future of newspapers - Cynthia McCune on Diigo

01 Jun 09

Seven reasons charging for content won’t work « Transforming the Gaz

Taking the Tinkerbell approach to the news biz.

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future of newspapers future of news newspapers business model

Paid content has been tried before. One of the biggest myths of the newspaper business today was that we foolishly gave our content away early in the age of the Internet. Many newspapers were either slow to go online because of fear of cannibalization or erected pay walls. We finally got aggressive and free online because holding back our content and charging for it weren’t working.
This meeting is an embarrassment. Our industry fights for openness and accountability in government and we are trying to find a path for success in a digital marketplace where transparency is increasingly important. Can these people not see how foolish and hypocritical it looks to think they can huddle behind closed doors and solve our problems?
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- clapping our hands to save the newspaper industry, like we saved Tinkerbell at the movies when we were children, has more chance of succeeding than the paid-content-cartel approach that newspaper executives are dreaming and talking about

16 Apr 09

Don't Stop the Presses! - Newspaper Association of America: Advancing Newspaper Media for the 21st Century

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future of news future of newspapers reinvent

many publishers are looking at how to reinvent the core newspaper, whether by cutting sections or days of distribution or more closely tying their print and online products together
If I am starting a newspaper from scratch, I may consider doing a robust Sunday edition, then creating the ultimate online newspaper for daily. I may even consider a very short, one-section, printed daily edition, but acting more like a companion to the online than a self-standing newspaper. I would print it in an A4 compact format, and I would make a sort of navigational tool to [information] that readers must know that day.
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- Traditional storytelling morphs into a combination of alternative story forms for short, explanatory information and narrative storytelling for compelling human stori
- More newspapers ought to be asking where are the holes in my media market, and how can I fill them?
- Let’s not, above all, fool ourselves. Cutting back the core product doesn’t strengthen it. It may be a necessary evil, but pitching a less-is-more approach to readers won’t fool them. Rethinking and reorganizing the core product (and coming clean with readers about the impetus for the changes) is the way to go.
- Ideally, a paper in Kansas City should not look, act and feel like a paper in Orange County, Calif., or Orange County, Fla. Yet, apart from the datelines on the local stories, they mostly do. That’s because newspaper people are more comfortable copying each other than taking the risk of trying something new.
- What will the core newspaper look like in two, five and 10 years?
- In some communities, the core printed product will not be around in two, five or 10 years. In others, it will publish less often, as [only] Friday and Sunday, for example. The daily ones will be compact formats, some even the A4 format, already popular in many countries in Europe. They will be inspired by magazines and books, and less by traditional daily fare.
- In less than a year, there will be very few seven-day-a-week newspapers. In less than five years, newspapers will print for Sunday only. In less than 10 years, no newspapers will be printed.

Journalism Online

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future of newspapers

First, Journalism Online will develop a password-protected website with one easy-to-use account through which consumers will be able to purchase annual or monthly subscriptions, day passes, and single articles from multiple publishers. The password-enabled payment system will be integrated into all of the member-publishers’ websites, and the publishers will have sole discretion over which content to charge for, how much to charge, and the manner of charge.
- Steve Outing is right -- this will speed the demise of newspapers, not save them. - on 2009-04-16
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a key initiative of Journalism Online will be to negotiate wholesale licensing and royalty fees with intermediaries such as search engines and other websites that currently base much of their business models on referrals of readers to the original content on newspaper, magazine and online news websites.

23 Feb 09

Wanted: Online Payment Plan for Print - Advertising Age - MediaWorks

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future of news future of newspapers magazines business model AdAge

