Is there a thread for the rapid death of the newspaper industry?

clay shirky, not comforting, but otm:

Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.

...Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.

Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism
Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism
Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism

So, so, so fucking OTM. Sadly, we're going to end up with neither.

Have Instapapered the piece and will read later. Thanks, Tipsy.

the internet has such a fucked up way of rewarding. it's the linkers that get all the revenue, which is a business that basically costs nothing to maintain, while the sources of the actual content, which is expensive, get nothing.

Well, yes, but those sources were the ones who decided 10 years ago to start giving everything away for free, in the hope that the Magic Money Fairy would visit them with some revenue-creating ideas further down the line. I'm not saying they necessarily had much choice, but there wasn't a great deal of thought went into it -- and, with this being the newspaper industry, editors and proprietors weren't keen to discuss the problem with each other.

Basically: the situation is fucked. It doesn't matter how it got fucked. All that matters is that it is. For everyone.

http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/45593000/gif/_45593096_newspaper_totals_466.gif

2010s = The Decade of Misinformation (like, more than ever)

I think we'll figure something out after the 2010s, but it will be roughly a decade before this happens.

UK national newspapers have misinformed as much (maybe even as gravely) as our government for as long as i can remember

It is very strange that newspapers rushed headlong into providing all their content for free.

I'm still surprised to see "print" links below articles on, say, Vanity Fair, or the NY Daily News, or the NY Times. Allowing people to read online for free is bad enough, but then providing a specially-formatted page so that people can print off exactly the articles they want to read without paying you a penny? It's bizarre.

Well, this is the only silver lining. Archaic newspapers that suck will finally die too.

Unfortunately, many newspapers thought that making most of their journalists' jobs be press release writers contributed to this.

but then providing a specially-formatted page so that people can print off exactly the articles they want to read without paying you a penny? It's bizarre.

but surely it's unfeasible to provide an obstacle to people printing online documents anyway?

You don't have to make it THAT easy.

Various newspapers did try various paying models. They didn't work.

They did, if you consider them taking their tops off, work.

It was hard for them to make pay work while all their competitors were offering free substitutes. The ones that had no or few substitutes -- WSJ, FT -- have made pay work.

There's still a massive oversupply just now, but after many more papers have died, that's going to fall sharply. It's then we'll find out whether or not people will pay for traditional journalism. I suspect not, but I'm cynical.

But isn't it that that no one ever really paid for traditional journalism, at least in the sense that newsstand sales and subscriptions always fell far short of operating costs?

but that's the whole thing: net ad revenue is a fraction of ye olde print ad revenue.

Right.

Although print ad revenue isn't any great shakes these days either, right?

Yeh, people never paid for the cost of the news they bought -- it's why freesheets work. But on the other hand, the amount that a newspaper will have to do in the future is far less as well: they don't need to try and cover everything badly as they do now, just focus on a few specific areas. Is there any point in them all trying to run sports websites, for example?

The print product has to try and offer everything because it's theoretically the only one you buy all day. The online one is sharing space with sites that will do business/sports/features far better, so leave that to them.

xposts: it's still massive compared to the pittance you make online

A couple of thoughts:

Any effect of the web on print is greatly intensified by the recession's effects on overall ad revenue. Newspapers are having their deaths hastened by that revenue drop, and some might otherwise survive.

Also, pay models work where you have an audience that can easily afford to pay and where you can convince that audience they're getting information they can't get elsewhere. The Wall Street Journal has that -- it at least gives the impression of financial reporting of a more "inside" nature and higher sophistication than you get elsewhere, and it caters to people who are interested in investment markets and such and therefore it ain't no thang to them to pay (especially if work is paying).

No one will pay for the same AP stories they can get a million other places, obv. And, similarly, newspapers can no longer rely on things like sports, comics, crosswords, classifieds, employment ads to draw otherwise non-news-interested readers in.

I guess the question is whether the possibility of people paying for more unique, in-depth coverage can be successfully translated to non-financial news. Obviously the old model of world-national-local-classifieds-comics-sports-and-the-kitchen-sink is not going to stay very viable where so many of those individual things can be had for free. More focus is required.

There'll always be a way to get anything for free if it's in digital form.

Software doesn't lend itself to this as much as other forms of digital media, though. If the news were more of a software application than just a static place where the words change from time to time, there's potential there.

This is just an idea thrown out that probably has as more holes than not, but making news a more interactive experience with long term benefits will probably seem worth more. I have no clue if the return on investment would be enough to foster a healthy culture of reporting. But it's just an idea.

i think what's especially endangered is the general-interest paper that wraps everything up in one bundle. nobody needs that when you have online aggregators that you can set to any mix of stuff you want. so i think journalism will continue to move more into niches, which of course has been going on for a while: sports, entertainment, politics, the environment, education, etc. some of those things will generate more traffic and interest than others, which is why some will be able to be commercial for-profit (like tmz.com) and others will probably have to be nonprofit or foundation-driven or something. the most likely arena i think for the continued operation of slimmed-down local news outfits will be local government/crime/schools news, because there will continue to be an interest in that and nobody else is going to do it. so i'd expect to see a lot of local papers turn into websites mostly focusing on those things (probably in partnership with a local tv station, since the newspapers might not be able to fund the operation on their own).

