Comments on: What Does the Future Hold for Newspapers?

By: Old Media Is Being Unbundled, Just Like Telecom Was: Tech News and Analysis «

Thu, 24 Feb 2011 05:01:10 +0000

[...] 2005, the newspaper industry had revenue of around $47 billion. Today, it is half that amount. The radio and television industry have gone through the same [...]

By: There is No New Media: It’s All New Consumption: Tech News «

There is No New Media: It’s All New Consumption: Tech News « — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 20:36:12 +0000

[...] so often, you hear executives bemoaning the demise of the newspaper business, the declining fortunes of radio networks and the crumbling of the television industry. There is [...]

By: newspapers: you’re making my head hurt | nerd alert!

newspapers: you’re making my head hurt | nerd alert! — Sun, 17 Oct 2010 01:39:38 +0000

[...] a huge, ongoing debate about the future of news – all content, really – online. You just might have [...]

By: Raul Chavarria

Raul Chavarria — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 21:47:15 +0000

Let me give you a real life perspective. In 2007 I left radio and joined a suburban newspaper chain. I was floored when I saw their Chicago revenue at $20 million. That was far more than most radio stations in Chicago. I was very impressed until I began to count the number of managers, assistant managers, co- managers, department heads etc, in the room. The shear bulk of the staff and management meant lower margins vs. radio where most stations had 5-6 managers or department heads. I realized then that newspapers didn't have much of a future.

By: Weekly Reader: What journalism is and isn’t « Intro to Online Journalism

Mon, 12 Apr 2010 21:44:23 +0000

[...] Newspapers are still acting as if the Web is just like print. [GigaOm] [...]

By: Kieran

Kieran — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 00:29:15 +0000

This comment nails it. I was just involved in journalism training here in UK and it made me more optimistic about the importance of a good journalist; the age-old stuff such as spelling names right and knowing your libel law etc. So a good journalist and – in a group – a good brand should always be worth something to someone.
However, print is dying and TV/radio (like the free BBC) have the new media sewn up, so it’s hyper-local and deep background which are both very valuable.
But who pays? Paper is merely a delivery medium heavily subsidised by advertising and it distributes mostly PR/advertising puff (George Clooney interview EXCLUSIVE! – translation: shouldn’t you be watching my new movie instead of reading this?).
Papers had a good thing going. They delivered a mix of things well: news, sport, health, crossword… But the web is about specialising: xxnews.com, xxcrosswords.com…
So do we want a portal that chooses a package for us any more? Perhaps. The iPad is the first/last, great hope for that, as it is restrictive in many ways. Which might be a good thing; the net is dauntingly vast and trying to keep up makes us all stressed. Which means reporters may end up packaging the virtual world as much as the real world. Which will need proprietors who embrace the net rather than see it as a death knell. Which needs a new generation of proprietors. If I ran a paper right now, I’d close it down and fire every manager over 21 (I’m half-serious), then give the staff a blank sheet to start from, online, writing for an iPad-style format, constantly updating during the day, going deep into issues as they hit the headlines (instead of ’24-hour’ news which is 5mins of news repeated endlessly). Use the experienced writers (ie the old guys like me) to deliver the depth. It would be pretty exciting.
And let’s get business to pay. You want us to run an interview with George Clooney to promote his latest film? Sure, here’s what it will cost. That already half-happens in travel journalism: ‘You pay all my expenses to go to your lovely hotel in Thailand; I give my unvarnished opinion about it as a trusted name in travel’. Small outlay for a couple of well written pages with pix set before a million readers, so let’s raise the price. And readers are clever enough to understand the game. Murky waters, of course; where do you draw the line? Perhaps even government can pay; local papers here in UK are being killed by councils producing their own papers, using taxpayer money to produce Pravda-style nonsense. Why not ban them and pay proper reporters to come to town hall meetings and do proper reports? Otherwise you leave it to bloggers with a personal agenda, whose funding might be a lot less transparent. What ‘price’ democracy, indeed?

By: This Week in Review: The iPad’s skeptics, Murdoch’s first paywall move and a ‘Chatroulette for news’ » Nieman Journalism Lab

Fri, 02 Apr 2010 16:16:55 +0000

[...] Mathew Ingram of GigaOm has a quick but pretty comprehensive explanation of the conundrum newspapers are in and some of the possible ways out. Couldn’t have summed it [...]

By: Reading Summary « Tom's Blog

Reading Summary « Tom's Blog — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 20:18:17 +0000

[...] available offline. Of particular interest is the following statement by Mathew Ingram at Gigaom: “The Times of London said it will soon charge users for access to its web sites at the rate [...]

By: justmakler

justmakler — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 15:45:58 +0000

Just to be clear, where I was coming from on the walled garden comment.

Newspaper websites make most of their money based on pageviews as well as how many unique visitors they get. A paywall would significantly reduce those numbers.

Online subscribers revenue will never grow or offset what papers have already lost. The strategy behind paywalls are often about retention of print subscribers more then it is new online revenue. In my opinion the amount of money that will come from subscribers online will not offset what is lost from the reduction in page views.

With the growing number of quality (neighborhood) bloggers, the use of location aware news services that are already starting to spring up. Then look at growing number of local competitors and sites like (AOL owned) Patch.com. This equals more and more places to find local content that might be “good enough”.

A good percentage of newspaper traffic comes from search (Sometime as much as half). More and more people start their search for news at google, msn or yahoo. One of the reasons is Newspapers have always had very poor search engines. The engines are already ranking AP and twitter very high. Soon they will start surfacing geo located news.

A major unnamed search engine is threatening to rank Pay wall news content much lower. It would take every newspaper in the country to bind together and fight this search engine. Hell will freeze over before you get all newspapers to agree.

All of these combined make me a scary fight against paid content. I do think there are paid strategies that will work but not the ones I’m hearing discussed.

/JustinMakler.com

By: News vs. Globalization « GD: Politics & Journalism

News vs. Globalization « GD: Politics & Journalism — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 02:36:31 +0000

[...] so unfortunately, there is little way to subsidize the actual news, anymore. And lastly, as “What Does the Future Hold for Newspapers?” portrays, newspapers are suffering from lack of advertisers, yet, if they were to start [...]