $500 for their web advertising? The first stage was already active with every publication. The second stage could've been a reasonable upsell (same price, but get online coverage too!). By the third you're pushing better tracking/metrics, interactive ads, colour-by-default, animation, etc. I get the impression that many papers treated it all very separately. In fact, for some time, one of the biggest entities in Australia maintained separate print and digital writing units (which strikes me as bizarre).
mjfern 14y ago
To survive, newspapers need to create significantly more value for readers and advertisers to drive demand and revenue, and lower their cost structures to about 10% of their historical levels. Any incremental steps, from pay walls to moderate layoffs, are totally inadequate to turn their fortunes around. Let me explain. The value proposition of most newspapers for both readers and advertisers pales in comparison to many new media options. For instance, who here gets their technology or sports news from a national or local newspaper? Who looks to newspapers for the latest stock market performance, restaurant reviews, or movie showtimes? Since their value proposition is depressed, newspapers are attracting fewer readers (and subscription dollars) and, in turn, fewer advertising dollars. And then you have typical newspapers' unwieldy cost structures. Many newspapers are still operating with staff levels that are multiples greater than their new media counterparts. I don't have any current examples, but during the 2008 elections the Huffington Post was driving as much online traffic as the Washington Post, with a headcount of about 6.25% (50 employees versus 800). In short, lower value begets lower revenue, and if we assume a high cost structure, it's a downward spiral to oblivion.
- WiseWeasel 14y ago
  The Washington Post also does actual reporting, unlike the Huffington Post; they actually produce something of value, even if they don't monetize it as successfully.
  - mjfern 14y ago
    > The Washington Post also does actual reporting... So does the Huffington Post, but many of the writers are unpaid contributors. > they actually produce something of value... Tell this to readers and advertisers, who are voting with their time and $.
    - brandnewlow 14y ago
      Nate Silver made a pretty good case that HuffPo bloggers don't contribute much to site traffic. http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/the-economics-of-blogging-and-the-huffington-post/ http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/the-econ... The implication is that the aggregated content lifted from other sites and the original content created by HuffPo writers gets 100x the traffic and eyeballs.
look_lookatme 14y ago
I've known a few old newspapermen in my various jobs, and they have all been fascinated by the speed of information in this new order. They see the opportunity and the power. But they also like to wax about the old times... and make no mistake, the old times was just a big boys club. Alcoholism was rampant, misogyny was par. A big story or scoop would take weeks if not months to develop and it might get buried on some fucked up principle (see Caro's excerpt in the New Yorker this year on LBJ's impending downfall until JFK and Dallas... a scoop, if not buried, alters the history of a million young American men and American foreign policy in profound ways), and then, once ready for the presses, after the editor trimmed it down, they'd all go celebrate their Pulitzer chances at a pub. It was a culture of exclusion and entitlement; your entree was "J-School" pedigree, or worse, your ability to kowtow to as a junior to an established writer until you got your chance, because that was your only path to being heard. It was a time where accountability was proportional to distribution, which is to say, tightly controlled at all levels and, for better or for worse, self regulated. It was also a culture of self-congratulation. The only redeeming quality of the old school is that self-control over distribution gave them stupendous levels of access and leverage, something that doesn't seemingly exist anymore.
- brandnewlow 14y ago
  Every profession out there has had periods that could be described this way from the last century.
  - look_lookatme 14y ago
    This is fundamentally not true. The massive disruption of this industry isn't from Japan/Germany or banana republics or China, this is pure change in distribution. It's analogous to music or movies or tv, only none of those industries fancied themselves as the "fourth estate" while the getting was good. The ground moved beneath the feet of this industry and as much as they like to sit around and acknowledge that with self-loathing NYT pieces, I'm not sure they've accepted it. Seems like there's still a lot of sitting about and grumbling about how bad it is and how much better it was when back when. Or worse, how relevant they really, really, really still are cough David Carr cough. See The Newsroom on HBO for example of this version of onanistic self flagellation.
ThomPete 14y ago
Adapting means firing 95% of your staff it's really that simple.
wsetchell 14y ago
Idea : make newspapers more like collaborative blogs with some extra payment options. http://wsetchell.blogspot.com/2012/07/local-newspapers.html http://wsetchell.blogspot.com/2012/07/local-newspapers.html
- brandnewlow 14y ago
  Hey, Will, Good post. I think consumers have this already in Facebook and Twitter. The news guys already post all their news there, for free, to try to generate ad revenues. People don't click through because often the entire story is there in the headlines and that's all they really cared about anyways.
prawn 14y ago