publishers themselves and trade associations such as the Interactive Advertising Bureau, which pushed for standardized ad formats that commodified banners and created even more competition in the form of ad networks.
The businesses are simply going to have to get a whole lot smaller.
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- while Google is great at getting people to content, it does nothing to distinguish quality.
- But certain news categories, such as sports, business, national and international news, have been commoditized, and differences in quality haven't been enough to get people to choose to pay over free alternatives.
- traffic to newspaper websites was up 12% in 2008.
- 77% of the members of the Association of National Advertisers say they are planning to reduce their media budgets this year, meaning nuclear winter for the media won't end until 2010 at the earliest.
- Mort Zuckerman, who said his New York Daily News was profitable until last year, is similarly pessimistic that a pay model of any type will save newspapers. "I think it's a wonderful idea, if it would be possible. I just don't think it is. The market will simply not accept it,"
- Mort Zuckerman, who said his New York Daily News was profitable until last year, is similarly pessimistic that a pay model of any type will save newspapers. "I think it's a wonderful idea, if it would be possible. I just don't think it is. The market will simply not accept it,"
- The media grandees weighing in had plenty of solutions (micropayments! Pay walls! ISP taxes! Nonprofit status!), but they can be distilled into two distinct camps: those who believe that consumers can be made to pay -- even a penny -- for content and those who don't.
- It was as if the media woke up, saw its shadow and realized that the print world, including American capital-J journalism, is in mid-collapse. It's finally dawning that this isn't just about the economy, and it's not going to suddenly get better when the Dow finally starts chugging upward again.
  
  Nope, this is about newspapers, and to some extent magazines, having their once-enviable franchises disintermediated by the web. Every publication now must compete with every other around the globe, many of which are willing to offer their content for free. They also face competition from thousands of aggregators, who take journalists' content, monetize it for their own profit, and, in many cases, give little or nothing back to its originators.

18 Feb 09

Micro Persuasion: The Newspaper Reporter of the Future is Here Today

Good example.

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PR future of newspapers web2.0 socialnetworking journalism

People are certainly writing newspapers off for dead, but I think they have a bright future (in digital form) and it's right in front of them.
the breakthrough work of individual reporters who are using social media to build a stronger connection with their audience (and their own personal brands in the process).
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- I am a Yankee fan and have been paying close attention to what Peter Abraham has been doing. He should win awards for breaking ground in sports journalism.
- First, he has a blog with a full-text feed that includes several posts/day and hundreds of comments/day from readers.
- Abraham has a Facebook group
- He is posting photos from spring training using his iPhone. Note the gear the others are using by comparison.
- a podcast up on iTunes
- using both CoverItLive and Mogulus to have a live video/text chat with readers.
- All Abraham is missing is Twitter, YouTube and maybe Flickr
- If every reporter did this on staff they can build not only a more engaged audience, but also redefine local media since it's all potentially global.
- More content creates more opportunities for us to tell our stories and to also engage journalists using these same channels
- What Abraham is doing represents not only the future of journalism but also what PR professionals themselves need to do to build connections in the years ahead.

17 Feb 09

Salon.com | The death of the news

If subsidies are the answer, we're lost.

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future of news future of newspapers journalism

