Or, How Newspapers Should Stop Worrying and Love the Internet
Supply and demand. Simple economics, right?
Except, that doesn’t appear to be the case anymore in the news industry. There’s still a strong demand for news, and there’s certainly a supply. But it’s a choking, suffocating, we-stopped-treading-water-hours-ago drowning supply, as major newspapers around the country are hemorrhaging money fast enough to make those stock graphs teeter near a complete and straight-down nosedive.
How, though? This is business, damn it. Newspapers sink cost to create a quality product that consumers demand. But since the advent of the Internet, since this era was coined the Information Age, consumers no longer consume in the traditional sense. That is, they don’t see the sense in paying for it.
Oh, they consume. Like unprejudiced locusts, people scour the web for the answers they seek, jumping from site to site—skimming, scanning, subscribing, and sharing.
A sense of digital entitlement among Internet users has pervaded our culture. Starting long ago in the Age of Napster, when the euphemism “file-sharing” was quickly created to replace its uglier synonyms “copyright infringement,” “song stealing,” and “Internet piracy,” people began to think that since they could obtain certain things for free online meant they should be able.
Basically, the Internet provided a real-life stage for the age-old question: “If you knew you could get away with stealing, would you?” And, perhaps to the disappointment of more moral generations to come, we collectively answered, “Hell, yes.”
Which brings us to today’s news: The Health of Journalism. In 13 short years of wide-spread Internet use, the American public has not only become accustomed to obtaining its news for free, but also become unappreciative of original news reporting and writing. Quite simply, people take their news for granted these days.
In a March 2009 survey conducted out of the Pew Research Center, 42 percent of respondents said they wouldn’t miss the loss of their local newspaper much or even at all. Perhaps more worrisome for the industry, 48 percent of respondents between the ages of 18 and 39 answered the question similarly.
For a little while, publishers and editors thought they could rely on online advertising from their websites to buoy the loss of revenue from subscription cuts. But as with nearly every other Internet company that executed a drive-traffic-first, make-money-later business plan, this plan fell solidly on its face.
So now the newspaper industry has one tough predicament on its hands. It must convince readers to return to its product—a product they take for granted, consider disposable and believe replaceable—and simultaneously persuade them to pay for it.
Micropayments, industry-owned advertising groups, single web-subscriptions across multiple publications…seemingly anything plausible and possibly profitable was discussed at a recent industry convention in Chicago.
At least one thing was in agreement: Content must be paid for. After all, this is business.
Now that various digital platforms are becoming the medium of choice for so many news readers, it makes sense to charge for what is expensive to report and edit professionally. —Rick Edmonds, Poynter
One of the forefront leaders of this intrepid march into the unknown is the Gray Lady herself. Despite the crown-jewel-investment-turned-thorn-in-the-side that is the Boston Globe as well as some more local and internal troubles, the New York Times is spending money (lots of money) on research and development of fresh news consumption methods and technologies—and, of course, ways of enticing people to pay for them.
One ideological, even if small, change within the company’s approach is the relabeling of its customers. Instead of referring to its audience as “readers”, the Times has stressed the not-all-that-semantic shift to “users.”
Here’s an interesting video interview the Nieman Journalism Lab out of Harvard had with Nick Bilton, the Design Integration Editor with the New York Times. (Sorry, the video couldn’t be embedded.)
One of the extremely cool innovations out of the NYTimes recently is its Times Reader 2.0. It’s an offline application that mimics the look and layout of the real-deal newspaper, loads “Breaking News” stories whenever they’re added to the site, comes with a browsing function that allows for quick skimming of article headlines (just like over morning breakfast!) and, yes, even has the daily crossword. The free download can be found here.
Currently, you get the front-page articles, the business section, the crossword and some other mini-extras all for free. And for only $3.45 per week, you can get every section of the Times to your desktop everyday—even the weekly Sunday magazine section. For comparison sake, daily home delivery costs $7.40 a week, and that’s with the current sale of 50-percent off.
It’s just one step in what plans to be a long haul toward staving off the industry’s collapse, but it’s one that makes an important break from recent attempts of the last few years. The Times Reader is comfortable in its own skin, comfortable in rejecting the old models and practices and trying something truly new.
For too long, newspaper leaders clung hopelessly to their Linus blankets, and as the Internet became less a passing tide and more a complete and utter game changer, terms such as tradition and timeless and nostalgia offered little in the way of a lifeboat. And it seems, supporting itself with only its last few gasps of air, the industry is ready for change.
Now, of course, the really hard work begins.
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