Seems to me that too often news sources make the decision to consolidate when general offerings mean they'll face more competition and leave them with a very broad, poorly-defined userbase. Target a specific area, get local readers and you're an advertising option for local businesses. My local paper (in Australia) has cut back its basketball reporting (for example) over the years and instead covered some pretty generic stories. e.g., instead of covering a domestic league, the writer has instead covered the US college Final Four. A few points: - their contacts and history are in covering local sport - why would I read this generic coverage over ESPN and American sources who have writers in the thick of the action? - in covering domestic basketball, the audience might be smaller, but the paper would have virtually no competition in covering it - cover local teams and you at least have a shot of building suburb-level audiences and hit up small businesses as a result In print, I understand that newspapers will generally include content such that its level meets a ratio with the advertising at hand. e.g., they might not print an extra four pages because they don't have the ads for it. But online is a different case. If your writer is getting paid a fixed rate, why wouldn't you have them at capacity whenever possible, generating unique, local content for your online version? They could be creating the Final Four fluff-piece for the print version, plus writing up online-only previews and quick opinion pieces on the domestic league. Categorise them by area (North, South, etc) and then find sponsors and advertisers for each. Small-fry ads maybe, but it wouldn't be shotgun advertising.
- brandnewlow 14y ago
  Shotgun advertising paid the bills for 60 years. Small-fry ads never have and it's very hard to make money from them. Newspaper sales reps that came into the industry more than 10 years ago came into it when they basically just processed incoming orders from chains, franchises, and ad agencies. That money is largely gone. "Small-fry ads" means asking those same people to now go out and hunt down money from local businesses being courted by performance-based ad companies like Google, Groupon, Living Social, Twitter, Facebook, Constant Contact, Yelp...you name it. That's a hard job. You need a superb sales staff to take business from those people. If you were a superb sales person, you'd want to make a lot of money and sell a great product everyone wants to buy. Would newspaper sales be your first choice?
wallflower 14y ago
"The unthinkable scenario unfolded something like this: The ability to share content wouldn’t shrink, it would grow. Walled gardens would prove unpopular. Digital advertising would reduce inefficiencies, and therefore profits. Dislike of micropayments would prevent widespread use. People would resist being educated to act against their own desires. Old habits of advertisers and readers would not transfer online. Even ferocious litigation would be inadequate to constrain massive, sustained law-breaking... Journalism has always been subsidized." From Clay Shirky's essay, "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable" http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/ http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking...
kaolinite 14y ago
I work for a digital agency that is owned by a very large newspaper company having been bought to help them adapt to a "digital future". The newspaper company is becoming increasingly desperate - the latest product they've launched is a Groupon clone, which they are pushing pretty hard. Whilst digging around on one of their servers, I've found a few sites which are "virtual shopping malls" with multiple levels and numerous "shops" that you can "buy" (i.e. advertise your site on). I think that they're not too sure what to make of this "Internet thing" so are just trying to port concepts from offline to online and it's not working too well.
- andyking 14y ago
  I worked for a small local radio station and was asked to implement something similar to the "virtual mall" last year on the station website. I was only asked to do it as a neighbouring station had one. It was laid out like a simple street map, in a grid formation, and companies could "rent" a "shop," or more accurately, place their logo in one of the spaces in the grid. I did it, then left the station, and it still sits there online, the "streets" filled with For Rent signs. It's like a failed SimCity, or a 2D version of Second Life...
danso 14y ago
I used to work at a medium sized regional paper...by the time I started, around '05, veterans were already complaining about how the good times had passed. In the 90s, a senior writer could get a project approved that involved going to Russia over the course of the year, ostensibly to write something relevant for our somewhat large Russian immigrant population. When I started, things still seemed good in that I could spend a week on a local story, even driving out to a city several hours away just to talk to people. Today, they don't even have the resources to cover huge events, like earthquakes that hit nearby, and instead rely on AP copy. Last time I visited, nearly everyone I knew was gone, usually for a job working in PR. And even the young idealistic reporters who were my age were all secretly interviewing for PR jobs. There really is little hope of turning things around. It's not just the lack of technical innovation...it's the constant downhill slide...it's hard enough to do good work on an average reporters pay...but to do it as your pay gets constantly cut and your hours constantly extended because other colleagues are let go is psychologically draining. And newspapers need more than just good work, or even Pulitzer level work...they need groundbreaking innovation that changes/streamlines the very core of what they do...from the reporters to the editors to the ad people. But there's no capacity or motivation for such entrepreneurship

