Vibe magazine is talking about going online-only. Seth Godin talks about how content will soon all be free. (“The reason that we needed paid contributors before was that there was only economic room for a few magazines, a few TV channels, a few pottery stores, a few of everything. In world where there is room for anyone to present their work, anyone will present their work.”) Newspapers struggle to stay aloft in an increasing Internet-focused world, and so many people predict their imminent demise.
What a lot of silliness.
News isn’t going to be free. Newspapers can stay alive if they want to. Blogs and citizen journalists aren’t going to replace the mainstream media.
Yes, it feels great to imagine a world where You and I are the ones collecting and writing the news. Where all content is free. Where the mainstream media has succumbed to the infinite power of the masses.
It ain’t gonna happen.
We’re in a transition phase right now, and like many transitions it’s messy. Newspaper revenue is falling and circulation is declining, but that doesn’t mean you conclude that the graph ends at zero. (I’ve lost four pounds this month. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to weigh a mere 80 lbs. in a couple of years — yet that’s the same logic going on here.)
There are so many important points being missed I don’t know where to start. First off, where do most blogs and non-mainstream media sources get their news? The mainstream media, of course. List all the blogs in the world that do any sort of news coverage. Now remove the ones that rely on others to do the reporting for them. What’s left? Not much.
Not zero, of course. There are plenty of non-MSM sources out there that pore over SEC filings and other government docs, or who have a particular expertise (or access to it), or who subscribe to various databases where they get the raw info they turn into news. But they are by far the minority. Most of these bloggers who are going to turn the world of journalism upside down are simply regurgitating what the professionals put out.
If professional journalists go away, so does their fodder.
Protests in Iran. Twitter goes wild, and we all get the raw story from the streets of Tehran. The MSM drops the ball! Except that there was a lot more to the story than the protests, although that was certainly the most compelling. Diplomatic issues? British diplomats kicked out or interrogated? American reaction? European reaction? All that came from the MSM. I have no great love for the Associated Press or Reuters, but the fact is that without them we’d be reduced to relying on, essentially, dueling press releases: reports from the Iranian government and reports from the streets. Neither of which is entirely trustworthy.
(Too often these days, all the MSM does is repeat those dueling press releases. It hasn’t been doing its job. Its readership is ripe for the picking; anyone can compete with reprinted talking points. But that doesn’t have to be the case.)
Here’s the thing: Doing quality journalism takes time, experience, and money. “Citizen media” can and should augment the mainstream media, but without that MSM, there wouldn’t be much news.
And people want news. It has value to them. They’ll be willing to pay for it. They are willing to pay for it.
Of course, they don’t have to. Newspapers, in their infinite wisdom, decided to give their content away free. It’s valuable, and they give it away. They pay to create it, and then give it away.
Is that the dumbest business model ever, or what?
What would happen if…
Newspapers must have Web sites, of course. Because… well, because everyone does. They have to put their content online because, um, everyone does. They can’t charge for it because, er, then people will go elsewhere.
Wrong.
Newspapers need to dump their Web sites.
If they want to survive, giving content away can’t work. It’s incredibly obvious to anyone who knows basic addition and subtraction. Newspaper Web sites lose money. They make a pittance in advertising dollars — nowhere near enough to pay for the content on them. So why continue to produce such a product only to give it away?
It’s not as if the sites drive up circulation. And if visitors will go elsewhere for their content, so what? That’s like giving away apples because you don’t want people to get their free apples elsewhere.
Correction: Newspapers shouldn’t shut down their sites. They should make them paid.
Now, if when you think of “newspaper” you think solely of the big ones — The New York Times, Washington Post, and so on — think again. There are a lot of newspapers in this country, in every city and town. New York, Chicago, LA — they’re a different animal, as they compete on the national stage with the likes of CNN and Fox News (both, by the way, paid via your cable company).
Here’s what I’d do as publisher of the Bumfrak Times, a more-typical 50,000 to 80,000-circulation newspaper in a small- or medium-sized market.
My Web site would have two sections, one free, one behind a “green curtain” — a subscription site. The free section would have things like supplements to stories in the paper/paid section (e.g., “Download SmithCo’s complete SEC filing” or “See more pictures from the Raspberry Festival”). It would also have message board for discussing the stories, ways for readers to contribute, and other social media-ish features.
But if you want to read the bulk of the content, you either have to subscribe to the print edition, or buy less expensive online-only access.
Sacrilege! you say. Everyone knows subscription sites don’t work! What’s the logic then? It’s better to lose money by giving my content away than cut my losses and shut down the site? Please.
I need to have worthwhile content. It’d be 99 percent local, for starters. Why should I compete with the national media? It’s a losing game. The local stuff (“hyperlocal” if you feel the need for a buzzword) is what people can’t get from CNN or The New York Times (or cnn.com or nytimes.com). That’s the kind of content they eat up. That’s the kind of thing people will pay for.
