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."
What do you expect? (Score:5, Interesting)
Making Excuses (Score:1, Interesting)
Newspaper is killing the newspaper. (Score:5, Interesting)
Take the New York Times. Between that Blair guy and now Miller, they've been shown to be nothing but a hack paper. Any newspaper that did not immediately point out the numerous lies of so many British and American politicians with regards to the ongoing war in Iraq falls into the same boat.
Intelligent people aren't going to pay money for ads and bullshit stories. And it's intelligent people who tend to read newspapers.
Giveaways (Score:2, Interesting)
The two aren't mutually exclusive (Score:5, Interesting)
Take a breaking news story (HP buys Compaq is my favourite example). We ran a BREAKING NEWS thing on the site immediately. We ran a follow-up story later that day with industry reaction (such as it was) also online. The next morning we had the customer comments/expectations story online, while most daily newspapers here were only just running the equivalent of our first story.
By the time our weekly print edition came out we had a full round-up of comment locally plus international expectations etc for a more rounded view.
That's the best approach I feel. Break news online (with attendant email alerts, SMS alerts or whatever you've got going) with more detailed relfective stuff in print.
This isn't new - print had to cope with radio beating it to news and TV (film at eleven!) doing what we couldn't do. What print does well is take a step back and offer a critical analytical assessment. In depth stuff. Well, that's what print SHOULD do well.
The two aren't mutually exclusive - print and online can co-exist quite nicely thank you. You add immediacy to your print edition with online. You add depth to your online edition through print. Different readers are served in different ways.
Re:Sure it's the Interenet? (Score:1, Interesting)
Is the newspaper still a practical business model? (Score:2, Interesting)
Unfortunately, doing so completely wipes out their subscription base. And I doubt advertising alone will be enough to sustain high-end staffs such as (despite an earlier criticism of the paper in this feedback) those on The New York Times. It'll be interesting to see if, or when, major papers shut down because they lose too much money investigating stories -- or if, more likely, they simply downgrade to the usual nonsense of hyping a murder trial or a missing white woman. Either way, however great a revolution the Internet may be for widespread communication and education, I mourn for what seems the eventual demise of professional journalism. Does anyone want a future of Fox News-caliber media?
Still, at least in my opinion, the good that is free and instant and widespread information weighs out the evil of such losses.
Re:Newspaper is killing the newspaper. (Score:3, Interesting)
If it's a balanced and comprehensive understanding of current issues you want, it's a mistake to rely on any one source of news, any one perspective--if only because people will attack you for your choice. For the record, I'll spend my time flipping between the NY Times, the Economist, Salon, the Village Voice, the NY Observer, NewsMax, CNN, and Fox News, and I find that's a salad that works for me. But no matter what you're reading, approach your sources critically and you'll probably do much better at understanding what's important to you.
Interesting that classified is UP in newspapers (Score:3, Interesting)
There are times I think a newspaper is great -- on a train, on an airplane, or when I want to sit outside in the sun with a cup of coffee. So for relaxing news delivery. But most of the time, web sites (or, even better, RSS feeds) are just so much more timely. And with RSS, I can get the headlines from a few sources, so when one site cock-blocks me by invalidating my BugMeNot login (cough, FY NYT!), I can read the article elsewhere, or just be content with the title.
Dead Tree Edition (Score:5, Interesting)
It's the dead tree versions that don't make as much sense. Lots of people don't want yesterday's news. But no reason that a well written newspaper can't write a web version just as well.
And the thick Sunday version with the sale ads and magazines are still popular. So they don't need to retire the presses. But basing your entire business model around delivering paper to porches, yeah, that'd dead.
Re:Newspaper is killing the newspaper (Score:5, Interesting)
On the flip side, a major disadvantage of the web is mutability. How do I know that link to the story on the 18th is actually the same text that ran on the 18th? Heck, how do I know that you and I are reading the same article today?
