Internet is Killing the Newspaper 397
jose parinas writes "MediaDailyNews is reporting that 2005 will go down as one of the worst newspaper years in history, and 2006 doesn't look promising. Online media is continuously generating more readership and ad dollars, but currently only accounts for 5% of total newspaper revenues."
The real question is... (Score:4, Insightful)
Immediate Access (Score:5, Insightful)
I still pay for the paper. (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure it's the Interenet? (Score:5, Insightful)
Who cares? (Score:2, Insightful)
Efficiency (Score:5, Insightful)
Yellow pages are dying horrible deaths too, and I'm loving every minute of it. Just look at how these online yellow pages are trying to force ads and sponsored listings on the first page, making it ridiculously difficult to get local results you really want. Then look at how quickly you can find something via a search engine.
Re:The real question is... (Score:3, Insightful)
Then again, many news websites are not as tied up. They can offer viewpoints that the major papers could never think of presenting. Even if their news is incorrect, it still may provoke thought in its readers, perhaps enough for them to investigate other news sources, and hence to make up their own mind based on the information they can obtain.
Re:Efficiency (Score:5, Insightful)
Investigative reporting. That's still where the newspaper outpaces all other forms of news.
The hardcopy might go away, but newspapers have their own websites.
If it kills the NYT... (Score:2, Insightful)
[/opinion]
Re:Newspaper is killing the newspaper. (Score:2, Insightful)
Same old song (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Efficiency (Score:3, Insightful)
Except that they don't do that now, and probably won't in the future. Doing so to a professional degree would certainly cause severe annoyance to various advertisers and politicians. Soon enough ad space isn't bought, and press credentials are revoked. Then they're really fucked.
"Growth" is flat, so try innovating (Score:5, Insightful)
Efficiency-Adblock. (Score:1, Insightful)
The NYTs certainly tries, and look at how we treat them. We DON"T want newspapers to succeed. No matter what. Free is our mantra, and we will slay anyone living in a capitalists world.
"Yellow pages are dying horrible deaths too, and I'm loving every minute of it. Just look at how these online yellow pages are trying to force ads and sponsored listings on the first page, making it ridiculously difficult to get local results you really want. Then look at how quickly you can find something via a search engine."
I've also found both inaccuracies, as well as numbers that never will show up. Besides yellow pages aren't as "dying" as you think (*looks over at the FREE yellow pages delivered last week*). Plus not everyone wants or has internet access, as well as all the advantages print has over reading off a screen. e.g. power failure, and yes phones do still work during such an event.
Re:Newspaper is killing the newspaper. (Score:3, Insightful)
However, the lousy quality of the reporting isn't the only thing that's killing the newspapers. I think that they are in a death trap of reader selectivity. Since most people only believe what they want to believe, do you really expect them to pay to read other stuff, too? From that perspective, it's only natural for the Internet to slaughter the newspapers. Not just because the Web is faster and cheaper, but because search engines make it easy to find the stuff that agrees with what you want to believe. No cognitive dissonance there!
To give you a convenient concrete example, if you dislike Bush, just do a news search for "Dubya", and you're pretty sure to see plenty of disrespect. All you need is to learn the appropriate buzzwords for what you want to see, and voila, that's what you see.
Actually, I like to sample several of the extreme positions, because the truth is most often somewhere in the middle. However, that's another strike against newspapers, in my opinion, since most of them are pretty uniform. An enormous part of the content comes straight off the wire, and the rest of it tends to be whatever the publisher likes.
Re:Newspaper is killing the newspaper. (Score:3, Insightful)
That said, that's no excuse for newspapers to report blatantly false information. Going back to the example of the Iraqi invasion, every newspaper of any credibility should have torn Powell's UN presentation to pieces. It has nothing to do with politics. It just has to do with the fact that they're there to report fact, and thus the correct thing for them to do when presented with lies is to point out those lies for what they are.
Newspaper != news paper (Score:5, Insightful)
Already TV news is less about news and more about entertainment. The paper is getting more like that too. There are so many media channels etc competing for peoples free time (== entertainment time) that the news has to be entertaining and gripping rather than factual.
Re:What do you expect? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:The real question is... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
Simple. Because you can read it while you're waiting for or sitting on the bus. I wouldn't be suprised to discover public transit to be the number one motivation behind newspaper sales.
Re:Efficiency (Score:3, Insightful)
While there certainly is less and less investigative reporting (much to my dismay, reporting current events is something for the AP wire), it does still exist.