72 points by daegloe 14y ago

> ...newspapers are being clobbered by paltry returns on underfunded pension plans. So that would be "defined benefit" pension plans then. The markets have no obligation to meet absurdly optimistic forecasts of returns on investment. If you're looking for someone to blame, consider that 10-year Treasury yields are under 2%, of which the single biggest buyer is the Federal Reserve. > The bread and butter for most of the [newspaper] industry is local information. No, the bread and butter of the newspaper industry is celebrity gossip, which is the very opposite of local information, and is a commodity product, which is why people are unwilling to pay for local newspapers.

philwelch 14y ago
I wouldn't call celebrity gossip a commodity product. People usually pay for commodities.
- nl 14y ago
  The term "commodity product" in this context refers a product that has been commoditized[1], and thus no premium price is possible. From Wikipedia: The more specific meaning of the term commodity is applied to goods only. It is used to describe a class of goods for which there is demand, but which is supplied without qualitative differentiation across a market.[2] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commoditization http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commoditization [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity
  - philwelch 14y ago
    Yes, I know what a commodity is. Thanks for insulting my intelligence. I was distinguishing between a commodity product and a non-product, which is something people don't even bother paying money for because it's practically free. A commodity product can't earn a premium price, but a non-product earns approximately epsilon.
    - nl 14y ago
      Thanks for insulting my intelligence I have no opinion on your intelligence. However, given that you were getting down votes I think it is clear I wasn't the only one who thought your writing could be clearer.
derleth 14y ago
> the bread and butter of the newspaper industry is celebrity gossip, which is the very opposite of local information, and is a commodity product, which is why people are unwilling to pay for local newspapers. This directly contradicts itself, which is probably your point. Focusing on local news is a necessary but perhaps not a sufficient condition for local newspapers to survive: They don't have a monopoly on any other product, but there's no guarantee they'll be able to survive on that one. Or maybe they can create local celebrities to follow around and gossip about. (They might run up against tougher defamation laws that way, though.)
- jbarham 14y ago
  Celebrity gossip is fungible. E.g., suppose I cared about the gory details of the Cruise/Holmes divorce. A quick search tells me there are almost 2600 articles on Google News for "TomKat". Clearly there is very little incentive to buy a local newspaper when so much information is available for free from so many different suppliers online. Anecdotally, I live in Melbourne and get a weekly local newspaper, but I don't pay for it since it comes with a bundle of advertising flyers. We sometimes glance through the newspaper, but I wouldn't be willing to pay for it. I'll wager that given the choice, most people would rather ditch the newspaper and keep the flyers. FWIW the future of journalism will probably increasingly look like http://www.dailymail.co.uk/ http://www.dailymail.co.uk/. It's trivia and gossip mainlined straight to the optic nerve. Addictive and profitable? Sure. "Great journalism"? No.
- jeffool 14y ago
  >Focusing on local news is a necessary but perhaps not a sufficient condition for local newspapers to survive: They don't have a monopoly on any other product, but there's no guarantee they'll be able to survive on that one. I disagree. I think we'll still have local coverage. I just don't think it'll be very in depth for a long time, and it will be very understaffed. (And in case there's any doubt, I mean these statements from a personal, moral standpoint, not an economics one.) My city (Albany, Georgia,)has one supremely dominating TV station, one tiny one, one dominating newspaper, and one that puts out 50 issues a year. The neighboring, largely rural, Worth County, has a news site called WorthIt2U.net Sure, that's an infuriatingly bad name to me, but to the people of the community there, who kinda new AOL, and got faster Internet when it came bundled with their TV and came with their phones? It's where they go. And often times, they beat the larger places to stories that get hits (wrecks, arrests,) because they're local. People have responded. People that stereotypically would be considered as "not online" have a new primary source of local information, it's just ran by a much smaller crowd. What's not able to survive is an old model, and I don't think anyone on HN has a problem leaving behind old models. The only thing missing is this same thing targeting the prime demographic.

