Letting Time Solve the Online News Dilemma 188
The Guardian's John Naughton isn't looking to micro-transactions or licensing fees from search services to solve the online news business model problems that have come to a head recently. Instead, he's simply waiting for capitalism to do its job in killing off the providers who can't cut it. Once that happens, he says, the remaining organizations will be in a far better position to see what web-goers will pay for online news, and he doesn't think it will inhibit the growth of an increasingly information-rich news ecosystem.
"Things have got so bad that Rupert Murdoch has tasked a team with finding a way of charging for News Corp content. This is the 'make the bastards pay' school of thought. Another group of fantasists speculate about ways of extorting money from Google, which they portray as a parasitic feeder on their hallowed produce. ... But what will journalism be like in the perfectly competitive online world? One clue is provided by the novelist William Gibson's celebrated maxim that 'the future is already here; it's just not evenly distributed.' In a recent lecture, the writer Steven Johnson took Gibson's insight to heart and argued that if we want to know what the networked journalism of the future might be like, we should look now at how the reporting of technology has evolved over the past few decades."
Warning! This is a False Sense of Security! (Score:5, Interesting)
It's difficult to keep one's head when all about one people are losing theirs, but let us have a go. First of all, some historical perspective might help. When broadcast radio arrived in the US in the 1920s, nobody could figure out a business model for it. How could one generate revenue from something that could be listened to by anyone for free? Dozens of companies were founded to exploit the new medium, and most of them folded. The problem was solved by a detergent manufacturer named Procter & Gamble, which came up with the idea of sponsoring dramatic serials: the soap opera â" and the mass market â" was born.
What you're overlooking is that newspapers have enjoyed revenues for quite sometime. Granted, they've risen and fallen, they are used to this steady income. Radio wasn't used to this income. Models like brand name advertising and recognition ensured its success. Newspapers have made money off of controlling the distribution channels of a similar model with great results, now they are staring down the barrel of a distribution model that they cannot control. They aren't used to this and they certainly aren't handling it well.
... who could blame them?
What radio saw was a controlled explosion in which they ramped up and expanded across everywhere. That's an easy thing to do because it's positive. What newspapers across the country should be doing is cutting unnecessary jobs, refactoring salaries. Being a columnist is not going to be glamorous any more. The irony is that you're going to be more widely read but be paid less. That might make a lot of people want to quit and find other work
This restructuring must happen or you will die. Marketing and endorsements have been the only card you have played (Murdoch's micro charging is proof he's out of ideas) for the past decade as the internet has exploded. The recession is making this more obvious now than it was last year. You had your chance to invent the new way, now you must act or reduce your work force.
The moral is simple: eventually someone will figure out a business model that works for online news. But it may take some time, and lots of outfits will fall by the wayside in the meantime. That's capitalism for you.
You are wrong. There is an end state where no one figures out a way for the model to work. Newspapers go the way of the buffalo just like drive in theaters. You have done yourself and your kind a great disservice by theorizing this false safety net and are only further lulling them into inaction and unemployment. I am not in your business but I see it from the outside and as a customer, use this advice.
True Investigative Journalism (Score:5, Interesting)
The days of relying on the news wire are over, guys. Anyone can do that, and they can do it without having to pay a single salary, while making money off of ad content. In a perfectly competitive system, consumer costs approach the marginal costs. When something is basically free, or cheap enough to be ad supported, then it will be. If the audience is limited, or the costs too high, than a fee to read will be used, or some other model will emerge. This is how the market works. It drives non-competitive players out of the market. On a side note, the music industry would do well to adopt a similar strategy (ie the music is free/ad supported, but the concerts are not).
Re:Capitalism maximizes for profit (Score:2, Interesting)
I once heard a show on NPR that brought in two people to debate an issue: a prominent liberal and a prominent conservative in the area of discussion (religion in this case). Something very interesting happened. The conservative felt that the moderator was biased against him simply for having the debate in the first place. He was accustomed to a format in which he is left unchallenged and unquestioned.
That seems to be the difference between liberal and conservative media. The liberal outlet gives equal time to multiple voices while the conservative one presents only a single side of any issue.
Re:Parasitic Google? (Score:3, Interesting)
It seems odd. Google has to pay for the privilege of sending them traffic.
It's more like "Google has to pay for the privilege of displaying content creators freshly created content next to Google ads." Without the content creators, Google has little to offer. I use Google as my homepage, and most of the time I can just read the headlines to know what is going on... I click on less than 10% of the stories. But without those results, Google has nothing to sell, no reason for my eyes to ever visit their news page. I look for Google to have more problems in the future as content creators become more desperate to monetize their work. What I fear is a guild system that ends up being something like ASCAP & BMI http://www.artistshousemusic.org/videos/the+difference+between+ascap+and+bmi [artistshousemusic.org].