Reporters, like all human beings who are trying to make sense of complex experiences, must constantly make judgments that go beyond the mere facts. And the he-said, she-said approach mandated by objectivity can be ridiculously stupid.
- But the reality is that "he said, she said" journalism is what often passes for objectivity these days. It's a way to avoid angering your audience, and many news publishers value that more than truth-telling. - on 2009-02-17
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What is really threatened by the decline of newspapers and the related rise of online media is reporting -- on-the-ground reporting by trained journalists who know the subject, have developed sources on all sides, strive for objectivity and are working with editors who check their facts, steer them in the right direction and are a further check against unwarranted assumptions, sloppy thinking and reporting, and conscious or unconscious bias.
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- 2008 was the worst year in history for newspaper publishers, with shares dropping a stunning 83 percent on average. Newspapers lost $64.5 billion in market value in 12 months.
- All traditional media is in trouble, from magazines to network TV. But newspapers are the most threatened.
- As Nation columnist Eric Alterman recently argued, the real problem isn't the impending death of newspapers, but the impending death of news -- at least news as we know it.
- one thing is indisputable: Reporting must be kept alive. With all its limitations and faults, it is a light that illuminates the world outside ourselves. And in an increasingly virtual and solipsistic age, that light is needed more than ever.
- traditional journalistic institutions, newspapers in particular, are weighted toward fairness and objectivity. The Internet is not.
- Finally, the death of reporting will dangerously erode the ideal of objectivity. Newspapers embrace the institutional mission of objectivity: Their goal is to find out and report the truth about a given subject, no matter what that truth is. They are not supposed to go in looking for an answer, or holding preconceived beliefs.
- With all their flaws, traditional media institutions served as unifying forces in society.
- Newspapers are institutions that adhere to a tradition of journalism and have the financial resources to carry on that tradition. Today, those institutions are threatened as never before, in part because of the disappearance of old-school publishers who regarded their media properties as a public trust, in part because of the rise of new media.
- Nietzsche's credo that "there are no facts, only interpretations" will become our epistemological motto.
- If capitalism wins the battle, the result will be an unregulated marketplace of ideas in which consumers choose their own news -- in effect, choose their own reality.
- It's much easier to consume unfamiliar information in a newspaper than on the Internet. Because of the physical layout of a newspaper, you're much more likely to read a story you aren't interested in than you would if you were online.
- firsthand observation is the building block not just of journalism, but of all human knowledge. This isn't just true in journalism, but in all fields, from science to the humanities. Academics acquire their knowledge through primary sources. Historians value firsthand accounts more than secondary ones, and give them more weight. The same is true for the law. An eyewitness to an event has more legal standing than someone who heard what the eyewitness said later.
- The MSM's less than stellar record explains why in online forums and threads about this subject, many posters welcome the impending end of the media universe as we know it. But those who are calling for the demise of traditional media are throwing the baby out with the bath water -- and the baby is reporting.
- As for the old media, it has not exactly always done a bang-up job of capturing reality. All too often it has been sclerotic, incompetent and driven by hidden corporatist, nationalist or reactionary agendas. The press's catastrophic failure to question the Bush administration's case for war in Iraq is the most glaring recent example, but there are many. "Professionalism" can be a vice, evidenced by the pathologically cozy relationship between many bigwig Beltway reporters and their government sources.
- As Slate writer and media critic Jack Shafer has pointed out, some bloggers have done significant research reporting, digging through FOIA documents or unearthing official secrets.
- From foreign newspapers to brilliant bloggers, the Internet has given a voice to countless talented and informed people who would otherwise have no platform. It has empowered readers, created an army of bloggers who provide much-needed fact-checking and criticism of the entitled mandarins of the establishment press, and provided powerful counternarratives to the bland, centrist pablum so often served up by the "respectable" media.
- The brave new media world will be one of tunnel vision and self-selected expertise, in which reported pieces are increasingly devoid of human interaction or human stories, often written by individuals who do not pretend to have a neutral stance. Raw, non-mediated video or audio will provide primary stories to anyone who is interested in them.
- Document-based reporting and academic-style research will increasingly replace face-to-face reporting. And the ideal of journalistic objectivity and fairness will increasingly crumble, to be replaced by more tendentious and opinionated reports.
- Currently there is no business model that makes online reporting financially viable. From a business perspective, reporting is a loser. There are good financial reasons why the biggest content-driven Web business success story of the last few years, the Huffington Post, does very little original reporting.
- If newspapers die, so does reporting. That's because the majority of reporting originates at newspapers.

13 Feb 09

D.C. Ranks of Mainstream Reporters Thinning - washingtonpost.com

More whining about the demise of newspapers.

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future of newspapers MSM

"The niche media cover trees, not forests. . . . They're generally not involved in watchdog, exposé journalism that by its very existence is a check on malfeasance."
Foreign media organizations have also been expanding their Washington presence. The BBC's staff of 50 is one-third larger than four years ago. Al-Jazeera has 105. Overall, the report says, 796 media outlets from 113 countries have set up shop here, compared with 507 outlets from 79 countries in 1994.
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- the greatest impact of the Old Media erosion is the shrinking attention to local congressional delegations, and legislation and regulation that affects certain states and communities.

D.C. Ranks of Mainstream Reporters Thinning - washingtonpost.com

The comments are more illuminating than the article.