I can think of two recent examples from my local paper alone. One is how DHS lied about how many people die crossing the border and how their numbers don't match up with the actual recorded deaths. Congress actually ended up using the newspaper's database to show how DHS was playing fast and loose with the numbers.
The other one is a report on how inaccurate the local gas pumps are. They claim they output a gallon but they really shortchange you. There was even a nice little map that showed which stations were the worst and by how much.
Bloggers are fairly lazy. They won't hound their local city government for raw data... if it's not on google, then it doesn't exist.
it's "old" by the time you read it (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Immediate Access (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Immediate Access (Score:5, Insightful)
Television is no substitute for a newspaper, at least not if the newpapers were doing their jobs correctly. TV news simply doesn't get you the depth that you get in a newspaper. Part of that is due to the nature of the medium and part of it is because the people producing news programs are more interested in flash than in content. (Yes, I know it's because that's what sells. Consumers are generally dumb and the TV folks are happy to go that route rather to trying to be decent journalists.)
The internet is a good substitute, provided you are smart enough to read reputable sources. (In other words, the same basic people as the ones who print newspapers, only putting the text online instead.) But that doesn't seem to be the draw away from the printed papers. Also, I (and many others) would much rather read a physical piece of paper than a computer screen. I work at a computer 9+ hours a day, typically, but I hate reading significant stretches of text off that screen. I prefer something solid. I can't really articulate why, but I just can't manage the computer screen well.
Re:The real question is... (Score:3, Insightful)
Informed by which metric? Shouldn't the government radio address be all I need?
Newspapers only print a particular set of wires, and they primarily exist to make advertising money. This is not concordant with my interests, so for me they are less informative.
I had an inane Toronto Star telemarketer yell at me once. I told her I only read online, she claims I'm half-informed and asks me if I'm proud of being ignorant. She must have been psychic.
Internet is Killing the Newspaper (Score:5, Insightful)
Radio threatened the Newspaper and took it's lunch money.
Broadcast TV beat it up.
Cable News kicked it while it was down (and then beat it up some more)
The internet is just finishing the job. The Newspaper has been killed by 3 previous mediums, and now a fourth is doing it. Newspapers will never go away, but they will never be what they were in before the 1950s again. As others have pointed out, Newspapers aren't what they used to be as the quality has declined and they are trying to more and more like gossip rags and 24 hour news channels which get printed once per day. Solid investigative reporting would keep them alive easily, instead we get AP wire reprints (which I already heard summarized on the radio and saw analyzed on TV). Now I can cut out the middle man and read these things off the wire online. Why do I need the paper for that.
And with wire stories like "New flash: President says he will name a new supreme court nominee at some point in the future" (there was one somewhat like that recently), I can't say much for their reporting.
Papers need to reorganize themselves and the kind of things they write/print if they want to become anything more than another local magazine. I'm sorry, but Newspapers are not in a good state right not (then again, neither is TV news).
The NYT is not "the paper of record" anymore, Edward R. Morrow and Walter Cronkite are gone from the in front of the camera. The entire news industry seems to be in a major crisis. They lost sight of reporting by realizing that they could just be the first to tell you something. 24 hour news channels hastened that problem. The internet and cell phones have taken it to it's logical conclusion.
I hope this all turns out well in a few years. I was getting mad at many of the magazines I used to love (gamer and computer magazines including GamePro, Nintendo Power, EGM, PC World, etc.) have fallen into the same trap so I've stopped reading most of them (I can get that info online for free, faster). I recently started reading a good magazine full of intelligent, insightful, and well researched articles: Forbes (yeah, different genre of magazines, but still). Newspapers (and TV news) need to go back to the same thing. They are all in a format of "Let's take that 1 minute news summary we did at the top of the hour and try to stretch it to 30 minutes" kind of "journalism", merged with "infotaiment" like Entertainment Tonight into one large affront to the intelligence of everyone.
I hope things turn out well. In the mean time, I will just continue to avoid more and more news sources as they get worse and worse. Some are still good. NPR had FANTASTIC, JOURNALISTIC coverage and analysis of Justice Robert's hearings. I learned a TON about the process and many other things by listening to their clips of the questioning with intelligent analysis and explanations. They're not always perfect, but they are one of the few left who even seem to try.
Re:Who cares? (Score:3, Insightful)
That said, as internet delivery matures, it'll no longer make sense to keep printing classifieds, job/real estate listings, and things of that nature. These are all are better served online. Detailed news coverage, too, will move off the printed page. You'll pick up a print edition for the morning commute with summaries of the day's news and events, and after you arrive at work, you'll go online to check out the full story, context, related articles, and updates.
