Comments on: The recession killed journalism – and saved it

By: writereditor

writereditor — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 14:28:17 +0000

“The lesson online media companies have taken from newspapers’ slow, public death is to move beyond the idea of selling the product. Online sites are selling their audience. It’s a simple twist of the equation, but one that changes everything about how a media company is run.”

Huh? This makes absolutely no sense. Newspapers never sold their product and always sold their audience. The price of the paper doesn’t begin to pay for the cost of producing it. They sold a huge audience to advertisers — and still make 90 percent of their remaining revenues this way. If online advertising revenue would pay for “investing serious cash” in better reporting, newspapers would have dumped the print product long ago. I know not a single newspaper reporter who cares much about whether their words are read in print or online, and I would challenge the assertion the “online media” — whatever that is, since “newspapers” still dominate online news audiences to a great degree — have made serious investments in reporting, under any revenue model, for-profit or nonprofit. Purely online outlets are struggling — a handful of national outlets and a smaller number of local ones stand out from the pack; most add little but noise to the conversation; many are simply unread. Meanwhile, especially in local and regional journalism, even “dying” newspapers continue to field vastly more journalists, with far more talent and experience, than any other alternative in broadcast or online. Newspapers have taken a beating, sure, and have failed to respond well to crisis. But for most cities, the notion that any serious alternative has taken their place is pure fiction. And no one has yet come up with a reliable and sustainable model to finance online-only news.

By: stambo2001

stambo2001 — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 12:00:16 +0000

Come on now, who are we kidding here? The people that sit on the media boards today are the same people sitting on the oil and pharmaceutical boards. They are the same people who organize political fund raisers.

Instead of investigative reporting we get pathetic drivel such as this entire article. ‘Journalism’ died because journalism died. The author of this article does nothing but hammer the point home.

By: pkitano

pkitano — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 21:58:32 +0000

Another bright side. Newspapers still own (or at least have a relationship with) the paying customer base – the local businesses – and they have no clue about social marketing. Yelp, FB, Groupon and Google Adwords are still way beyond the comprehension of most small business (with more on the doorstep – Foursquare, Trip Advisor, etc.). That’s where Hearst Media Services, Gannett Local and other media marketing bureaus come into play.

By: ariznem

ariznem — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 19:11:09 +0000

Newspaper sites have big leads in all their respective cities when it comes to online traffic. The loss of classifieds is what really killed their business models, not this writer’s tsk-tsk “they didn’t understand their marketplace, didn’t understand digital” pro forma dogma that is so tired to read now.
There was no way a newspaper was ever going to compete with “totally free” when it came to people wanting to place an ad to sell their couch or advertise for a job.
That is not their fault. They are trying to overcome that loss of revenue with new things, but, yes, the legacy costs of their business are making that hard to do and make a pure profit. But many are getting there. Newspaper websites are some of the most innovative around IMO, which is why their traffic numbers are growing, not shrinking.
If the writer of the piece (whose company only makes profit because of a small niche of Wall Street/business subscription model that most companies do just out of rote “because we think we have to” compel) had done more homework, he’d know that newspapers were some of the first “companies” to go online.
There will be other smart guys who come along and kill the Reuters of the world too. But until then, by all means keep that smug worldview of the newspaper business intact.

By: DavidCayJ

DavidCayJ — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 18:38:25 +0000

“They have been trapped in a terrible mindset that they are in the business of selling newspapers.”

I always understood newspapers to be in the business of bringing buyers and sellers together. The depth and quality of news, from hard to features, determined the size and quality of the audience and, therefore, the revenues that could be generated.

The Digital Age has shown that buyers and sellers will come to specialized websites without no news, damaging that model, especially for the lucrative little classified ads that Pulitzer called “mustard.”

By: johncabell

johncabell — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 16:34:59 +0000

There are so many ways to describe this phenomenon … My own bias is that consumer appetites for news didn’t change, and that conflating the death spiral of newspapers with less rigorous sources of online news was simply bad reporting for the past, oh, decade or so.

There is a hunger for news, and for convenience. The latter is what the digital revolution is all about: we haven’t turned our backs on journalism, we just want it in a different format. This is the sadly simple truth that many newspapers (just about all of which are, by definition local, with an obvious market/constituency) were just to imperious to act upon.

The bifurcation of news (some entities gather, but others distribute) could be trouble. But it also results in some very creative leavening, like Flipboard and even Google News.

That said, some trees will die to make room for new seedlings. But the forest will be just fine, thank you very much.