Even if the paper newspaper is headed the way of the dodo (see yesterday's post), the mainstream press still serves a useful function that needs to be continued in some form. Otherwise, the reporting staff that newspapers train, fund, and send out to write reports ultimately disappears. Some people say they can do without the mainstream press, and that they already rely on the internet, or blogs, or even radio, for their "news," but perhaps it's not generally appreciated how much all those sources depend directly on simply disseminating, or linking to, reports that were generated originally by newspapers.
Newspapers haven't given up; they talk of moving increasingly to the web and offering their reporting and other features there. The difficulty is to find a viable business model. Business managers have finally realized that they can't continue to give away on the internet a good that they can charge for in hard copy (and that's costly to produce). No wonder people are abandoning the paper version and flocking to the web! Here's another case, by the way, where a down economy has forced a business that was already faltering with a tenuous or outdated model to confront change.
So most news generators are now considering how to charge users for the product. To me, that's the simple part of the issue. If we really must abandon printed copies, I'd be happy to pay a commensurate subscription cost for internet access, just as I do now for the delivered paper. I suspect most individual readers would do the same. Another suggestion is charging according to the number of items accessed; I don't care for this proposal, because I want to read everything, not just a couple of items. Of course, a subscriber-payment arrangement could only work if the same content won't be readily available elsewhere free, so a way must be found to limit what aggregators can use (perhaps the per-item license idea would work here - what would the implications be for bloggers, though?).
A more difficult part of the problem is whether advertising revenues would be able to contribute significantly to income and thus lower the cost to subscribers. Even the newspapers that have done best in keeping their heads above water - the New York Times and the Washington Post are certainly two of them - still can't break even on their web operations because advertising there doesn't bring in the same income. There are a few media examples that don't depend on advertising: Consumer Reports does not accept advertising at all; it charges for its magazine and also charges a fee for access to its website; certain newsletters and investment services also seem to be making do with hybrids of print-plus-web. Beyond that, neither media analysts nor the papers themselves seem to have a glimmer of an idea on how to make advertising pay off on a large scale.
Ultimately, if advertising's share in the income stream can't be increased, I suspect that we will end up paying more for our news on the web than we ever did for the printed paper.
Yes, newspapers are going the way of buggy whips and beaver skin hats. The 150 year old Rocky Mountain News declared bankruptcy last week and I’ve seen reports that the San Francisco Examiner, Chicago Tribune and several other notable papers are teetering on the brink. It is economics and technology at their finest or worst depending on your viewpoint.
I too bemoan the loss of the newspaper, but believe that cable TV and the Internet will win in the end. Like most people, I already get the bulk of my news from one of those non-print sources and the newspaper now provides me backup. When it comes to commerce, most people find it more efficient to buy and sell on the Internet whether you are talking about jobs, cars, homes, loans, or junk. Internet sites like Monster, Craigslist and Vehix can be searched more quickly than was ever possible with the traditional classifieds in the paper. More and more advertising money will be funneled from print to Internet as firms like Google really figure out how to segment the viewers so they can target the right set of eyeballs for that perfect ad.
Some pundits believe we are destined for 4 or 5 mega-papers (eg WSJ, USA Today, NY Times, Wash Post, …) and lots of community newspapers where there is still a market for news you can’t get anywhere else and the local merchants are not interested in reaching the masses. Augmenting this will be the bloggers that become popular and tend to replace the editorial and analysis from newspapers (yes, you bloggers shoulder some of the blame for decreasing newspaper readership, too.).
One prominent view holds that there will be some marriage of the various ways news is distributed and that this will result in a better service for everyone. So far, it does not seem to have worked all that well (think CNN-Time Warner), but this convergence phenomenon is still relatively new.
The only thing that really worries me about this downward trend in the number of newspapers is the loss of real reporting at the local and regional level. I suppose there may be a rise in investigative reporters that post to the Internet, but I doubt that the need for in depth news can be served by a few mega papers, the Internet bloggers, and the local TV reporting. And that has a profound impact on how we view the world.
Posted by: blot44 | March 03, 2009 at 02:16 PM