The Newspaper Isn't Dead Yet

theodp writes "Slate's Farhad Manjoo had high hopes for using the Kindle DX — Amazon's new large-screen e-reader — to read newspapers. A good first effort, says Manjoo, who concludes that for now newsprint still beats the $489 Kindle. While he has issues with latency, what he really misses relates to graphic design. The Kindle presents news as a list, leaving a reader to guess which pieces are most important to read. Newspapers, by contrast, opine on the importance of the day's news using easy-to-understand design conventions — important stories appear on front pages, with the most important ones going higher on the page and getting more space and bigger headlines. Also, because of its overnight delivery model, Manjoo gripes that the Kindle suffers from a lack of timeliness, making it not even as good as a smartphone."

Re:google news

[Anonymous Coward]

because the suits, the manager and the company proxy do not like it
i live in a part of the world where i get THREE FREE newspapers distributed at the subway/metro
and i enjoy reading slashdot on my new HTC Magic Android phone ^_^

The real problem is marginal cost

[Geoffrey.landis]

The real problem with newspaper economics is that the cost of production is almost entirely fixed cost, and the marginal cost is very small. That is, the main cost is in gathering the news and putting together the stories and laying up the first copy; once you've paid those fixed costs per issue, an additional issue costs very little. Hence, the incremental cost of internet publication is almost nothing-- they've paid the fixed cost to gather the news already. This means that competition drives newspapers to put their content on the internet for free: there's little cost reason not to (they've already paid the cost of producing the content), and they're competing against other newspapers, who can also put it on the internet for free, so there's no way they can keep the content valuable by restricting access.

In the old "print" days of newspapers, this was not a problem-- there would be only a few newspapers in a town; and the customers were given the choice of buying a newspaper or not reading the news. With the internet, though, newspapers are no longer local, so all the newspapers compete on the internet with each other, and there is no real bottom to the cost.

The only real solution is for newspapers to continue to go out of business. When this reaches the point where there are only a handful left, they might be able to start a model of restricting access to paid customers. They're still competing against bloggers and crowdsourcing, of course, but the actual professional (which is to say, paid) reporter model of newsgathering may have advantages in the quality of news, sufficient that it may be worth it for some customers to pay for.

(This is a general problem in free market theory, by the way, not specific to newspapers-- in a market with many small producers (rather than one or two large ones), when the marginal cost of production is close to zero, the equilibrium free market cost is zero, and thus everybody is driven out of business...)

Newspapers on the Kindle

[Brandee07]

Some information for informed discussion:

I rather like my newspaper on the Kindle, just for the fact of the small size and not having to crawl under the car to retrieve the paper. In addition, articles are in one piece, not continued on page A28. The articles are not abridged. The rest comes down to the individual paper and their publishing habits, and how much effort they're putting into the Kindle edition.

I get the Washington Post on my Kindle. It never has more than one picture per article, and sometimes when there are multiple pictures in the print edition, the wrong caption is attached to the picture in the Kindle edition. There are no ads, classified, comics, crosswords, sudokus, or horoscopes. All of the local sections and once-a-week sections are included. It is delivered every morning while I stand on the metro platform. The download takes about 30 seconds. Make sure to get it on the platform- Sprint doesn't have towers in the tunnels in DC.

There are separate sections for "The Front Page" "Politics & Nation" "World" and "The Fed Page," which I believe (not sure) are all rolled into the A section in the print edition.

You can clip a whole article with two clicks, which copies the whole article into a text file that can later be moved to a computer.

Periodicals are automatically deleted when they are more than seven issues old. You can flag any particular issue to be saved, and it will not delete it, although once seven issues have passed (a week for newspapers, seven months for magazines), you will no longer be able to re-download that issue from Amazon, although if you have stored it on your computer, you can always re-load it by USB. This is a demand on the newspapers part, as they make good money selling back articles. It's also largely moot, as most people throw away their newspaper when they're done reading it anyways.

The Kindle newspapers are no less timely than print newspapers, as they ARE the print paper in content. For breaking news, there's the NYTimes Breaking News Blog, which I don't subscribe to, and Google News open on my browser during the day at work.

The Washington Post has made huge leaps over the past year and a half on their Kindle edition. Every couple months I notice something in the layout has changed, and always for the better. When they made that big deal about the Business section being rolled into the A section, it has remained separate for Kindle users- the change was made to save on printing costs, after all.

I read my news on the Kindle 2. The Kindle 1 has a different set of behaviors (never automatically deleted old newspapers, leading to memory filling up, no joystick for easy navigation). The DX is just a Kindle 2 with a larger screen and (reportedly poor) native PDF support, so newspapers should not be any different than on the K2.

It's REALLY EASY to go get a single issue of a different paper, if you want one that day. Today I want to read the LA Times and see what's happening in my parent's area? It's kinda hard to find newsstands selling the LA times in DC, but I can do it easily on the Kindle.

No periodical that I know of has TTS disabled, although it's a terrible idea. The TTS software is terrible with proper names.

The main issue with newspapers on the Kindle stems from- what else?- DRM. A normal book purchase for a Kindle is available on all devices associated with that account (up to 6). A periodical subscription is tied to one device only. That means if you have His and Her Kindles, then you'll need two subscriptions for both devices to get the same paper. Also, this means that if you are backing up back issues on your computer and your Kindle breaks and is replaced, you will lose access to those back issues, unless you break the DRM. Switching which Kindle a periodical is assigned to is easy, but if you change your settings twice a day every day, you are likely to attract attention. Periodicals can only be assigned to Kindles, not to iPhones/iPod touches, although iPhones have their own methods of newspaper-getting.

Anyone have any questions about the actual implementation of Kindle newspapers? Nothing like actual facts to base a discussion off of!

Re:The real problem is marginal cost

[Jacques Chester]

Most newspapers lose money on the cover price. The real money is in classifieds and advertising.

What is killing newspapers is not competitive sources of content, it is competitive ways to place classifieds and display advertising [clubtroppo.com.au].

Disclaimer: I used to work for a small Newscorp newspaper in the classifieds department.

Re:But Cory said....

[dancingmad]

Also given Obama's recent speech in Saudi Arabia.

I think you mean Egypt.