More troubles for newspapers

Robin: You are not mistaken.

I know. I was just being suitably humble. 😉

I blame the leadership of newspapers and they poor decisions they continue to make.They decide the money’s in hyper-local coverage, then they cut staff. Uh, the wire services aren’t going to cover sewer committee meetings.They unleash a flurry of blogs, but most blogs serve as personal diaries for the writers and are boring if you’re not related to the writer. And if I visit a food blog, there’s an ad for Lufthansa. If I visit the beer blog, there’s an ad for Lufthansa. If I visit the animals blog, there’s an ad for Lufthansa. How about trying to get relevant ads on each blog?The newspapers, especially the local rags, are rife with stagnation and people who are scared to take risks because they don’t want to lose their jobs. So they continue to use the model that worked in 1600s-1990s and blame the Internet and craigslist and monster for stealing their business.

:To focus on craigslist though, if we’re convinced that the newspaper classifieds aren’t coming back, fine. Rather than throw in the towel altogether, why not make it affordable and effective for the small businessman to purchase display ads? That’s why I said – It seems that newspapers will have to come up with new financing options to replace that pretty much permanently lost source of revenue. There should be a variety of ways that newspapers can generate new revenue including those you suggested o-fish-l.

Two large Supermarket chains stopped distributing their flyers with the local paper. That says alot about circulation. I’ve also noticed that coupons are now coming in the mail, and not in the Sunday paper.

dlhalper:First, newspapers and journalism are a business. It is not some kind of priesthood or a legion of selfless public servants. It’s a business. Get over it.I believe that the haughty self-righteousness of many journalists, (who behave as if they are in a profession to “serve the greater good” as they see it, rather than report news) explains why the press is held in low esteem by the public. Second, you ask:“Will you love it when you can’t get access to print journalism any more?”Print is nothing more than one medium for content delivery. There is no law of the universe that says journalism has to be printed and delivered daily to my home by illegal immigrant independent contractors. That is a product strategy, and one that right now is clearly failing.

Harry: You’re right, but you’re wrong. First, let’s quickly dispense with what you’re telling Donna Halper. I am certain that by “print journalism,” she is not restricting her view to dead trees. She means newspapers, print or online.Now, then. Though newspaper owners certainly have no God-given right to make large profits, we do have an unusual dilemma. The public is clamoring for what newspapers give them. Properly done, journalism is necessary to democracy. And the economic basis for this popular service is disintegrating.So many of the anti-newspaper arguments I see are based on the notion, stated either explicitly or implictly, that the public is turning away from newspapers. That is demonstrably not true. Advertisers are turning away from newspapers. Solutions are needed.

Dan,A reasonably well informed public is essential for democracy. But “journalism” has no monopoly rights to provide such information to the public, unless you define journalism as any medium that informs – a definition too broad to be useful. Considering the fraction of the US population today that gets information mainly from local TV news and “Entertainment Tonight”, I am pleased that our democracy functions as well as it does.The means of content creation and distribution (for purposes of sharing news or otherwise) have been radically decentralized in the Internet era, and are becoming ever more so. This decentralization inevitably hurts the large incumbents (especially newspapers), who had very few competitors and enjoyed a business with significant barriers to entry. As for declining advertising revenue, the advertisers are simply trying to follow eyeballs with their spending, wherever the eyeballs may go.But today it still remains challenging to create a branded product with significant public awareness. Products and brands, as always, matter very much to consumers. Newspaper organizations (their business side, I mean) are hopelessly flabby when it comes to these now-critical organizational skills of strategic marketing and promotion, because for decades they have simply operated a golden franchise, many of them operating as near or outright monopolies. Now that world is disappearing, which is their tough luck. Similar structural changes have hurt workers in many other businesses, for example US auto workers. Whining that journalism is too vital to our democracy to be allowed to suffer from the forces causing its restructuring is a form of exceptionalism that, as I said above, I find self-righteous and silly.

Before John Farrell or any overworked, underpaid authors sign on to write for any newspaper, they should read the contract, looking for reference to anything like World Rights. I believe the Globe requires freelancers to sign away all rights to the story. If it becomes part of a book or a movie, the company would own it.

