Newspapers
In a duo of articles that are sure to up the alley of those in the publishing world, the Economist examines the challenges newspapers face in adapting to the information age.
What strikes me is that the original business model of newspapers packaged content (a module of information combining current events, business news, classifieds and sports) with a delivery vehicle (printed text on broadsheet). The internet offers a new delivery vehicle, but there is still the need for the content newspapers provide. The challenge they face is how to decouple their content from their delivery vehicle.
I think that some sort of aggregator, mediated by some editorial perspective, would be the best answer. At the very least, it is what I would want. Sort of like the EarlyBird, except with a specifiable scope. So someone could say, “I live in Boston so I want local news, Red Sox, Celtics and Pats coverage, but I also want defense-focused news as well as the standard 5 pages of front-page and national news I’d find from the NY Times, WSJ, WaPo and Financial Times.” It would also be great if I could get that as a package either on my desktop, laptop, handheld or Kindle. And for sanity’s sake, it should be self-contained so I know when I’m done.
That is one of the challenges of the internet age: when have you read enough? Sitting in the sea of content, you can easily get so far away from shore that you lose all bearing. So some structure would be useful. With a solid foundation like I described above, it would be much easier to control my blog consumption through my bloglines account. And then I might be able to better say when enough is enough and I’ve done my reading for the day.
One of the things that newspapers have lost is part of their “gatekeeper” function. They were gatekeepers in part because they owned the huge printing presses and newspaper distributions systems. Anyone who wanted to compete with them had to pony up big bucks to buy their own presses and distribution system. Without that gatekeeper function the premium they can charge has dropped. Now anyone for example can post ads on half a dozen websites for less then what the newspaper charges or write editorial or news article and publish it for pennies. The same is coming to TV and Radio as well since their control of parts of the broadcast spectrum becomes less important if you have access to a wider spectrum on the internet
Newspapers still have a lot of legacy assets, they have name recognition, they have reporters, they have contacts with both newsmakers and ad buying businesses but this as I said is legacy left over in large part from when they had dominance due to their ownership of the presses. Without their gatekeeper presses they must worry that competitor both large and small can jump into the business with much lower distribution costs. Or even steal or borrow their product and publish it elsewhere without the newspaper making money off of it.
For one I see a big drop-off in money paid for opinion articles since everyone has an opinion and most are quite willing to spout off on it for free. As shown by my response.
As for news articles I do see problems mostly in how the paid media will get paid for it since it is so easy these days to cut and paste and copy almost any article. And there will also be competition from people who won’t bother trying to get paid since they too can write an article and post it for very low cost and if there is a choice between two articles on a subject and one is free and the other costs then free usually wins out with the public
Comment by DJF — May 31, 2009 @ 11:25 am