Print News Fading, Still Source of Much News 140
CNet's Dan Farber took a look, not only at the popular news of how print media is dying a slow death, but also what contribution to the news print journalists are still making. According to research quoted, while the physical publications are quickly becoming a thing of the past much of the news that makes its way into circulation via blogs and other means still originates from the hard work of those print journalists. (We discussed a similar perspective on the news a week back.) "While the Internet is growing as the place where people go for news, the revenue simply isn't catching up fast enough. The less obvious part of the Internet overtaking newspapers as the main source for national and international news is that much of the seed content--the original reporting that breaks national and international news and is subsequently refactored by legions of bloggers--comes from the reporters and editors working at the financially strapped newspapers and national and local television outlets. [...] As the financial pressures mount--the outlook for 2009 is dismal--and the cost cutting continues, we can only hope that the original news reporting by top-flight journalists is not a major casualty."
Re:It's simple... (Score:4, Informative)
We still get our paper (Score:4, Informative)
We used to get our paper every day. Then I noticed that we were taking the paper in in the morning and putting it into the recycle bin unread at the end of the week. We were getting all of our news from TV and the Internet. We only really used the paper for the Sunday ads (finding sales and coupons). We looked into Sunday only delivery and determined that our paper's Saturday-Sunday rate was a better deal. (I would read the paper most times on Saturday.) After awhile, we got a notice from our paper that we were being switchded to Thursday-Sunday delivery for no additional cost. Now we're basically in nearly the same boat as before. Every recycling day, 2 papers (Thursday & Friday) go into the bin unread. Saturday's is read and Sunday's is read only for the ads. If we could get the circulars/coupons online for cheaper than the cost of the paper (this would need to include ink costs to print the coupons), we would cancel our subscription entirely.
Re:Emperor Murdoch is still making huge profit... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:We still get our paper (Score:1, Informative)
I worked in the circulation department of a fair-sized local paper about twelve years ago. Even then they were getting pretty desperate.
They ended Friday - Sunday service (Friday's TV guide) and Sunday-only (coupons) service. You could do Mon - Fri (businesses usually), Weekend or every day.
The theory was that it would force people wanting both the coupons and the TV guide to buy a seven-day subscription. Since that was a really stupid ass idea, it predictably failed to do anything other than piss off several thousand subscribers, many of whom canceled. I got an earful from more than one person about it.
Re:Emperor Murdoch is still making huge profit... (Score:1, Informative)
Only Correct in a VERY Limited Way (Score:3, Informative)
Of course subscription = revenue. BUT revenue does NOT mean Cover All Operating Costs.
I used to work for a software vendor writing and implementing enterprise circulation systems for medium and large newspapers. For the greatest majority of all print media (and I would be surprised if there were more than a handful of exceptions) MOST revenue is derived from advertising. (How much did it cost to buy that one full page Firefox ad in the New York Times a few years ago?) In all cases, the cost of a subscription for a direct to home subscriber (if this is offered by the newspaper), and wholesale revenue to distributors, stores, etc. only covers a part of the distribution costs. Having your own experienced reporters in key areas of the world is very expensive. While most individual newspapers do not have the financial resources field reporters on their own, their publishers who own groups of papers can combine the revenue and pay for this quality reporting.
In the U.S.A. the papers offer what is called 'Total Market Coverage'. They have extensive and verified address lists for whole regions. They know who they deliver to on the main days where advertising goes out (usually Sundays in the U.S.A... could be Saturday or Sunday in Canada). They know the addresses they deliver Sunday papers to with all those adverts. They then also know the households that don't get the adverts. The paper then snail mails the advertisements and fliers to the remaining households that do not subscribe to the paper. The work they do verifying the addresses reduces the mailing costs but still it is expensive. They also have demographic information for the areas to make sure they don't sell ads for Cadillacs to areas that can only afford Kias.
The amount they can charge for advertising is based on numbers collected for the 'Audit Bureau of Circulation' (ABC); the 'Nelson Rating' of newspaper circulation. The most important numbers are ones reflecting 'paid circulation' as it is assumed those who pay for a newspaper actually read it. The higher the ABC number for paid subscriptions, the more a newspaper can charge for advertising... just like T.V.... more people watching means better revenue. When less newspapers are sold, less money is made. Ads may be mailed out to everyone, but you know the people who read the papers are more likely to see the ads and use them (or at least see them before they throw them out!).