damian2000 14y ago

I often see an article appear in a newspaper a good 2 or 3 days after I first found out about it on HN or twitter. For me, that's the main reason they are losing customers - they are not doing the job they used to be good at, i.e. coming up with news or in-depth reporting you can't find anywhere else.

minikomi 14y ago
On the other hand, good storytelling and in depth radio journalism in the form of podcasts seems to be going from strength to strength.
- draggnar 14y ago
  Exactly. I'd like to see this issue from the perspective of Vice Magazine or The Atlantic, who seem to be finding a way.
Aloisius 14y ago
Odd. I mostly see articles in newspapers linked to on HN and twitter.

rmason 14y ago

The time is fast approaching where there will be few local newspapers, just regional ones. For quite some time the newspaper business has been a game of musical chairs for employees and the music just sped up.

brandnewlow 14y ago
Things may shift in the future, but at the moment, it's the regional guys who are going under. The local guys are getting bought by Warren Buffet. This is because the local guys still have their "effective monopoly" over local advertising in their communities. http://www.fool.co.uk/news/investing/2012/05/28/why-buffett-is-buying-newspapers.aspx http://www.fool.co.uk/news/investing/2012/05/28/why-buffett-... The regional guys and the guys covering large cities are the ones getting hammered hardest right now because they're being exposed as not being "essential reading" for any one thing. In Chicago, for instance, the Chicago Tribune covers Illinois state politics, but the real wonks turn to insider blogs like Capitol Fax for that news. So Tribune's not needed for that. Sports? ESPNChicago.com and all the Chicago-focused sports blogs have them beat there for resources and depth. City Hall news? They're untouchable there...but who wants to buy ads against that content? And who really wants to read it other than local wonks and older people who own homes. Entertainment? People find out what's going on from massive sites like FB, Twitter, Yelp, you name it. And on and on. So a paper like the Tribune is left with a great brand, lots of exclusive content, and the ability to out-execute just about any of their competitors at anything it wants in terms of quality. But none of that matters so much to consumers who have tons of more convenient options. Meanwhile, the internet hasn't really figured out hyper local yet, with the exception of Topix.com, which is huge in small towns. Everyblock might get there, and even Reddit eventually as geographic subreddits continue to grow.

ethank 14y ago

Newspapers are finally accounting for their assumptions of necessity throughout the last 15 years. My family was involved in what at one time was the second largest paper in CA (the OC Register). My mom was the CFO and I started there at 15 as their first webmaster. My mom would always bring home things for me to test as "threats" to the paper rather than opportunities. Delphi, Prodigy, Aol, compuserve, eworld, Microsoft blackbird, cd-I and finally a BRI ISDN PPP account. Threats. Not opportunities. When they finally put the entire newspaper online it was in PDF. I left in 2001. And then went into the music business in 2005. Hah.

