Can the New Digital Readers Save the Newspapers? 289
Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that several companies plan to introduce digital newspaper readers by the end of the year with screens roughly the size of a standard sheet of paper to present much of the editorial and advertising content of traditional periodicals in generally the same format as they appear in print. Publishers hope the new readers may be a way to get consumers to pay for those periodicals — something they have been reluctant to do on the Web — while allowing publishers to save millions on the cost of printing and distributing their publications, at precisely a time when their businesses are under historic levels of pressure from the loss of readers and advertising. 'We are looking at this with a great deal of interest,' said John Ridding, the chief executive of the 121-year-old British newspaper The Financial Times. 'The severe double whammy of the recession and the structural shift to the Internet has created an urgency that has rightly focused attention on these devices.' The new tablets will start with some serious shortcomings: the screens, which are currently in the Kindle and Sony Reader, display no color or video and update images at a slower rate than traditional computer screens. But many think the E-ink readers are simply too little, too late and have not appeared in time to save the troubled realm of print media. 'If these devices had been ready for the general consumer market five years ago, we probably could have taken advantage of them quickly,' said Roger Fidler, the program director for digital publishing at the University of Missouri, Columbia. 'Now the earliest we might see large-scale consumer adoption is next year, and unlike the iPod it's going to be a slower process migrating people from print to the device.'"
Answer: (Score:1, Insightful)
No.
Next question?
Innovation only under pressure (Score:5, Insightful)
This is why recessions aren't always bad. Some of these old companies will only do something novel when they absolutely have to. Otherwise, it's business as usual.
Re:Standardization (Score:5, Insightful)
For $300, no thanks (Score:4, Insightful)
Give me a reader for $80 and maybe. $300? Screw that.
Size of a piece of paper? No thanks (Score:4, Insightful)
Outside of those carrying briefcases or backpacks, who wants to carry around a papersized piece of equipment to read old-fashioned news. Shouldn't they be focusing on a cheaper kindle-like device, since that has shown some acceptance in the marketplace?
Theres a lot to be said for a newspaper which can be rolled up or folded to take with you. Size is important for this sort of media.
Thinking about things the wrong way (Score:4, Insightful)
The newspapers are doomed. Their focus is to be able to get the same revenue for ads with a bigger device. They completely miss the point. They think that "giving away content" on the internet was their biggest mistake.
In reality, their biggest mistake was not containing costs 10 years ago (slowly) to reflect the structural shift of information to a different medium.
I used to have a subscription to the Wall Street Journal, which gave me both dead-tree and online information. While the content was ok at first, when NewsCorp destroyed the editorial content it was no longer worth the effort. Only about 10% of the dead-tree editions would be read because the format was unwieldy at the desk.
They need to bring costs in-line and generate quality content at the same time. (No, I didn't say it was easy.) There isn't a top-line solution that will make them viable long-term. Look no farther than ad rates to understand the limited value that the papers can generate for most of their advertisers.
Re:Standardization (Score:2, Insightful)
This move will drive newspapers consumption even further into the ground.
I always say this, if traditional printed newspapers want to survive the digital age, all they need to do is go 100% ad-sponsored and distribute it to the public for FREE. Much cheaper than developing some proprietary shit hat ony runs on some shit, which you have to spend a shit load of money to get.
Modern Revolution? (Score:3, Insightful)
A kick in the groin with that subscription? (Score:5, Insightful)
advertising content of traditional periodicals in generally the same format as they appear in print. Publishers hope the new readers may be a way to get readers to pay for those
I'm willing to pay for content OR to have it infested with ads. Not both.
They want to have my cake and eat it too. This is why I can't wait for these businesses to crash and burn.
Could work, in theory (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd be interested in this, provided it's on a device I can use for other things (like a Kindle, I don't want a newspaper only reader), and it can get the paper wirelessly every morning. If those two things are true, I'd likely transfer my dead tree subscription over to the digital one, which saves the newspaper the cost of printing and delivering a paper to me every day (which are substantial costs).
Of course, right now the Kindle doesn't really work in Canada at all, so that's a pipe dream for me at the moment.
Re:Standardization (Score:4, Insightful)
Advertisers are more interested in people who bothered to subscribe or buy something, they figure they will actually look at it.