In 1999 one of the big publishers (it might have been the one owning USA Today) successfully pushed to get unpaid circulation numbers into the ABC audit figures as well. This was to push up their numbers to be relatively high because they are the papers that show up at every hotel door in America every morning (but are not necessarily read). This gives a sort of bragging right: "look how big our circulation is". Even though many hotel guests just step over the paper on the way out the door. This is also an indication that subscription revenue doesn't really cover much when they can give away the paper for nothing (and in these cases most of the content is light weight news feed work where they don't have their own reporters stationed around the world).
The bottom line is that if papers can't keep their revenue stream up, and it is sliding like a runaway toboggan, they won't be able to function much longer. We won't have reliable and quality reporting any more. Sorry, but I don't believe some guy with no credentials or anyone to vouch for him personally, who writes something on the internet under an assumed blogger name, is trustworthy (but why not? if you read it on the internet it must be true... right?). Yes we can try to sell advertisements on newspaper web sites and charge by how many hits the paper gets as a rating mechanism. But with adblock and mostly unreliable hit counters (unreliable for basing expensive economic models on), it is an extremely steep uphill battle that I for one, am uncertain can be overcome.
Where there is a need, yes there will be someone to sell y
Journalism can work (Score:1, Informative)
As someone who has worked in newspapers for 20 years, including several stints as a web designer, I can tell you first-hand why print is declining, and why first-hand online news sources (that's the news department side of newspapers) are fading, even while online news is attracting more eyeballs than print ever did.
But first, a few basic facts:
In the traditional newspaper model, the cost of subscriptions (and newstand sales) paid for the cost of printing and distribution; that includes paper, ink, pressmen, machines to insert the glossy ads, amortized capital cost of the presses, and other related costs.
The costs of newsgathering, writing and editing, along with headline writers, the pay of advertising sales, circulation, receptionists, and so on, was to be paid from advertising, both the big ads on the regular pages, and from classified ads.
In effect, that should've/could've meant that moving from print distribution of the news to online distribution of the news would be possible, with most of the news operation intact -- except for printing and distributing the dead trees.
In fact, however, most publishers looked with disdain and bemusement at the people who thought online news would overtake printed versions. At one paper where I was creating and staffing the website (alone, for a seven-day paper, in 1995) the publisher said he'd seen this all before, a few years earlier, when some people said the news would all be delivered to homes via fax in a few years -- and that didn't happen, so why worry about the Internet?
When I moved to a different chain, I heard much the same thing from the CEO, who said people had claimed radio, then TV, and then fax machines would be the death of newspapers -- and none of that happened, so why worry? And, why invest much in this new medium?
Then, when sites such as Craigslist came out, those same news leaders were dismissing it -- the same way they'd never really worried about the free classified papers in their communities -- because such publications didn't have the prestige of the community's daily paper(s). They were likened to garage sales, while we were Macy's.
Then they spent years trying to come up with an "online strategy" which almost always was an effort to pretend to have an online presence, but preserve print readership by forcing readers to the print edition for the full story.
Attempts to make money online have been long hampered, at almost every paper, by a combination of politics, intertia and incompetence OUTSIDE of the newsroom.
For example, the task of signing readers up for online subscriptions falls to the circulation department -- yet the circulation director's bonuses remain tied to growth in print sales.
In advertising, it's often the same way. A salesperson might be able to sell an online ad -- if they work really, really hard at it. But in the same time, they can sell three times as much print advertising by simply calling the people they've always called and selling them what they've always sold them. This could be dealt with by adjusting commissions to make selling online ads worth the time, but few places have done that, perpetuating the inability of online operations to turn a profit, much less break even or help offset the losses being incurred elsewhere.
With all that said, the reporters keep plugging away. Sure, there are lazy, incompetent reporters, and lots and lots of press releases simply being re-written (or just re-typed). But in just the past year at the paper I work at (a small one in the Midwest) we've had stories about how the federal and state government manipulate the statistics in No Child Left Behind; another discovered long-established (and forgotten) city ordinances mandating water-conservation rules when water supplies drop to a certain level; another reporter built his own rough computer models and successfully challenged the Army Corps of Engineers' longstanding estimates of how much water was really stored in a local reservoir the city depends on.