ethank 14y ago
To be clear my mom was on the right side. The publisher was on the "threat" side.
- natrius 14y ago
  The publisher was right. It's 2012 and we still don't know how to make newsgathering profitable online. It's easy to say that news organizations should have been on the forefront of adopting new technologies, but even today in the internet's adolescence, print journalism is significantly more profitable. Convincing people to stick with print as long as possible while staving off "threats" was the right strategy as far as I can tell.
  - ak217 14y ago
    It was the right short-term strategy. Would you rather be in charge of a media enterprise that is producing dwindling revenue, has a limited lifespan, aging workforce and no way to attract new talent, or one with smaller but rising revenue, sexy requisitions and massive future opportunities?
    - natrius 14y ago
      That dichotomy is convenient, but false. News organizations have no problem attracting new talent. It is difficult to get a job as a journalist. The only news organizations that both have had a print product and meet your latter description stopped printing because they'd squeezed all of the profit out of it that was there to have, and their "smaller but rising revenue" from their online operations are all that remain. Until you can point to an online business model that is more profitable than print, preserving print and its attendant profits was clearly the right strategy.

joering2 14y ago

But isn't it more like a medium that has changed? What stops those newspapers from running online versions? In fact, most or all already have an online presence. Wouldn't it be cheaper to run a website, versus running a printing press? In addition, the $ spent on ads in newspapers will surely shrink, but $ spent on online advertise continue to rise without signs of stopping. To me this whole rant about running out of newspaper business is like a rant of messenger going out of business. No, you don't have to ride your bicycle through entire city to deliver message from Mr. X to Mr. Y; we have email and internet now. At the end of the day, the consumption of news will not change -- people will still want to know whats going on in the wild world, whether it is economy, politics, science or celeb gossips. Sure the medium will change, but lets stop crying over the fact that 99.999% of population is not using an electrical telegraph anymore (if most never did).

nhebb 14y ago
Ken Auletta of The New Yorker spoke about this on Charlie Rose a few years ago. He explained that while the operating costs for online news is lower than printing press / hard copy distribution, the advertising revenues are even lower still. If a newspaper went to an all online format, the differential would be negative.
- brandnewlow 14y ago
  And the advertising revenues are so much lower because on the web, advertisers measure actual impressions of their ads. They don't pay for ads that don't get loaded by a reader. Meanwhile in print, advertisers have always paid no matter if anyone paged over to their ad or not. The lack of measurement was the secret sauce that made print publications profitable.
- prawn 14y ago
  Did any newspaper try maintaining budgets across the transition? e.g., advertiser goes from paying $500 for their print advertising, to paying $500 for their print and web advertising, to (in the future) paying $500 for their web advertising? The first stage was already active with every publication. The second stage could've been a reasonable upsell (same price, but get online coverage too!). By the third you're pushing better tracking/metrics, interactive ads, colour-by-default, animation, etc. I get the impression that many papers treated it all very separately. In fact, for some time, one of the biggest entities in Australia maintained separate print and digital writing units (which strikes me as bizarre).

mjfern 14y ago

To survive, newspapers need to create significantly more value for readers and advertisers to drive demand and revenue, and lower their cost structures to about 10% of their historical levels. Any incremental steps, from pay walls to moderate layoffs, are totally inadequate to turn their fortunes around. Let me explain. The value proposition of most newspapers for both readers and advertisers pales in comparison to many new media options. For instance, who here gets their technology or sports news from a national or local newspaper? Who looks to newspapers for the latest stock market performance, restaurant reviews, or movie showtimes? Since their value proposition is depressed, newspapers are attracting fewer readers (and subscription dollars) and, in turn, fewer advertising dollars. And then you have typical newspapers' unwieldy cost structures. Many newspapers are still operating with staff levels that are multiples greater than their new media counterparts. I don't have any current examples, but during the 2008 elections the Huffington Post was driving as much online traffic as the Washington Post, with a headcount of about 6.25% (50 employees versus 800). In short, lower value begets lower revenue, and if we assume a high cost structure, it's a downward spiral to oblivion.