UK national newspapers have misinformed as much (maybe even as gravely) as our government for as long as i can remember

Uh-huh, yes, every single word every paper has ever printed is a lie. Come on: I'd be the last person to pretend that every paper was a bastion of truth, but deliberate misinformation has always been the preserve of the few, thankfully. The point being made eloquently by many others here is simple but key: without the resources of a newsroom behind them, how is any journalist going to be able to hold anything to account, ever?

Better to have a functional journalistic model with a few bad apples than no journalistic model at all, surely?

But that, I fear, is where we're headed. This:

I think we'll figure something out after the 2010s, but it will be roughly a decade before this happens

chimes precisely with my thinking. Shit, eh?

Also, Hurting OTM about focus/quality as the ideal ... but is that likely to happen either? When circulations started really plummeting, almost every UK paper got into a crazy price war or giveaway war in a short-term bid to beat the figures. Nobody did the sensible thing -- to say: "Right, falling circulation goes with the territory here, so let's dig in; let's make this paper a quality product bought by fewer people but with a truly loyal readership base on which we might even be able to build." Nah, they all fucking threw shit DVDs into little plastic bags and hoped for the best.

This isn't revisionism, either: I've been saying this for five fucking years now. Nobody listened. And, of course, it's bloody difficult to consolidate your quality when you're being forced to lay off staff left, right and centre.

Did I say "fucked, totally and utterly"? Oh, yes, I did. Several times.

(I try to kid myself I don't really care, but the sheer volume of swearing in that post surprises even me.)

RIP Ann Arbor News (I lived across the street from this building for two years).

Uh-huh, yes, every single word every paper has ever printed is a lie.

where did i say that? is everything politicans say lies? no. it's a heart over head feeling but they make me just as angry in the end so, honestly, fuck them.

and i'm not advocating 'no journalistic model at all' there btw

We're kinda lucky in the UK that there are so many papers -- they're mostly biased in different ways, so act as a counterbalance on each other. These US cities that have one or two papers at most are screwed if the paper's shite. I can see why so many US posters elsewhere are cheering at their demise

It was hard for them to make pay work while all their competitors were offering free substitutes. The ones that had no or few substitutes -- WSJ, FT -- have made pay work.

They haven't really made pay work - FT.com was a very expensive commercial failure and both have now made the majority of their content free, haven't they?

The pay-subscription model works like a dream in B2B because customers are willing to pay large amounts of money for access to that information. It hasn't really worked in more consumer-orientated financial media, partly because the price of the paper version puts a ceiling on what can actually be charged.

There'll always be a way to get anything for free if it's in digital form.

This is kind of a myth, or at least a half-truth. It's not a matter of whether there's "always a way" to get it, but how hard it is to get. For example you could put everything in a non copy/pastable format, and either restrict the e-mailing and printing or only allow a printing/e-mailing format that includes advertising. I mean there was always a way to get a paper copy for free too if you wanted one bad enough, but most people will only go through so much trouble.

There are lots of pay-for-information schemes over the internet that work just fine. Westlaw and Lexis come to mind -- specialized information organized in a way that is very costly to do and hence cannot easily be done for free.

but text and pictures, in digital form, is one of the easiest things to get generally (more than linear media).

They haven't really made pay work - FT.com was a very expensive commercial failure and both have now made the majority of their content free, haven't they?

I think they've made it "work" in the sense that they've made more money than they estimate they would have from advertising if they made it available for free, which the NY Times failed to do with Connect.

In terms of making it work enough to pay for itself, no they didn't, but I don't think anybody mass-market is going to do that. Too many competing options for advertisers.

These US cities that have one or two papers at most are screwed if the paper's shite.

and to be honest, most of them are pretty bad, and not many are better than mediocre. i worked at a mid-sized corporate-owned daily for a few years, and even though i felt like i did some good work there, and i had lots of friends who also did (several of whom are still plugging away at it), it was an uphill battle against a great corporate complacency. as the only daily in town, the paper had no real incentive to be better than it had to be to attract advertising -- and as the biggest print vehicle in that part of the state, it didn't have to be very good. i found it hugely frustrating, which is why i jumped ship for an alt-weekly after a few years. (ironically but predictably, the alt-weekly is now owned by the same corporate chain that owns the daily. but i left before that happened, and so far the corporate chain has mostly left the alt-weekly alone.)