Dan,Let’s find some common ground. Newspapers are losing subscribers and advertisers for their print products. This undermines their historical business model. Their online products, at present, cannot possibly replace this revenue decline. Hence their recent financial distress and loss of market cap, as epitomized by the NYT, whose stock has lost over 60% of its value in the past 5 years.Agree so far?Here is what I am saying:1) For established newspapers, competing online is far more difficult. In print most of them have competed with only 1 or 2 other firms, with very similar business models, which had not changed in decades. Online the competition is potentially global, it is against tens of thousands of firms of widely varying sizes, resources, and expertise. Their business models are fluid and vary all over the map. It is far more difficult to succeed here. You claim, “the public is clamoring for what newspapers give them”, but even if that is true there are many, many more products to choose from online that can substitute for what readers get (or used to get) from newspapers –- whether paper OR online newspapers. 2) Because companies like Google enable all sizes of content providers to easily include ads, there is far more competition for advertising revenue online. Despite its youth, there are also better metrics for evaluating online ads than there are for print ads, at least in terms of knowing how often they are viewed and whose eyeballs they appear in front of.3) I believe that 1 and 2 above mean that established newspapers as a whole cannot easily adapt to online world, that most of them will not succeed in doing so, and that their current revenue imbalances and financial distress will persist.4) The fundamental cause of newspapers’ distress is the far more intense competition that exists online for content provision and for advertising.5) Because of 4 above, I claim that newspapers represent a typical case where restructuring in an industry causes extreme distress to established market leaders. In most cases this distress is caused by globalization (for example, try finding a single American-made consumer electronics item). In the case of newspapers their distress is caused by technology changes that have given their subscribers/advertisers more alternatives and also enabled globalization of content distribution and advertising. Regardless, their dilemma is quite analogous to what has occurred many times before in other industries that were forced to restructure as competition became far wider through globalization.Does that “engage with the issue”? If so where and why do you disagree?

Dan, I have to disagree with you. A cataclysmic fate has befallen newspapers and its going to get much worse before it gets better.The newspapers (NY Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe) just as they finally, finally, stood up to a President 40 years ago in the face of the horrible mistake that was the Vietnam War.One lazy Judy Miller killed newspapers for the next 50 years.Today, they lay down like dogs – LIKE DOGS! and exculpate themselves from the process.This is not the press that I grew up with, nor the press that I intend to live with.www.bostonmediawatch.org

…whereas the online figure is derived from more precise methods of measurementand:The web eliminates that kind of uncertainty, shifting power from the publisher to the advertiser.Substantiating these claims would help support the premise that online readers are making up for loss of print readers. I don’t see that the State of the Media’s report supports them. In fact isn’t the point of the Online Audience metrics: The Web’s Biggest Challenge? section that there’s no agreed-upon method to gauge web traffic? And that this continues to be a headache for advertisers:But even as advertisers poured money into the Web, some expressed dissatisfaction with how traffic was being measured. And recently these concerns have grown louder.The trend obviously is that readers are getting more of their content online. But as the article says readers are more likely to arrive at an online article from the side doors of aggregator or blog links, as from an article’s “home page” (a term approaching quaintness). And once there they aren’t necessarily apt to remain within that website, since there’s no boundary. The site may get raw hits this way, but not so many unique visitors who click on more than one link within the site.It doesn’t seem precise to me then, to offset decline in print readers with the tally of raw hits to any say, Globe article, and conclude therefore that the readership numbers are steady. If that’s what whoever’s making this assertion (Dan?) is doing. Even “unique” visitors, so what, their value depends on how many links they click on within the site. A unique visitor hitting say six or ten links might approach the meaning of a print reader.(Again, if the methods are really “precise”, it would help to know what they were. What are the metrics?). In other words 10,000 hits to one article in your online edition doesn’t make up for the loss of 10,000 print readers. It’s not evidence of steady readership. Also, someone who has made a financial investment in the paper (ie, a print reader), even if they mightn’t have spent as long reading as they claim in a poll, is more likely to spend time reading more of the paper (especially if they claim to spend 40 minutes!) as tossing it into the trash unread. The online reader is apt to be navigating across sites following a train of thought. It certainly isn’t the same as someone who buys the entire newspaper. The difference is, I bought the Globe and found X in it, vs I found X, and it happened to be in the Globe. The particular site an article happens to be found in is tending to irrelevance.