WiseWeasel 14y ago
The Washington Post also does actual reporting, unlike the Huffington Post; they actually produce something of value, even if they don't monetize it as successfully.
- mjfern 14y ago
  > The Washington Post also does actual reporting... So does the Huffington Post, but many of the writers are unpaid contributors. > they actually produce something of value... Tell this to readers and advertisers, who are voting with their time and $.
  - brandnewlow 14y ago
    Nate Silver made a pretty good case that HuffPo bloggers don't contribute much to site traffic. http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/the-economics-of-blogging-and-the-huffington-post/ http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/the-econ... The implication is that the aggregated content lifted from other sites and the original content created by HuffPo writers gets 100x the traffic and eyeballs.

look_lookatme 14y ago

I've known a few old newspapermen in my various jobs, and they have all been fascinated by the speed of information in this new order. They see the opportunity and the power. But they also like to wax about the old times... and make no mistake, the old times was just a big boys club. Alcoholism was rampant, misogyny was par. A big story or scoop would take weeks if not months to develop and it might get buried on some fucked up principle (see Caro's excerpt in the New Yorker this year on LBJ's impending downfall until JFK and Dallas... a scoop, if not buried, alters the history of a million young American men and American foreign policy in profound ways), and then, once ready for the presses, after the editor trimmed it down, they'd all go celebrate their Pulitzer chances at a pub. It was a culture of exclusion and entitlement; your entree was "J-School" pedigree, or worse, your ability to kowtow to as a junior to an established writer until you got your chance, because that was your only path to being heard. It was a time where accountability was proportional to distribution, which is to say, tightly controlled at all levels and, for better or for worse, self regulated. It was also a culture of self-congratulation. The only redeeming quality of the old school is that self-control over distribution gave them stupendous levels of access and leverage, something that doesn't seemingly exist anymore.

brandnewlow 14y ago
Every profession out there has had periods that could be described this way from the last century.
- look_lookatme 14y ago
  This is fundamentally not true. The massive disruption of this industry isn't from Japan/Germany or banana republics or China, this is pure change in distribution. It's analogous to music or movies or tv, only none of those industries fancied themselves as the "fourth estate" while the getting was good. The ground moved beneath the feet of this industry and as much as they like to sit around and acknowledge that with self-loathing NYT pieces, I'm not sure they've accepted it. Seems like there's still a lot of sitting about and grumbling about how bad it is and how much better it was when back when. Or worse, how relevant they really, really, really still are cough David Carr cough. See The Newsroom on HBO for example of this version of onanistic self flagellation.

ThomPete 14y ago

Adapting means firing 95% of your staff it's really that simple.

wsetchell 14y ago

Idea : make newspapers more like collaborative blogs with some extra payment options. http://wsetchell.blogspot.com/2012/07/local-newspapers.html http://wsetchell.blogspot.com/2012/07/local-newspapers.html

brandnewlow 14y ago
Hey, Will, Good post. I think consumers have this already in Facebook and Twitter. The news guys already post all their news there, for free, to try to generate ad revenues. People don't click through because often the entire story is there in the headlines and that's all they really cared about anyways.