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future of newspapers reporting journalism

It is the big papers and the networks who often lack a fundamental underdtanding of how the government truly functions. They focus too much White House press conferences and high-level events. When they do cover important happenings at the agency level, their reporters tend to gloss over complexities and even miss key facts. The trend towards specialized journalism is a good one.
Here's a little secret: those 'niche' publications by and large cover the gov't more extensively than the MSM and certainly are far more valuable than the second-rate regional bureaus now fading from the scene.
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- many of these niche publications, Food Chemical News among them, are independently published and are not creatures of the industries they cover.
- the real change in journalism is not the emergence of niche publications -- which have been around forever -- but the weakening of traditional general circulation newspapers at the same time bloggers and other nontraditional sources of news are emerging.
- Bloggers and other niche media cover government at the level of detail where the dirty work is done -- a level generally overlooked by the mainstream media as they cover the big story du jour and flit from scandal to scandal.

12 Feb 09

Do Newspapers Have a Future? -- Printout -- TIME

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future of newspapers objectivity blogs craigslist

Some believe that the answer is to restore local ownership. Newspapers were born free, and yet everywhere they are in chains, like Gannett.
I'm not sure what that new form will look like. But it might resemble the better British papers today (such as the one I work for, the Guardian). The Brits have never bought into the American separation of reporting and opinion. They assume that an intelligent person, paid to learn about some subject, will naturally develop views about it. And they consider it more truthful to express those views than to suppress them in the name of objectivity.
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- Newspapers on paper are on the way out. Whether newspaper companies are on the way out too depends. Some of them are going to find the answers. And some are going to fritter away the years quarreling about staff cuts.

11 Feb 09

Battle Plans for Newspapers - Room for Debate Blog - NYTimes.com

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future of news future of newspapers

In some cities, midsized metropolitan papers may not survive to year’s end.
What survival strategies should these dailies adopt? If some papers don’t survive, how will readers get news about the local school board or county executive?

Forget Micropayments -- Here's a Far Better Idea for Monetizing Content

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future of news future of newspapers micropayments

Many people in the newspaper industry are already in full-fledged panic mode, and one of the recent responses has been a wave of calls to resurrect an online publishing business model that has not yet worked: micropayments.
This approach hasn't worked. It won't work. Is completely counter to the nature of the Internet. It will hasten newspapers' death spiral.
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- If the newspaper industry takes Isaacson's advice, then anyone who still works at newspapers should panic!
- The user must be given the option of whether to pay for a Web site's content (by financially supporting the site), or read it for free.
- Your once-powerful newspaper brand doesn't mean as much as it used to, and to get paid for newspaper content online, it must become part of a giant pool of content that's financially supported en masse.
- Think of it this way and you'll understand the core concept behind Kachingle: Just as online users currently pay an Internet provider $30 or more a month for their computers to access the Internet, and perhaps a monthly fee for all the music they want from a service like Rhapsody, they'll also pay a monthly fee for all the news and blog content on the Web.
- The next important point to grasp about the Kachingle model is that it allows individuals to financially support the online content providers that they like best.
- KISS -- keep it simple, stupid. Online publishers, including newspaper Web sites, are more likely to convince people to pay a monthly "Internet content fee" if everyone is in it together and there's one ubiquitous badge on every content site that an individual visits (which always remembers you). The publishers who make the most money will be those that produce the best content, and thus get the most people to support them via the Kachingle system. That should be to the advantage of newspaper Web sites' quality content, right?

10 Feb 09

Reflections of a Newsosaur: Mission possible? Charging for web content

Definitely a "newsosaurus." The comments are most interesting.

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future of news future of newspapers business model

The biggest difference between what the music industry did and what newspapers could do is that people wanted music. Do people want newspaper content anymore? Should content quality be at the forefront of the conversation?
The newspaper industry is not dying because it gives away content on the web. Try these two factors...

* Penetration of the print product has been in decline for decades, impacted by TV and cable.
* Revenue has been under pressure for the last decade due to dramatically lower rates charged by competitors on the internet.

Those are destructive outside forces unrelated to the industry's decisions about the internet.

Giving away content was a response to these realities in the '90s -- trying to regain audience and revenues and, everyone hoped, keep things status quo.