That doesn't mean that they won't buy ads in free papers, but they won't pay as much if you don't have some sort of reasonable proof that there is reader interest in your publication.
Re:Standardization (Score:2, Insightful)
Neither!
Re:For $300, no thanks (Score:3, Insightful)
Better yet, a $300 reader for the NYT, a $250 reader for the local paper, a $450 reader for Condé Nast publications, a $200 reader put out by a consortium of alternative weeklies...
Any publisher-proprietary reader over $99, probably even $49, will die. And the balance sheets showing scores of unsold, low-margin/high-cost devices won't be a pretty sight, either.
Re:Standardization (Score:5, Insightful)
e-Reader: $300
Newspaper: 50 cents.
I know which one I'm more likely to buy...
According to current trends: neither.
Re:Standardization (Score:5, Insightful)
There have been free ad-supported newspapers out there for decades. None of them make the kind of money the subscription-based ones do even today, so why would you think a free model would work better?
For the reasons noted by the other reply to your post, advertisers will pay a much lower rate for ads in a free paper than in a paper people have to pay for. This means that in a free newspaper you'll have to have a much higher advertisement-to-content ratio, and even then you're not likely to make enough money to sustain any more than a few reporters, which means the quality of your content will suffer.
The free newspaper market is crowded and low margin, even more so than the subscriber-based newspaper market. Going that route will only accelerate the decline.
Re:I _want_ a larger reader (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd wager your the exception however and there isn't a critical mass of consumers looking for a product to meet the needs you have. iRex has no competition in this area, but yet their reader hasn't been much of a success. The lack of options is a symptom of demand, not supply in my opinion.
Re:Standardization (Score:5, Insightful)
My newspaper costs over $360 for a year's subscription.
If I get it via some kind of branded device, how many free years will they give me? Even one is cost effective for me, assuming I don't care about color pictures or the comics.
Re:Of course not. Here's why: (Score:5, Insightful)
Ben Goldacre had it right. [badscience.net]
The thing that bothers me with newspaper and TV news is that many stories need information from a specialist and they insist on putting a non-specialist, a journalist, between you and the person who knows what they're talking about.
In scientific stories, you always get a 3 minute story with an idiot dressed in a lab-coat dumbing down the message of a professor or medic, followed by a measly 10 second snippet with the actual expert. Of course experts won't always speak in the most media friendly way possible - so coach them! Edit the interview until it makes sense! But don't feed them through a non-comprehending cipher.
It really is reaching the stage where the best way to get the information is to find a decent blog from somebody who actually works in that field.
Re:Thinking about things the wrong way (Score:3, Insightful)
Look no farther than ad rates to understand the limited value that the papers can generate for most of their advertisers.
Maybe you missed this part
A subscription-based model on custom displays with the ad-supported web edition available for the masses sounds like a win-win situation, no?
Re:Standardization (Score:5, Insightful)
Good point. A real subscription to WSJ or NYT is not cheap. But keeping current subscribers isn't really the problem, is it? It would be much better (financially) to get some old subscribers back, or even new subscribers.
The cost argument is very good, but I don't want 3-4 eReaders, each that only works on one paper. That's just a hassle.
Then there is the up-front cost. Right now I can buy my local paper only on Sundays, or when I see an interesting story. But very few people will front the $360 unless they are very committed. If they are that committed, they probably already subscribe. But you can't get rid of the paper edition, because how would you attract new readers when the price of starting goes from $1.50 to $360? You have to keep print, so you won't be able to cut costs too much.
Re:Standardization (Score:3, Insightful)
The browser makes a crappy newspaper. Various e-readers have a chance, especially if I can mix my local paper with the NYT, the WSJ, SFC, and maybe /. for breakfast. Add in my comics. Put it on my cable bill. I'm sold-- and happy I don't have to haul sacks of dead trees to a recycler.
Re:Standardization (Score:5, Insightful)
The subscriber count is one of the big problems of free newspapers, since they can't get accurate numbers. But if you gave away free eReaders, they could report back reader numbers so you could value the ads much better, allowing you to get higher rates since you can prove your readership (instead of surveys saying it's between 1,500 and 30,000), right?
