A lot of us continue to worry about the ongoing collapse of newspapers and the threat to traditional reporting. It’s something we’ve talked about a lot at GMD, and something which you’re hearing more about from the industry in question. Unfortunately, what you hear is rarely constructive or meaningful. Take for example the latest from WCAX from July 30th (ht Philip).
Beyond the most perfunctory mentions, are there any actual discussions of altering the business model? Of identifying what’s working and what isn’t? Of creative new approaches? Of looking ahead to a new media landscape?
Yeah, right:
“We are not a blogger who is coming and going, building new identities every day based on their own opinions, that is not going on with us. That is why we are credible. We are just not going anywhere,” says Catherine Nelson, the general manager of the Rutland Herald.
“(Bloggers) are perhaps stealing, maybe that is too strong a word, but stealing their news from newspapers and television. They are not doing original reporting. So the funny thing would be, if newspapers were to disappear tomorrow, we would be pulling the rug out from under them,” Stern says.
“The internet is still just a bog of misinformation,” Wolstenholme says.
“One of the problems in this new media world is the lack of focus,” says David Mindich, who chairs the journalism department at St. Michael’s College. “Bloggers merely augment what traditional journalists do.”
No escape from the blogger boogeyman, apparently.
The token blogger interviewed is Philip Baruth, and Philip does a fine job sounding nothing like the wild-eyed enemy of freedom and information that this, and so many other such reports, paints. Of course he also does a good job stating the importance of professional reporters, making the blog-bashing screeching going on around him that much screechier.
Blogs, of course, do not directly compete with newspapers. But “new media” speaking broadly (including blogs) present clear challenges for “legacy” media, both in terms of challenging quality and quantity of content (and, at times, veracity), as well as technical and creative hurdles for how to reach their audience in a cost-effective manner. And certainly, those challenges threaten to swallow entire newspapers.
When a person feels denigrated or unfairly run down, there are, generally speaking, two ways they counter it. They can start talking themselves up, or they can start talking others down so they seem to rise in comparison. The latter is a lot easier, and seems to be the more common M.O. among many media professionals. But the fact is, all the trash talking of bloggers-in-their-underwear in the world is going to amount to nothing as far as the bottom line viability of traditional news venues are concerned.
And cracking the new media nut meaningfully is going to mean a lot more than simply having your reporters blog, its going to necessitate reimagining entire business models.
All of this is why the denial also on display is frightening:
“The loud voices proclaiming the death of newspapers, if you dig into who they are, are the people on the web,” says Dennis Stern, a senior vice president at the New York Times.
Okay, just “people on the web.” And just from websites such as The New Yorker, The Business Insider, USA Today, and, of course, this recent Rasmussen poll for US News & World Report:
65: Percentage of American adults who think daily papers won’t exist in 10 years
17: Percentage of adults who think daily papers won’t exist in three years
83: Percentage of Americans between 18 and 29 who think newspapers have less than 10 years left
Just a bunch of crazy bloggers, all, I suppose.
Clearly, the time has come for “experts” like Stern to stop shaking their fist at the storm and wake up and smell the coffee.
And yes, a professional editor would’ve done something about that mixed metaphor.
But I do know that I got to find out in todays Times Argus who is running for Secretary of State. I got this news more than a year ahead of the election! What a bonus. And to include what Eric Davis thinks was just gravy. With this kind of reporting, good days are ahead for print journalism. You just watch.
Newspapers are in serious trouble, and the Internet is largely responsible, but bloggers got nothin’ to do with it. It’s Craigslist, leaching away the classifieds. It’s the multiplicity of mainstream news websites that devalue the wire copy that’s a staple of any newspaper’s content.
If anything, bloggers are probably a net plus, because they point out newspaper stories. They certainly don’t drain significant ad revenue (as anyone trying to make a living off a blog can attest).
Of course, the real reason the newspapers (and broadcasters) hate the blogs is that blogs frequently criticize the mainstream media. Newspapers, so often critical of others, are notoriously thin-skinned.
must have stolen the newspaper and the signal ?
