Bring On The Techies: How Silicon Valley Can Help Save Newspapers
The author is the CEO of ContentNext Media, parent of paidContent.
How badly does the newspaper industry need new ideas? Here
The author is the CEO of ContentNext Media, parent of paidContent.
How badly does the newspaper industry need new ideas? Here
We were brainstorming of all things…the width of the paper." I wonder if the discussion was around turning the WSJ into a tabloid style(what others have done) to make it readable for some of the raveling audience among other reasons(I am not in the business. The look and feel of a paper is expensive to change (not just HTML) and if we in the valley were doing it we would applaud Ms Meyer for her attentiveness.
As for ideas – my friends once said that people buy papers to read the 'agate' type – classifieds, sports scores, stock quotes, obits. When I used to contribute to a weekly industry pub, the old school managing editor used to tell me that my job was to "fill the space!" I suppose so the newspaper would have 'stuff'' around the agate type and advertisement. I think that stuff is now called content and this thread is about getting folks to read more of what they never did.
The blue bags on my lawn
Memories of time gone
When with haste, I would review
To see who died, no more bags blue
I agree completely with this BTW, I would love to save newspubs – if only to make sure that stuff like this is assigned, edited, streamlined/cut or rejected, to save you the reader.
Well, at least if you can convince the SV that there is money in helping save print, they'll stop pushing for it's death.
I think there's at least two questions which I think aren't being asked by anyone in the newspaper business: how do you save the physical "newspaper", and how do you save the deep analysis and thorough reporting which is the hallmark of what newspapers do? I think they're really two different things. One, is making the physical newspaper a profitable, yet relevant thing — there are still plenty of people (myself included) who find the actual, physical newspaper an ideal medium for browsing and reading news without the ADHD of Internet content — and the second, is somehow figuring out a way where long-form, in-depth reporting can be supported in a world where online clicks are worth a fraction of print ads. I don't think it's a question of saving the "newspaper industry" and newspaper companies (and their baggage/etc.), but instead, what new models need to be formed to still be able to serve the many readers who want their daily, physical paper; and also, but separately, support the huge costs behind deep investigation and long form reporting that newspapers bring to society–but instead, most likely on a web-based platform, driven by the models or similar ones you suggest in your post. I think those two questions are separate from "saving the newspaper" and are the key to breaking through the industry's issues.
Print NewsPaper should remain. Its feel can not be compared with anything which the Internet offers. It's a well known truth the print media is suffering in all countries who have high speed internet/broadband. But reading newspaper than straining your eyes in front of a monitor can not be equated. Feeling of newspaper is quite different.
Excellent post by Nate, despite the fact that he admits to pushing 40 years old. However, I would like to set the record straight for the paidcontent.org community on one point: I was not the unnamed publisher of The Wall Street Journal in the anecdote at the beginning of Nate's post–an anecdote, by the way, colorful enough to be worthy of inclusion in an article in the Journal itself. I became publisher the following year, in 2006.
Ben, there may still be "plenty of people who find the newspaper the ideal medium" but that's a dyeing breed, sorry. I agree that we need a way to save the deep analysis and thorough reporting, but that doesn't require a dinosaur print product. It's a digital world now!
Great comments and the type of dialogue that I hope Silicon Valley will embrace as Google already has: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/02/from-height-of-this-place.html.
The newspaper folks need to allow new thinking in…not, uhm, surprisingly, they seem to be absent from commenting (it is a very digital way of engaging an audience.)
Gordon was definitely not the publisher at the time- our Managing Editor (who once worked under the then publisher) pulled the publisher's name from my original story saying that naming her would be unnecessary…
Your premise is flawed. You don't cite a source for the precise-sounding 50-to-65 percent of traffic to media sites that supposedly originate from portals. I'm assuming you didn't cite a source because you pulled the numbers out of thin air. I used to work at one of the sites you mentioned, and, while it's not my place to post their internal traffic data, I can tell you that your numbers are way off.
I'm beginning to wonder what it will take to kill the if-only-everyone-were-as-smart-as-we-are-in-Silicon-Valley meme (which reached its most absurd extreme when Tom Friedman suggested that everything would be fine at General Motors if only Steve Jobs were in charge).
The basic problem with the newspaper business is that most major metro dailies had enjoyed monopolies on certain kinds of advertising in their markets (or they belonged to JOA cartels that eliminated price competition). Now that the monopolies are gone, newspapers have lost all their pricing power, and their monopoly-era cost structures are completely out of alignment with their new revenue-side reality.
Companies tend to fail when confronted with these sorts of changes, and there's often no right answer to save them (the hub-based legacy airlines still haven't figured this out after decades of trying). No under-40 out-of-the-box thinking will change that.
Comscore– source/loss. It is a subscriptions service. Thanks for pointing that out, Karl.
Music & Gaming are the two traditional industries which have transitioned to having the highest shift to digital revenue while books & newspapers are the two trailing. Check out Lauren Rich Fine's DIY report for the data.
It is a combination of problems confronting newspapers– not just the monopoly issue but cost structures, delivery, usage, engagement and the digital world.
The age comment is meant as a metaphor for "types of thinking" and innovation does generally prevail. I know my grandmother learned to use a computer at 70 years old in the 80s so hopefully the venerables will seek unique solutions that may not have existed in the past…
Nathan brings up some good points, but they seem to amount to a combination of paternalistic control and price-fixing. The real answer is a lot closer to 'old thinking': return to focusing on audience and subscription, rather than on content pushing models.
The Tech companies that Nathan references have been successful, but if you look closely at their success, it has been largely based on Monopolistic business models: maximum marketshare (google), copyright protection (Microsoft), audience aggregation via inboxes (Yahoo), Audience control via proprietary platforms (AOL).
Newspapers, in seeking the maximum distribution of their news, have spurned these models and as a result have destroyed their own financial footing. They are overly profligate with their IP. They value all their product at the same price point: $.50 cpms.
Display ads would have to get to the $15 cpm range to cover the costs of their newsrooms as they are currently staffed.
How do you get those CPMs? Know your audience the way they have known them in the past – via subscriptions. You don't have to even charge for the subscriptions. All you have to do is to get the consent to market to/advertise to subscribers in exchange for getting 'free' news. Targeting relevant ads via all different modalities pays for this. If you opt out of the ads, well you opt out of receiving the free news. It's that simple. Known, verified audiences get high cpms, lurkers and anon users get low cpms.
We work with the newspapers and know they get this. Either they begin to own audiences or the search engines and aggregators own their audiences. Disintermediation = death. Newspapers used to know and monetize their audiences. The shiny object of the internet has temporarily stunned them. They need to wake up now.
Dave