It hasn't worked out that way.
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- Moving behind a pay wall isn't a real fix, either, unless the news organization provides something of unique value; while there is a lot of good stuff in a lot of papers, there are also lots of things that aren't particularly unique - weather forecasts, for example. Papers will have to restructure pretty significantly to find niches that work for them online.
- Where's the depth newspapers have developed that people might pay for? I worked for one paper that has just about everything that's been in the print product (and then some) since the mid-80s digitized and searchable for employees. Why not open that functionality up to the user? Do you think there might be a market for a t-shirt featuring the sports page from dad's state championship. Maybe a mug with grandma and grandpa's wedding announcement?
  
  Why isn't the business staff at major papers cranking out e-books detailing the market status of different sectors, ready to be downloaded at $5 a pop? Why haven't the entertainment staffs doing e-book biographies of local musicians ... or actors ... or whatever? Podcasts of interviews with local heroes and stars available for "upgraded" members?
- One last point: When we indeed do "save" the news industry, the old players will be smaller than before, yet still plenty strong enough to serve the public good as they always have. But they'll have shed those cost-$10-per-copy-to-deliver-on-Sunday shackles (unless the Sunday ad inserts remain strong and it makes economic sense to continue that).
  
  Steve Outing
- If the newspaper industry takes the advice of old-media lions like Isaacson and Brill (both have high-profile calls for micropayments to save the industry), newspapers will die a quick death. The guys calling for this are like the music execs who fought digital tooth and nail instead of grasping the new reality and figuring out how to profit from it.
- Howard is right. Most news is a commodity, not because we have made it so, but because very little of it is truly unique. Couple that with low demand from consumers, many of whom would rather be entertained than informed, and you don't have a very strong case to charge for content.
- it's always been my understanding that we readers weren't paying for much more than the manufacturing and distribution costs associated with the content, which, in a sense, we were indeed getting for free.
  
  Now our readers have done us the enormous favor of buying their own printing presses (their computers) and distribution system (Internet access). I understand there's a crisis, but it sounds to me like you want to charge people for something that has been free not just for the past 15 years, but forever.
  
  Neither you nor anyone else would be talking about this if the advertising model hadn't collapsed. The real question is whether we can come up with a new model that works.
- If you want assured destruction of today's newspaper newsrooms, go ahead and start charging. It will be the end.
- Any newspaper that switches to paid faces an immediate threat of a disruptive start up that will offer as much or more news online for free at a much lower cost basis
- You notice the TV side of the industry never has this paid vs. free conversation. In fact, TV news site producers salivate at the idea of newspapers charging for content. It would open the market for them to turn their sites into the #1 local news source.
- The case against paid content is so irrefutable as to make any mention of paid content completely laughable.
- I think it is too late to re-impose a paid model with any prospect of market dominance, control, or profit
- easy-to-acquire free content on the web rapidly undercut the demand, and therefore the revenues, for their flagship physical products.
- easy-to-acquire free content on the web rapidly undercut the demand, and therefore the revenues, for their flagship physical products.
- It is not a sustainable model to charge for the print edition while giving away the online edition. It is economic suicide, as we are seeing now.

09 Feb 09

Resilient Strategy for Times Despite Toll of a Recession - NYTimes.com

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future of news future of newspapers nytimes recession

“As other newspapers cut back on international and national coverage, or cease operations, we believe there will be opportunities for The Times to fill that void,”
does not carry the kind of crushing debt burden that has led other publishers to default or file for bankruptcy
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- unlike almost every other major paper in the country, the flagship Times newspaper has not significantly reduced the size of its newsroom or the content of its pages; its newsroom staff of almost 1,300 people and budget of well over $200 million are easily the largest in the country.
- The company’s digital revenue has leveled off after years of torrid growth — it actually declined slightly in the fourth quarter — and it remains just 12 percent of all revenue.
- the company has positioned itself well to ride out another year of recession, maybe two. The company still operates at a profit
- “I think they’ve put The New York Times out of danger.”