In all but the biggest cities, newspapers have a virtual monopoly on the news. Television? Please. Not even close. If you want to find out what happens someplace, the newspaper is the only place to go. And yet they squander that power by giving away their product.
Not me. Here in Bumfrack, if you want the best, most comprehensive local news, you know you need to come to me. I’ll give it to you however you want it — print, online, fax, to your mobile. I’ll make it worth the 50 cents a day I’ll charge. But I’m going to charge for it.
And the reporters? They’ll hate it. They’ll hate the idea of covering town council meetings and ribbon-cuttings at the new big-box store. But them’s the breaks. That’s what happens in smaller cities and towns. And that’s what’s important to people there. (Of course, there will be hard news, and probably plenty. But no longer will the “fluff” be confined to the Life & Leisure section. It will be de-fluffed and treated as news.) You wanna cover the big stories? Put in your time here in Bumfrak, then get a job with CBS or CNN or MSNBC.
And when people complained about our not giving the news away free anymore, I wouldn’t worry. Because what’s gonna happen? Some bloggers will start their own, free, news site? Best of luck to ’em. I’m not going to compete to see who can give away the best stuff for nothin’. If I can’t provide people with something better than what they can get from a bunch of amateurs and part timers, I’m doing something wrong.
Because here’s a fact: Providing news takes a lot of time. And people need to pay the bills — they can’t walk away from their day jobs to attend meetings or interview the police, or sit in the county clerk’s office going through records. So eventually those guys will need to eat, and they’ll begin to ask for donations, or they’ll go out of business. Guaranteed.
News isn’t entertainment. Free Web comics are as good (actually better) the “professional” ones. The stuff on CollegeHumor.com rivals anything you’ll find on Comedy Central. But news is another matter. It’s not part time. The Beast needs to be fed all the time, 365 days a year. And that’s valuable enough that people will pay for it.
Wait and see. If today’s newspapers fail, whatever replaces them will soon enough adopt a fee-based model. Whether it’s a professional competitor, or a group of bloggers who get together, at some point they will realize — correctly — that they provide something valuable enough (and expensive enough) to charge for.
gnomic says:
Here are a couple of problems with this analysis, Andrew:
1. If newspapers take down their websites, they go from irrelevant to obscure in a single bound, losing the advertising revenue stream and subscriber base that allows them to claim numbers that boost their ad revenues.
2. Until someone develops and deploys a sustainable micro payment system that invisibly and reliably charges users small amounts for viewing stories, the up-front subscription model loses to the advertising model almost every time. The sole exception I can think of is NPR.
3. The industry dynamic has to change as well. Newspapers would have to unilaterally disarm themselves of free sites, or users will simply switch to the next free site.
Ultimately, the newspaper industry has created this mess. They quit doing news and started re-issuing press releases. What passes for a newspaper in my town is an insult to the bird droppings and rotting fish that it is best suited for.
The problem is that the industry – not newspapers, the entire news industry – news to restructure itself and target niches and deliver quality reporting and analysis.
Sadly, quality here is in the customer’s eyes. Fox News is crap, but it is quality to the myopic inbred fools that believe in bloviating talking heads that spew hate propaganda as news. In other words, Fox has hit upon the right formula. Give people what the want.
And the industry needs to decouple news delivery from news gathering and analysis. There need to be fewer cost intensive news gathering companies and more news delivery companies to pay the gatherers.
Of course the idea of story ownership – the concept that is near and dear to every journalist and true reporter – dies in this model. Which is find – there is a direct market for these personalities and the blogosphere has clearly demonstrated. But news as we know it becomes a team sport.
And this is exactly what has happened and what it happening in the media markets, including news.
It has nothing to do with giving crap away for free. Let me say that again: Newspaper web sites have do not help or harm the news industry. Economically, they are neutral. What is killing newspapers is a lack of delivery of any real value. Much of what they write is crap. There is no value to reissued press releases, rewritten weather forecasts, re edited police reports, and prettier type fonts.
At one time, there was value to the McPaper (USA Today) in that the ubiquitous short story format was useful, but then wireless delivery killed that value. Tweeting has replaced the news ticker. Bandwidth has replaced daily delivery with immediate results (fast crap, but still crap)
The hyper competitive environment means that there is more demand for less of the reader’s time. Visualization of the complex (simple, pretty pictures, see GOOD magazine for examples) and targeted delivery (ala Mine magazine which is a nice concept, but poorly executed) is the new future for all media, including news.
Ultimately, this will be good for the reader and bad for newspapers. But it is a self-inflicted wound. The industry abandoned quality a long time ago. Readership and new outlets started falling before the Internet, and the pace just accelerated afterwards.
But we agree on one point. Free content from newspapers will end. We just disagree on how. You think is should be a choice. I don’t think it will be. The sites will just go dark and newsprint will join the dinosaur and the horse whip as relics of the past.