Re:Size of a piece of paper? No thanks (Score:4, Insightful)
Shouldn't they be focusing on a cheaper kindle-like device, since that has shown some acceptance in the marketplace?
They should be concentrating on delivering the news to people in the format that they want it delivered in. People are already long beyond the point where someone else telling us how to get our information is going to work. I want my news via RSS that I can read on my phone and any multitude of other machines I'm using throughout the day. I do NOT want to purchase ANOTHER device to read news from one source.
The newspaper industry continues to amaze me. When they are failing, and failing hard, instead of finding a way to work within the boundaries of what people want and are already utilizing, these companies are trying to get people to go back to reading what is basically the same thing that put them out of business in the first place.
Re:Standardization (Score:3, Insightful)
You'd get a better product hitting their web page with your iPhone. The half-assed pdf-esque digital format papers aren't worth the subscription price.
Re:I _want_ a larger reader (Score:2, Insightful)
The fact that a $100, roughly paper sized, highly legible, long battery life, great software containing device isn't on the market probably has quite a lot to do with it not being possible right now.
I'm pretty sure such a device would sell millions and millions of units.
Re:Standardization (Score:4, Insightful)
The cost argument is very good, but I don't want 3-4 eReaders, each that only works on one paper. That's just a hassle.
Right. I would definitely think the business model should be to standardize on a single reader (or better yet, a specification that different manufacturers can meet), and then subsidize the cost of the reader, sort of like cell phones. Buy subscriptions to the WSJ and NYT, get a free e-reader.
Even giving away a $300 device, the publishers will save money in the long term by not having to actually print and deliver things-- given either a long enough timeline or a large enough number of subscriptions per device.
Newspapers are already dead (Score:3, Insightful)
Exercise: buy a newspaper and throw out all the sections that are 100% marketing. Entire sections, like Autos, Real Estate, and Wine (Wine?) go into the dumpster. The classified sections can go; that's all on-line, and on line it's searchable.
Of what's left, over half will still be pages that are all advertising. Throw out those pages. About 15-20% of the original pages will be left.
Then throw out the pages than only have stories you already saw on Google News. Throw out the stories that came from PR Newswire. Maybe 2 to 3% of the pages will be left. That's the "content". The whole paper could probably be condensed down to about six pages. In many cities, less.
Today's newspapers make spam look like an efficient data transmission medium.
Re:Of course not. Here's why: (Score:4, Insightful)
Ben Goldacre had it right. [badscience.net]
That's a pretty good list, especially 1, 4, and 5.
It does seem to me that large newspapers are having trouble on the web because they don't seem to understand the differences of what the "new media" has to offer. I don't got to the NYT website to read my news, I come to Slashdot or Digg, who might possibly link to the NYT. Why is that?
Well, first because they're offering a broader selection of news. Second and more importantly, Slashdot provides a good discussion system for me to talk about the story. It gives a place where people, sometimes with equal or greater expertise than those writing the story, can comment, either supporting the conclusions of the article or picking them apart. There's added depth.
And this is where the biggest value of this "new media" comes in: there aren't real space limitations. You can put up all your content, as much as you have, in any number of combinations, permutations, and sorted in any number of ways, all at the same time. You can have a good discussion system, and people who aren't interested in it can choose not to visit it. If you have a scientific issue and you have two different experts with differing opinions, you can have the dumbed-down synopsis of the debate written by a journalist, but you can also allow each expert to write their own argument and publish them alongside the journalist's story.
The only real expense for these things is in editing or moderating, which I think probably can be done in a cost-effective way.
Re:Standardization (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:A kick in the groin with that subscription? (Score:3, Insightful)
That is how you feel, that's fine. But the truth is, some level of advertising is acceptable to most people even when they pay for content. Advertising can help subsidize the cost of the content, thus allowing people to spend less to receive the same content -- so the publisher can get more people to pay if they charge less.
The question is, at what point do the drawbacks of including advertising outweigh the cost savings that included advertising brings?
The answer to this question will vary by person -- you have a very low tolerance for advertising. I, on the other hand, have a fairly high tolerance for it, as long as it is unobtrusive, since I can quickly judge if it's relevant to my interests, and ignore it if it isn't. People have a whole range of value assignations to advertising-free media, and the truth of the matter is that publishers need to work the sweet spots in order to generate enough revenue to be profitable.