Nothing at all to do with this
A recent poll quoted here http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/… by AIM Group formerly called Classified Intelligence shows how steep the dip in real estate advertising has been for newspapers.
…….
Haven’t seen WCAX in months because with the digital signal change they are unavailable by antennae. Read it online.
the one about blogs stealing from newspapers
the Free Press just printed a (really really really stupid) op-ed by Rich Tarrant that first appeared at VT Tiger
Just looking over Green Mountain Daily’s front page posts from the last few days.
First, there’s this piece, which I did find out about from the Reformer. Where did the reformer get is news? The exact same place the Herald did. It’s an AP byline. No original story on this from either the Reformer or the Herald.
Right before that is a piece I wrote on Herrick’s Cove which was entirely original, including original photography and details about Herrick’s Cove, with no sources from traditional media whatsoever.
Prior to that was a piece by Jack which played off of the Boston Globe’s coverage of words created by a GMD frontpager. I.e., we reported on the news reporting on content we generated.
Prior to that, Ed Garcia posted a fairly elaborate piece of his own.
The entire remainder of the front page here is currently original commentary by GMD members, some of which is media criticism, but still original commentary.
I think this is my way of calling “load of crap” on the nonsense quoted in this diary.
Unfortunately, the average person seems to be more inclined to take his or her news from the tv station with the best ad revenue or the newspaper that can somehow continue to subsidize its existence with meet and greets. The current cry against bloggers versus reporters is really being perpetuated by the columnists at the more influential papers. Those are the people who are most threatened by unwashed masses with equal amounts of ink. If newspapers want to get back to reporting news that the public will buy, they should get rid of the overpaid, underthinking op-ed writers.
Newspapers are being ripped off by some blogs like Gawker but the biggest problem is as JO mentioned: business model failure. As a basic rule of capitalism, you can’t make money if you give away the store. This is what the newspaper industry hasn’t figured out yet. They need to create a revenue model based on the most important things they deliver, which is content. This means they need to finally start making online readers pay for the news.
A model that won’t work is the standard subscription fee. Online readers jump from paper to paper, mostly reading the articles that interest them. The iTunes model should be one of the primary paths for the newspaper industry to investigate, only with a wide range of pricing from free to $0.99. Web traffic statistics can offer the guide to pricing premium content vs. niche content vs. basic services (like obits and announcements). For example, imagine how much money the NYTimes could make if they charged $0.07 for the latest Paul Krugman or Frank Rich. By charging a nominal fee for individual writers and/or headline articles the online version of the Times won’t fall into the trap it suffered when it tried to charge readers for all op-ed writers in it’s Premium version several years ago. Millions of readers want to know everything about Michael Jackson; millions others about Iraq and Afghanistan. And they are willing to pay chump change to read it.
Newspapers can set up transaction arrangement in a variety of ways, but it would be important for the transaction method to be portable from one newspaper to the next. Something like Paypal or a similar transaction gateway.
Another thing that needs to happen industry-wide is to stop allowing Google News and other news aggregators to deliver content for newspapers. I wonder if the National Newspaper Association ever considered buying the unused url, TheNews.com. If they purchased a memorable url like this, then they could build their own news aggregator powered by Ask.com or another search company.
But of course, we don’t see any of this happening. It seems as if newspapers are trying to generate revenue online primarily through advertising. Ain’t gonna happen, especially for smaller papers.
The iTunes model, combined with a search powered news industry aggregator, has the potential to put newspapers back in the black and even highly profitable.
next time some newspaper or telie-news reports what others are saying or pushing how great their Iranian twitter coverage is or mindlessly put in some AP drivel.
Fact is the world of “blogging” is extremely diverse with some folks merely passing on what they heard and others doing some really fine investigative reporting and a greater number doing some combination.
Green Mountain Daily is a great example of the last of these.
This doesn’t even account for the way passing stories around can dig up obscure information the major “news” outlets missed … like there weren’t any WMD stock piles in Iraq and other twiddle.
Oh, did you see how the Times Argus put their on-line poll in the op-ed section as if on-line polls had some sort of validity?