(that's why i have mixed feelings about the rolling collapse of the daily paper -- it's hard for me to get too worked up about, since so many of them have been weak for so long. but otoh, i know that at all of these places there are some good and smart reporters and editors doing what they can in unfriendly circumstances.)

I was wondering how newpapers benefit from airing podcasts? I listen to a couple of The Guardian's and they're fine (Football Weekly is great). They contain no advertising content, so where are they making their buck? (apart from giving the paper some extra exposure if they're any good i guess).

I guess they're nebulous "brand-building" exercises. I know someone fairly high up at the Guardian - she told me its website and related initiatives don't make money and they never have, and that everyone at the Guardian is running around like headless chickens without a clue what to do next.

Their website is definitely one of the better ones as well.

but they make me just as angry in the end so, honestly, fuck them

...

and i'm not advocating 'no journalistic model at all' there btw

Right. So what are you advocating? A legion of bloggers setting the world to right from their bedrooms armed with nothing more than the weight of their own ill-formed, unedited opinion? Some kind of magic information fairy?

Serious question. You can't dismiss all non-broadcast news-publishing organisations (note how desperately I'm trying to avoid the word "newspaper" itself) -- which, with comments such as "fuck them", you're doing, no? -- on an otherwise very intelligent and well-balanced thread and not offer some suggestion as to what you'd have instead. Text and pictures might be easy enough to come across, but meaningful text? Pictures that tell you something? Who's going to provide them once the surviving newspaper websites have been reduced to two work-experiencers and an RSS feed from the BBC?

Have a read of Ian Jack on Comment is Free:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/21/local-newspapers-under-threat

I think this hits the nail on the head, even if it is a bit misty-eyed and over-romanticised. And I'm guessing you and I will agree on the comment Other than the people who work for them, who could really care if the Daily Star and the Sunday People vanished tomorrow?

(that's why i have mixed feelings about the rolling collapse of the daily paper -- it's hard for me to get too worked up about, since so many of them have been weak for so long. but otoh, i know that at all of these places there are some good and smart reporters and editors doing what they can in unfriendly circumstances

Yes. Absolutely. Blueski, this is exactly it: there's a metric tonne of shit out there but to dismiss everything is spectacularly reductive.

And Tipsy: I'd refer you to the Ian Jack piece I linked above. It won't make you feel any better, but it offers an interesting take on the same argument.

Magic information fairy sounds good I'll go with that cheers.

I mean do you think I'm being spectacularly reductive by never buying a newspaper or spending much time on any of their websites other than when duped into reading some of the Guardian shit linked here? If so fine. Wires are being crossed here, but it's not worth arguing about really.

Yes, because unless you are the only person in the world, and you are right about everything -- which, with the greatest respect in the world, I doubt is true of any of us -- then you can't really expect the rest of society to fall into line with you.

You might not look at newspaper websites but a staggering amount of other people do. So unless you're popping up on this thread just to say "lol dicks talking about journalism" -- which doesn't seem to be the case! -- then, umm: what do you think should be done?

I'm really trying to find out what you think here and all I'm getting is gnomic two-line responses at best. You don't strike me as someone who avoids the news. So: where do you go to get it?

To be honest "avoids the news" isn't all that far off, as bad as that sounds. How else to describe a situation where you never read a paper (unless you're alone in a pub/cafe etc. which is not all that often, or on a bus for a few minutes. I've never been a paper buyer on a regular basis tho) and more recently don't have a TV to catch the news semi-intentionally (I am missing Newsnight a little but otherwise doesn't feel like a great loss). Rarely listen to news radio either. All of which just leaves, yes, the internet and just a handful of news sites i'm forever meaning to expand the range of...so I guess I do expect news for free. I can see how this might be cause for concern but don't feel too bad about disregarding old media entirely because it clearly isn't required in my life (and if that's true for me it can and will be true for many thousands). I'd offer you constructive solutions but don't really have them yet.

Here's my best guess at what the future will look like: most major newsgathering will get consolidated down to just Reuters, AP and one other - they will sell packages to the surviving newspapers, which will all be freesheet or online only, with the exception of one or two high-end "quality" dailies. Newspapers will supplement these news agency packages with local reporting, provided by some combination of traditional reporting/"Web 2.0"/advertising-driven content. Original investigative reporting, if it survives, will survive on TV and in weekly magazines. Some countries, like France, may set up new government-subsidised newspapers or newgathering organisations.

It strikes me that TV news is being somewhat sidelined in this debate when in fact the huge growth of 24hr rolling news over the past few years is surely a massive factor in all this?

rolling tv news, non-pro blogs, etc don't do

- informed opinion
- investigatory journalism

Yeah I'd say the advent of CNN etc was one of the factors dooming newspapers - after all, decline in readership began in the eighties, before the Internet. But the main factor remains advertising, and the impossibility of "monetising" newspaper websites.