prawn 14y ago

Seems to me that too often news sources make the decision to consolidate when general offerings mean they'll face more competition and leave them with a very broad, poorly-defined userbase. Target a specific area, get local readers and you're an advertising option for local businesses. My local paper (in Australia) has cut back its basketball reporting (for example) over the years and instead covered some pretty generic stories. e.g., instead of covering a domestic league, the writer has instead covered the US college Final Four. A few points: - their contacts and history are in covering local sport - why would I read this generic coverage over ESPN and American sources who have writers in the thick of the action? - in covering domestic basketball, the audience might be smaller, but the paper would have virtually no competition in covering it - cover local teams and you at least have a shot of building suburb-level audiences and hit up small businesses as a result In print, I understand that newspapers will generally include content such that its level meets a ratio with the advertising at hand. e.g., they might not print an extra four pages because they don't have the ads for it. But online is a different case. If your writer is getting paid a fixed rate, why wouldn't you have them at capacity whenever possible, generating unique, local content for your online version? They could be creating the Final Four fluff-piece for the print version, plus writing up online-only previews and quick opinion pieces on the domestic league. Categorise them by area (North, South, etc) and then find sponsors and advertisers for each. Small-fry ads maybe, but it wouldn't be shotgun advertising.

brandnewlow 14y ago
Shotgun advertising paid the bills for 60 years. Small-fry ads never have and it's very hard to make money from them. Newspaper sales reps that came into the industry more than 10 years ago came into it when they basically just processed incoming orders from chains, franchises, and ad agencies. That money is largely gone. "Small-fry ads" means asking those same people to now go out and hunt down money from local businesses being courted by performance-based ad companies like Google, Groupon, Living Social, Twitter, Facebook, Constant Contact, Yelp...you name it. That's a hard job. You need a superb sales staff to take business from those people. If you were a superb sales person, you'd want to make a lot of money and sell a great product everyone wants to buy. Would newspaper sales be your first choice?

wallflower 14y ago

"The unthinkable scenario unfolded something like this: The ability to share content wouldn’t shrink, it would grow. Walled gardens would prove unpopular. Digital advertising would reduce inefficiencies, and therefore profits. Dislike of micropayments would prevent widespread use. People would resist being educated to act against their own desires. Old habits of advertisers and readers would not transfer online. Even ferocious litigation would be inadequate to constrain massive, sustained law-breaking... Journalism has always been subsidized." From Clay Shirky's essay, "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable" http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/ http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking...

kaolinite 14y ago

I work for a digital agency that is owned by a very large newspaper company having been bought to help them adapt to a "digital future". The newspaper company is becoming increasingly desperate - the latest product they've launched is a Groupon clone, which they are pushing pretty hard. Whilst digging around on one of their servers, I've found a few sites which are "virtual shopping malls" with multiple levels and numerous "shops" that you can "buy" (i.e. advertise your site on). I think that they're not too sure what to make of this "Internet thing" so are just trying to port concepts from offline to online and it's not working too well.

andyking 14y ago
I worked for a small local radio station and was asked to implement something similar to the "virtual mall" last year on the station website. I was only asked to do it as a neighbouring station had one. It was laid out like a simple street map, in a grid formation, and companies could "rent" a "shop," or more accurately, place their logo in one of the spaces in the grid. I did it, then left the station, and it still sits there online, the "streets" filled with For Rent signs. It's like a failed SimCity, or a 2D version of Second Life...

danso 14y ago

I used to work at a medium sized regional paper...by the time I started, around '05, veterans were already complaining about how the good times had passed. In the 90s, a senior writer could get a project approved that involved going to Russia over the course of the year, ostensibly to write something relevant for our somewhat large Russian immigrant population. When I started, things still seemed good in that I could spend a week on a local story, even driving out to a city several hours away just to talk to people. Today, they don't even have the resources to cover huge events, like earthquakes that hit nearby, and instead rely on AP copy. Last time I visited, nearly everyone I knew was gone, usually for a job working in PR. And even the young idealistic reporters who were my age were all secretly interviewing for PR jobs. There really is little hope of turning things around. It's not just the lack of technical innovation...it's the constant downhill slide...it's hard enough to do good work on an average reporters pay...but to do it as your pay gets constantly cut and your hours constantly extended because other colleagues are let go is psychologically draining. And newspapers need more than just good work, or even Pulitzer level work...they need groundbreaking innovation that changes/streamlines the very core of what they do...from the reporters to the editors to the ad people. But there's no capacity or motivation for such entrepreneurship