With that in mind, I predict that papers with an urban readership (NY Times, London Times, Mainichi Shimbun) will begin offering tabloid-format editions--magazine-style folding, that is, as opposed to broadsheet--simply because it's more convenient for the commute. These will shift to summary/teaser form, as nobody's going to be reading them for anything more than to pass the time and to find out what they have to look forward to online. It's easy enough to find up-to-the-minute headlines and detailed reports in a city environment, anyways (web, outdoor news tickers, taxicab LCDs).
God knows I'd appreciate a tabloid edition of the Times. Stick the crossword on the back page and I'm set for the commute home too.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The two aren't mutually exclusive (Score:5, Insightful)
The Internet is great for instant information, opinions, and huge amounts of both. But it is very spotty when it comes to analysis, SNR, and summary. Typically, it takes a little time for information to be properly filtered and recommunicated. This delay allows print publications time to catch up and this material can still be placed on the web later. Fundamentally, the act of publication forces information to be cut down, crap to be thrown out, and resources to be focused. There are papers that do this well and some that do it very poorly.
An excellent example is the Economist. I can find virtually every piece of information from that publication through some other channel before the print edition hits a stand. I do not, however, have the time to summarize, anaylze, and edit as the Economist does. Nothing in that publication is revolutionary or, in fact, beyond what I could generate. But it saves me countless hours of research.
Newspaper's Main Problem: The Credibility Gap (Score:1, Insightful)
Between Jayson Blair, The Hutton Report, Rathergate, Mike Wallace at the gun control rally, etc. etc. and their willful omissions [timblair.net] (to cite merely one of many omissions) I have stopped believing what the MSM is reporting. It is clear that the MSM has a not-so-hidden agenda. They used to be called "reporters." Now they aren't willing to simply report, they must champion a cause.
Lessons from Vietnam: The Credibility Gap
The MSM* was permanently changed by the Vietnam war and its aftermath, including the Watergate scandal and the Nixon impeachment. [As commenter Jon Ravin [blogs.com] points out in the interest of accuracy, Nixon was never actually impeached, but resigned when his impeachment became inevitable.] The experiences of that time explain much of the agenda journalism of the MSM today, but I would submit that they have not only forgotten the most crucial lesson from Vietnam, but their failure to remember will ultimately destroy them as a uniquely important and powerful force in our society.
First some history; During the years of the troop escalation in Vietnam, ultimately topping out at over 550,000 American military personal, the Pentagon and the White House, still fighting the last war in terms of Public Relations, continually measured our success in the war by pointing to "body counts". Using an outdated model of war in which the media play the role of conveyors of information controlled by the Pentagon and the administration, daily body counts of enemy combatants were touted as evidence, in the infamous words of General Westmoreland, that we could see "the light at the end of the tunnel." From 1965 on, we were, according to the daily body counts, winning the Vietnam war. When the Tet offensive took place in January of 1968, the reason the public was so shocked and ready to see our military victory as a defeat was that the expectations of victory "right around the corner" were crushed. We never knew that the North Vietnamese, post-Tet, were ready to sue for peace; all we knew was that an enemy who was supposedly being decimated was able to launch a major offensive. The conclusion was that either our military and the administration were incompetent, or that they had been lying to us all along. This lead to the "Credibility Gap". No longer would our press, feeling with some justification that they had been used and lied to, allow themselves to be so gullible. From this point on , the press almost universally saw themselves in an adversarial role against the military and the Executive branch of government.
It is important to note that the Pentagon and White House were only doing what had always been done in war time. The purpose of news in war time is to support the morale of the home front and to that end, propaganda has always been an important aspect of warfare. Unfortunately for the Johnson and Nixon administrations, while the nature of war hadn't really changed, the nature of our media had. We had close to real time news emanating from the battlefields of Vietnam. Reporters could see that there were attacks not being reported, injuries and deaths of Americans being swept under the rug, and constant reports of impending victory which were easily refuted.
This is extremely relevant to our war effort today. The military realizes that we are fighting a new kind of war, which includes a significant public relations aspect on the home front. The MSM does not yet recognize that fact; they are still fighting the last war.
We are winning in Iraq and have been for some time. When
Re:Who cares? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The real question is... (Score:5, Insightful)
The New York Times and the Washington Post have lost their press access?
Or did you mean that both papers have never been critical of the current administration?