The Lesson From Norway (Score:3, Interesting)
Norwegian newspapers have managed the transition and are now making almost half their money from the online version.
How did they do it? You make it free and accessible, you add services and features. Exclusive video content and articles. The online and print divisions are separate, with dedicated staff and management.
Obviously it helps that Scandinavians read more newspapers than the rest of the world, and that high-speed Internet is widely available and affordable!
Advertising is the most important revenue source, however they now make more money from services like social networking etc. People pay monthly fees for services they actually want.
So at least in Scandinavia online news will continue to be free, hopefully the US and UK will find business models that work for them.
Here are my sources:
http://whatsnewmedia.org/2007/09/23/newspaper-v-internet-if-you-cant-beat- [whatsnewmedia.org]âem-join-âem/
http://abluteau.wordpress.com/2009/04/01/european-newspapers-find-creative-ways-to-thrive-in-the-internet-age/ [wordpress.com]
It's not Google killing the news sites (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm afraid it's not Google killing the news sites. It's the Internet itself. The Internet made it possible for anybody who wants to to publish cheaply and get read by a world-wide audience, and in the process killed the mere reporting of news as a paying job.
Why should I go to a news site to read a reprint of a press release from a company when I can go to that company's own Web site and read the original press release? Why should I read a news report of the latest scientific breakthrough when I can go to the scientist's own site and read his own paper on it? Why should I read the news reports of a disaster when I can go to the Twitter feeds and Livejournals of people who're actually there and read their first-hand reports, or go to the web sites of the emergency-services agencies in the area and read their updates on the situation? And in all of those cases, those first-hand sources aren't in the business of reporting news. They don't particularly care whether they get paid for generating their content, they've got other reasons of their own for wanting that content visible. And, as in so many things, the Internet's making it harder and harder for those middlemen whose business model is to get between the source of something and the eventual consumer and charge for transferring that something from the source to the destination.
Now, news sites aren't doomed. But to survive they're going to have to do something more than just report the news. They're going to have to start pulling together many sources of different information, analyzing all of it and putting together the pieces that it isn't immediately obvious fit together. Of course, that's going to be kind of hard seeing as they've spent the last decade or so wiping all traces of that out of their organizations because investigative journalism of any quality doesn't produce the Holy ROI.
Re:There's a big thing missing... (Score:5, Interesting)
...is that most of the "easy fruit" of reporting that basicly just being on site and report what's happening is easily done by regular people, there's always someone who likes to talk about it.
Time for another Slashdot Pop Quiz. Which of the following is most true?
a) Regular people are willing to regularly attend hearings on the local, state or federal level;
b) Regular people have a budget to attend and cover those hearings;
c) Regular people have an extensive network of contacts in local, state, or federal governments with whom they've developed relationships that facilitate ferreting out new stories, ongoing consent to both on and off-record quoting, and cross-checking facts; or
d) Regular people watch American Idol.
The answer is obviously (d). Now if you're feeling inspired, pick a topic. Doesn't have to be government. After you've spent a few weeks researching who the movers and shakers are, see if you can get your name and email address added to the list of folks who regularly receive information, say, something ordinary like press releases. Your odds are higher than trying to get someone important to actually take your calls, but those odds are probably still slim to none.
When you get round to discovering you've got nothing to contribute, you'll be ready to blog about it anyway along with countless others who are doing the same. Hopefully by then you've gained some respect for reporters, most of whom are employed by newspapers. If not, I guess we'll have to sit back and wait for that traffic accident, meteor landing in your backyard, or other one-off event to occur for you to play Regular Guy Reporter.
Re:News is now entertainment. mod up (Score:5, Interesting)
100% correct. unfortunately, since the fall of the CCCP, the news industry has slowly collapsed into a sensationalistic grab bag of titillation and distraction.
Here's a nice short documentary on this [google.com] by Adam Curtis.
RS
Re:News is now entertainment. (Score:3, Interesting)
Newspapers are not in trouble today because they have advertisers. They are in trouble because of their antiquated delivery mechanism and their less than timely delivery.
What you read on the web today will not be in the papers until tomorrow. It will most likely have been the subject of many talk shows on the radio, T.V round tables, and countless forums such as slashdot.
But let's go with your suggestion that market forces are evil. If you can't market it, then who pays? The government. Then, the government is just another sponser. To think that the news organizations would not then tailor their coverage to please their sponser is naive at best.
NPS is a great watch dog when it comes to covering politicians that don't agree with their political philosophy. But they are mere cheerleaders when the pols running the show are on their own team.
Information Value Crisis (Score:2, Interesting)