31 Jan 09

Objectivity or voice: Which tells the story better? » Nieman Journalism Lab » Pushing to the Future of Journalism

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future of news future of newspapers objectivity blogs

the way the two organizations — a daily newspaper in Seattle that’s at the center of the story it’s covering, and a national media blog run by the proprietor of a hyperlocal Seattle web site — cover the story says a lot about the relative merits of objectivity and voice in journalism.
Which account gives you the better sense of what happened at the hearing? I’d say Bergman’s, even with his obvious conflicted interest in the topic (which, of course, The P-I has too, but shields behind the journalistic tradition of objectivity), gets to the heart of the matter and holds a sharp pin to the over-inflated balloon that were the committee’s preconceptions.

I know which one I’d read all the way through.

Newsosaur: Small publishers barely feel the pinch

A good reason to start out at a small newspaper chain.

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future of newspapers

Although sales for the newspaper industry as a whole fell an average of 15% in the first nine months of 2008, revenues fell an average of 2% for papers under 100,000
While metros face stiff competition from competing electronic and online media for readers and advertising dollars, smaller papers often are the only vehicles for news and advertising in the communities they serve.

30 Jan 09

The All-Digital Newsroom of the Not-So-Distant Future

Good stuff.

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future of newspapers online

Some of those newspapers will live on purely in digital form, reinvented (and inevitably downsized significantly).
We will also likely see some single-publisher towns lose their newspapers. Some of those communities may go newsless, but in others we may see the print edition disappear but re-emerge as a digital news operation with the same brand name.
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- Sadly, any newspaper that sheds its print edition will lay off a lot of people. Pressmen, drivers, everyone in the circulation department -- all gone. For a large newsroom, a lot of journalists will lose their jobs, perhaps one-half to two-thirds. (I hope I'm being pessimistic, but I doubt it.) A leaner news operation will probably mean a significant thinning of newsroom middle-management ranks. A smaller advertising department is likely.
- Surviving journalists who get the jobs in the reinvented news operation will likely include the most popular columnists and the "star" reporters
- The transformed newsroom will be filled with multi-functional journalists who are comfortable carrying around a digital camera and tiny video camera; who make it part of their routine to record audio for possible use in podcasts or multimedia project sound clips; who are regular users of social networks and understand how to leverage them to communicate with and attract new readers, and share some personal information about themselves as well as promote their work; and who are comfortable and willing to put in the time to engage and communicate with their readers or viewers, including participating in reader comment threads accompanying their stories.
- there will remain a place for photojournalists -- but they'll need to be adept at video and not just still news photography. They'll need to know how to do video editing and production, and produce multimedia content.
- that may make this digital newsroom younger than today's print newsrooms
- the post-paper news entity will need people focused on inventing and developing mobile news features and applications, and thinking about how to make money from mobile users. Smartphones (Apple's iPhone, Blackberry Storm, et al)
- At the managerial level of the news entity formally known as the newspaper, we should see a chief technical officer (CTO) position, and a head of social media.
- Every journalist is a blogger, and a beatblogger, and a social network junkie.
- increasingly blog entries and tweets get posted online unedited by trusted staff journalists.
- In my view of the newspaper sans paper, every journalist is a personality, not just an anonymous byline.
- If an environmental reporter succeeds in building a valuable community, for example, he may find within it individuals who work, say, in the Forest Service or who head up a trails advocacy group, who are talented writers or speakers and can be persuaded to write occasional columns, opinion pieces, or submit video shorts.
- beatblogging isn't just or really about saving money; it's about bringing niche-interest communities and journalists together and improving and expanding the overall news product.
- Here's what the reporter/blogger will routinely do:
- Long-form stories and features.
- Regular blog entries (basically short articles)
- Instant updates.
- you should view these paper-to-digital news transformations as a solid step forward toward the future of news media

29 Jan 09

News You Can Endow - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com

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future of news future of newspapers newspapers news