I would prefer to see a scale of offerings, not an oversimplified duality of subscription-only or advertising-only revenue for publishers. I suspect the ad-revenue-only content would be horrific to read, while I wouldn't drop the cash on the subscription-revenue-only content.
To make a long post short, what exactly is wrong with advertising subsidizing suscription costs?
My requirements (Score:2, Insightful)
1) lightweight
2) flexible - as flexible as paper
3) cheap
4) no vendor lockin
I'd be happy to go to an office supply store and buy a foldable broadsheet-size e-paper reader then download the same newspaper I get at home. I wouldn't pay twice for the same subscription, but I might pay for a subscription I wouldn't otherwise pay for if the content was specialized enough.
For newspapers, specialized content includes local content not covered by other media including other local media, editorials and opinions, and in certain cases, advertisements, such as those in the Sunday supplement. Many of the latter are now online though.
Newspapers need to get it through their head that they are in the news- and opinion-delivery business, and that print is just one of many methods of delivering content.
They also need to get it through their head that if another vendor provides essentially the same information, or even a large subset of it, with no cost and no annoyance, he will be strongly favored over a provider that charges money or uses annoyances. Different readers consider different things annoying, but some annoyances include being on paper, not being on paper, being on paper of the "wrong" size, requiring a screen or window of the "wrong" size, browser incompatibilities, having ads, having animated ads, using active content on a web page, using tracking cookies, requiring a login, not allowing comments, etc. etc.
No. When I could not tell an opinion article (Score:3, Insightful)
from a news story I gave up. The last election made it even more pathetic. Too many of today's newspapers are nothing more than tabloids. They would have been laughed out of the industry thirty years ago.
So no, no reader is going to fix newspapers. Far too many of these papers are losing subscribers because the paper's political view is no where near in line with those who used to pay for them. Worse too many of these papers then call those people who don't subscribe over differences of opinion "ignorant" and wonder why that doesn't help.
Then again my experience is mostly with the AJC... though my buddy in LA says it is no different there.
Re:Answer: (Score:5, Insightful)
Hype machine dialed to 11 (Score:4, Insightful)
This whole idea begs the question of whether or not newspapers actually need "saving". The Kindle is not going to save large newspapers anymore than their websites will save them. What needs to change is not so much the delivery format but the way newspapers are run. Newspapers and news entities cannot effectively run as for-profit organizations or at the very least not as publicly traded for-profit organizations. The demand for stock price returns have led to newsroom cuts, consolidations, and expansions into markets newspapers shouldn't really be in. Newspapers either became or got swallowed up by "media companies" and now are part of television, radio, newspapers, magazine, and sometimes internet media conglomerates. We're all the worse for it because in order to drive a profit newspapers have increased column inches for advertising and reduced column inches for actual articles. They've also taken to filling space with wire articles instead of having a decent sized newsroom of their own. Wire services in and of themselves are useful entities, especially for smaller papers but we've moved into an age where people can log onto Google News and read wire service articles, newspapers don't need to waste ink printing them.
What will save newspapers the media conglomerates failing under their own weight and breaking back up. Newspapers will end up becoming more format neutral news organizations. They'll start providing news articles to specialized providers instead of running the whole stack themselves. A newsroom will write the stories and pass them off to Amazon to load on the Kindle, to Audible to make into an audiobook, to their website, and to a printer that will put the words to paper for people that still want (or need) a physical version of the news. The LA Times newspaper (for example) however will probably go away. It will end up being the "News and other work from the LA region" paper. A dedicated publishing group will pick up stories from the LA Times newsroom, advertisers, and possibly local blogs, and print and distribute them. The LA Times newsroom will no longer have to worry about the printer as long as their stories are submitted on time, advertisers can still get local ads out to people, and everyone will still be able to get the news that is important to them.
The main difference between that future and today will be the newsroom and the printer will not be owned and operated by the same company. More newsrooms will likely end up privatized or run as community owned entities similar to the St.Petersburg Times. News is a difficult thing to make profitable as it is a service in the public interest. If existing news organizations don't reorganize they will fail and other organizations with more streamlined processes and better management will eventually fill the void. A newspaper might fail but the journalists that love their work will keep doing it in one way or another.