For an interesting, behind the scenes look at things, one company I worked for had a news site, and part of the content came from Reuters. Part of the tagging in the news stream indicated "updated" versions of the same articles, that you were REQUIRED to replace.
If you pay attention to breaking stories on Yahoo, you can see the articles morph and change during the day...
Re:Immediate Access (Score:5, Interesting)
The formatting of news web sites seem to leave a lot to be desired. For one, look at CNN.com, for any given page, the actual article is less than 1/4th of the page, the rest is split between an asinine site navigation system and ads.
Ads in a newspaper aren't anywhere nearly as intrusive as on the Internet. No newspaper ad bounces, flash, shake, spin, spawns popups or any crap like that. Newspaper ads don't try to leave cookies, tracks IP or otherwise grab and store information without telling me. I block all that stuff, but it's still a surprise when I use other computers.
Bad news for everybody (Score:5, Interesting)
What's worse is the effect this will have on all media. TV and radio stations already have very slim news staffs. They rely on newspaper stories as the starting point for many of their own stories. As do magazines. And this will affect blogs as well, as they usually write about what's been published elsewhere.
News starts with reporters, and most of them work for newspapers.
More people might prefer to read their news on the Internet, but with newspapers declining, there simply won't be as many stories to read.
Re:What do you expect? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Immediate Access (Score:5, Interesting)
That said, I always end up finding a few things to read and usually wind up spending a couple hours with it. It's quiet and calm and a nice change not to be sitting up looking at a screen for another couple hours. Sure, it may not be great for up-to-the-second news, but I don't care about that anyway. There's always some neat articles about local stuff, vacations, homes, etc. Browsing slashdot and the rest gets old after a while and it's a nice change of pace to find some unexpected neat thing that *doesn't* have to do with technology, Google, MS, Apple, or My Rights Online--and to do it in a nice, quiet, analog fashion.
Oh yeah, one other great thing about newspapers: no animated ads.
Re:Newspaper is killing the newspaper. (Score:2, Interesting)
Regarding television news, it has nearly always been a joke. It is a part of the sensory overload so many people have come to expect. The news does not change because a camera is thrown into the mix. People could be informed quite well by a news reader lecturing with a few slides as visual aids, but that would fail to get the ratings of watching packages. I have seen CNN, Fox News, CBS, NBC, ABC, MSN, and too many other TV news networks to mention all blowing hours at a time watching "suspicious packages" left in transit stations on a live feed. On the off chance that something does go awry, they'll get the best camera angle on the carnage and perhaps make some more money from ads and good ratings.
So long as newspaper and TV news prefer sensationalism to reporting, people who want information are going to look elsewhere. This may be one of the "worst newspaper years" in the US simply because the US does the worst job covering news.
Too make matters worse, ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Does this include account Free (as in beer) papers (Score:3, Interesting)
That said, I read a paper newspaper daily. The Metro (metronews.ca) is a free (ad-supported) newspaper that offers me as much news as I can read daily - 45 minutes on the way to work - with less ads than the major (not-free) dailies. Ok the journalism may not be as highbrow and neutral as such publications as the WSJ (US), the Times (UK) or the Globe (CA) [/irony], but frankly I am capable of researching a story if something catches my eye. And it has a crossword and sudoku. It also focuses on the one aspect of news that is not well covered online which is my local (down to what happens on my street) news.
The paper is not dead, nor will it be for the forseeable future, but the industry is undergoing (albeit more quietly) the same changes as the other major media - music and tv/film, and they need to find a new business model that can compete with the technological and revenue changes of the day.
The metro has a readership of over 400,000 of Toronto's 20-35 (read disposable income) population. This is the kind of targeted marketing that Google is milking vast VC on right now. National bloatpapers may have had their day but the print-paper industry is far from dead. They just need to wake up.
Disclaimer: I have nothing to do with any news dissemination organ, be it online, tree-based or otherwise
Re:Making Excuses (Score:4, Interesting)
Any paper who wants to survive in the future needs to invest heavily in online content and NOT just make their website exactly like the printed paper. If news is presented online in a convenient format, they will have no shortage of page views and ad revenue. Otherwise they will shrivel up and die. I suspect most papers will survive but those that are stubbornly resistant to progress will die in the next 10 years or so.