Re:Immediate Access (Score:3, Insightful)
Evolution (Score:2, Insightful)
Can you imagine receiving a daily Slashdot mailing in your mailbox at home? Ridiculous
-Da3vid-
Re:Newspaper != news paper (Score:5, Insightful)
Basically, newspapers are going to have to provide something besides stale wire reports and three-paragraph news articles. More focus on local news and issues would be a start. Forget the national news; most people already get that from other sources long before it's published in a newspaper. Stick with the local stuff, the things people won't find anywhere except their hometown paper. If you are going to cover a national news story, go beyond the four Ws. Have your reporters do some more in-depth analysis or investigation. Basically, give people something they can't find ten thousand identical copies of at news.google.com.
Can't trust the papers... (Score:4, Insightful)
This is the Information Revolution: the Revolution is greatly improved access to the information. People are more educated now than they were 50 or even 20 years ago and can make informed judgements. They don't need some "journalist" to do it for them. This is quite appart form the fact that today's journalism is extremely poor compared to yester-year's.
I don't buy papers because I know that I can't trust them to bring me news in an unbiased, non-politically or commercially influenced fashion, or full of Tabloid rubbish like British newspapers. I accept the risk that the news I learn via the Net can be from the "uninformed" masses and mitigate this by using many sources so I can judge for myself where the "truth" may lay.
I won't even read over people's shoulders anymore.
For at least the last 10 years, newspapers have been good for only one thing: the ink used in newspaper presses is fantastic for removing streaks and smudges from my computer monitor!
Re: The trend matters - they'll start charging $$ (Score:1, Insightful)
Short answer: yes it does matter.
Long answer: the only reason why we have free online news is that everybody is offering it for free. Everybody is doing that because they have other sources of revenue. What this article is saying is that those sources of revenue are under attack from free online news. If the economics don't work out, they'll start charging for reading online.
If the economics don't work for the industry, the industry will start to move towards charging for reading the news. That will be the effect so you will not have online free online news as you do right now and then it *will* matter.
We are already seeing that in the NY Times. I think that this will be the trend.
Re:What do you expect? (Score:4, Insightful)
Quality stuff will always survive in some form. I'm least worried about the WSJ, which is probably the smallest of the three papers I read. As you'd expect from a business-oriented newspaper, they got their business model straight from the get-go, and they've done very well with it - as of 2002, they were the most popular subscription service on the Internet.
- Obviously a happy subscriber to WSJ.com, but nothing more.
Re:What do you expect? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Death for some... (Score:3, Insightful)
Then some new wave of local news bloggers will form a syndicate that borrows from blogging and wiki technologies. There will be a demand for a single site that can link you to people reporting on news in your area and that demand will be filled.
It's not hard to imagine that someone would report local news as a hobby and as a community service and even make some money by having their local hardware store sponsor them. The golden rule in blogging is to find a niche and dominate it, so this news form would actually be quite attractive to many bloggers. Local news won't die, not as long as hosting is cheap and ads are easy to come by.
Sad but True? (Score:3, Insightful)
Come to that, the internet is trumping *every* other media source when it comes to raw news. I can't Google search for related terms on my cable box. I can't run a Truth-or-Fiction fact check on a radio. People will tell me something they saw in the paper, and I'll say, "Oh, yeah, that was on [insert one of 20 news-sites here] yesterday!" In the age of RSS-feeds, plus a shell script I wrote to scrape them all, it's getting to be the next best thing to being psychic. In fact, even my library card usage is down - but I've downloaded and hoarded a slew of E-books!
Re:Bad news for everybody (Score:3, Insightful)
Do you seriously believe that people all of a sudden lose interest in what's going on in the world and in their community just because some highly paid NYT reporter is laid off from his cushy job? Because photographs are made with $200 digicams by amateurs, instead of $8000 SLR cameras wielded by Pulitzer-prize hungry press photographers trying to find the artistically most compelling composition and most disturbing photograph? I don't think so.
What this will do is give a larger audience to non-traditional media and reporting, and I think that's a good thing. In the pre Internet days, the press was important and far better than nothing at all, but nowadays, newspapers and newspaper staff are an anachronism and should be abolished. The market is doing just that.
Re:Death for some... (Score:3, Insightful)
Here's a newsflash. This has already happened. Many newspapers in the US are owned by big companies that own multiple papers. Same thing with radio stations. I live in Colorado and even the two big Denver papers, The Denver Post and The Rocky Mountain News, are owned by the same company. I hope that the death of the newspaper will result in the creation of some local news websites that will increase the diversity of our news.