Thomas Jefferson wrote in January 1787. “And were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate to prefer the latter.”
Today, we are dangerously close to having a government without newspapers.
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- If Jefferson was right that a well-informed citizenry is the foundation of our democracy, then newspapers must be saved.
- But there is an option that might not only save newspapers but also make them stronger: Turn them into nonprofit, endowed institutions — like colleges and universities. Endowments would enhance newspapers’ autonomy while shielding them from the economic forces that are now tearing them down.
- News organizations have cut costs, with grave consequences. Over the past three years, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and The San Francisco Chronicle have trimmed their staffs. The number of American correspondents reporting from abroad fell by 25 percent from 2002 to 2006, and only a handful of American newspapers now operate foreign bureaus.
- As long as newspapers remain for-profit enterprises, they will find no refuge from their financial problems. The advertising revenues that newspaper Web sites generate are not enough to sustain robust news coverage.
- By endowing our most valued sources of news we would free them from the strictures of an obsolete business model and offer them a permanent place in society, like that of America’s colleges and universities. Endowments would transform newspapers into unshakable fixtures of American life, with greater stability and enhanced independence that would allow them to serve the public good more effectively.
- Aside from providing stability, an endowment would promote journalistic independence.

23 Jan 09

San Francisco Chronicle Editor Ward Bushee: Forum | KQED Public Media for Northern CA

KQED - Forum with Michael Krasny

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future of newspapers sfchron layoffs

22 Jan 09

Free Newspaper Venture Depends on Local Blogs - NYTimes.com

If you scrape content from a bunch of local blogs and print it, is it really a newspaper? Will people read it?

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blogs future of news future of newspapers nytimes

The Printed Blog, a Chicago start-up, plans to reprint blog posts on regular paper, surrounded by local ads, and distribute the publications free in big cities.
“We are trying to be the first daily newspaper comprised entirely of blogs and other user-generated content,” he said. “There were so many techniques that I’ve seen working online that maybe I could apply to the print industry.”
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- “The free newspaper business model is still very workable,” said David Cohen, a founder of Silicon Valley Community Newspapers, a group of free weeklies south of San Francisco that was sold to Knight Ridder in 2005 and is now owned by MediaNews. “There’s a huge readership that wants the local news, and local businesses tend to increase their advertising in bad times
- The Printed Blog will publish blog posts alongside other Weblike content, like user-submitted photographs and readers’ comments. The paper will be printed on three or four 11-by-17-inch sheets of white paper and laid out like a blog instead of in columns.
- A city the size of Chicago could have 50 separate editions tailored to individual neighborhoods.
- By publishing articles written by bloggers who are already diligently covering topics as varied as town politics and local fashion, Mr. Karp can slash one of the biggest expenses of a newspaper: reporters.
- Advertising remains print’s one great advantage over Web publications: advertisers will pay much more for print ads than for online ones.
- Mr. Karp expects that each issue, to be distributed twice a day to 1,000 people, will eventually have enough ads to earn a profit of $750 to $1,500 a week.
- Ads from local businesses are one reason that free dailies have been a rare bright spot in the newspaper industry. Unlike struggling car companies and department stores, which are mainstay advertisers of metropolitan dailies, small businesses have increased their ad spending during the recession, several publishers said.
- Mr. Cohen, who was recently laid off by MediaNews, said The Printed Blog’s potential challenges would be magnified by its plan to publish dozens of niche papers. “It just sounds daunting,” he said. “To me, that’s why the Internet was invented.”

A Revolving Door of Editors and Publishers - NYTimes.com

www.nytimes.com/...19paper.html - Preview

future of newspapers nytimes

upheaval in a business that is battling for survival has drastically shortened the shelf lives of editors and publishers at major papers, whether they leave voluntarily or are forced out. All have had to navigate waves of ownership changes, cutbacks, experimentation or all three.
“The primary explanation is the unremitting pressure on these guys to produce journalism at a lower and lower cost,” said Conrad C. Fink, a professor of newspaper management at the University of Georgia.
Not so long ago, editors of major papers typically stayed for 7 to 10 years, sometimes much longer. But among the 20 highest-circulation newspapers in the United States, 19 have changed their top editors in this decade — several of them more than once.
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- Even when changes are justified, rapid turnover takes a toll, Mr. Steiger said, because “keeping people focused has to be challenging when the troops don’t know whether you’re going to be there in six months.”
- “The owners want people who’ll move faster toward the future, however that’s defined,” said John S. Carroll, who was the top editor at The Baltimore Sun and then at The Los Angeles Times, where he stepped down rather than continue cutting his newsroom. “The business is convulsing, and a lot of people just aren’t suited to the stripping-down that is going on now.”

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