Re:Sure it's the Interenet? (Score:3, Interesting)
Epic 2014 (Score:3, Interesting)
Death for some... (Score:3, Interesting)
I live in Orlando, Florida. The local newspaper is called the Orlando Sentinel, a.k.a. the Slantinel. Their agenda-pushing sometimes makes our mud-slinging presidential candidates seem mild. In an internet full of freedom of choice, the Sentinel will most likely lose. People read it just because it's really the only local paper we've got.
When everyone gets all their written news online, it'll die because it's so bad. I doubt it will be the only paper like this, and I doubt it'll die willingly and quietly for that matter. I expect it'll be fairly ugly. Lots of "the internet can rape your children, steal your soul, and cause you to gain 50 pounds" type stories.
Re:Newspaper is killing the newspaper. (Score:2, Interesting)
You think freedom of the press has always been about keeping an informed public? Originally, the first ammendment was excepted because each politician knew he didn't want his party's newspapers silenced when his party wasn't in power.
However, I'll take the occasional hack journalist over state-controlled media any day. It's better to be a lemming with good vision than a horse with blinders on.
Not murder, suicide (Score:2, Interesting)
Yet today's newspapers are about litte more then poorly-disguised polemic and not-so-subtle agenda driven editorials masked as news reporting.
Know why Fox news and the talk radio stations are eating your lunch? Because when you become so self-satisfied and smug, people are revolted by it, and driven to other sources.
Welcome to capitalism, biatch.
Re:Death for some... (Score:4, Interesting)
They may be slanted but at least they're focused on news that's important to you. (And while they exist, you can at least pretend that someday they might investigate Hollings for his Mouske-ties.)
Re:What do you expect? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Newspaper is killing the newspaper. (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course, this is an observation that is new to the "mainstream" of our generation. Many people in my parent's generation would only "trust" one source. Indeed, most television news programs and newspapers still advertise themselves today as "your most trusted news source" as if it is a good thing to only focus on one!
I feel this is a reflection on our increased education, more than it is about the internet, or even the quality of newspapers (which has declined markedly in the last 10 years). More people with university education (completed or not) means that more people understand your observation of the importance of a varied news source.
It means more people recognise that present-day journalist are either hacks, or payed-for schills of whichever "cause" the story is supporting (it used to be that papers reported facts, not "stories").
This is compounded by the Internet, because people are finding it easier to get alternate views from sources besides their "trusted" newspapers. And as they learn that, in fact, you can't trust your newspapers, they turn to whatever source that they feel they can trust.
Re:Death for some... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What do you expect? (Score:3, Interesting)
It's not so much that the articles are crappy (although they often are), it's that the newspapers publishers do not grok the internets. It's the "horseless carriage" mentality, but now it's "online newspaper". Ask yourself why would a newspaper post one single picture of an event on it's website? The answer: because it's expensive to print pictures on paper.
The television station websites also suffer the same mentality-- let's put up a website that will have exactly the same content that we broadcast on television.
Anyone who spends any amount of time on Slashdot already knows this, but the internet is different than a t.v. or a newspaper. Therefore, it should have a different type of content. On the internet there are no constraints on how long an article or new clip can be, no limit on the number of photos, no reason you can't post raw video or audio along with the typical edited clips so that people who are interested in a subject can see more indepth coverage.
And why don't tv networks have continuous or near-continuous live feeds on their websites from some of the events they cover. I bet >99% of all the video that is fed to the stations or networks is never broadcast. Why not make it available on the web? Most of it will be pointless and boring, but I might tune in occasionally to see long videos of, say, US soldiers working in Iraq or watch raw footage of someone driving around a hurricane damage zone, etc.
Another idea-- post video of all archival broadcasts and footage on the website so people can watch old news if they want.