newspaper business models - Michael Becker on Diigo

29 Oct 09

Newspapers Raise Prices to Fight Falling Circulation

Some newspapers are increasing their revenue by raising prices for their papers, even as their circulation numbers shrink.

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Peter Kafka All Things Digital circulation newspaper business models newspapers revenue business prices

26 Oct 09

Newspaper Readers Buy Papers for the Content

Ryan Chittum takes a stance against those who argue that news content has no value, that people are really buying ads and not news.

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Ryan Chittum Mark Potts Columbia Journalism Review newspaper business models paywalls journalism business newspapers

13 Oct 09

Stephen Foley: Nice try – but you're wrong, Mr Murdoch

Newspapers will be committing collective suicide if they try to put their content behind paywalls without first making that content into something people want to pay for.

www.independent.co.uk/...-wrong-mr-murdoch-1769254.html - Preview

Rupert Murdoch Stephen Foley paywalls newspaper business models

It's desperate stuff. It won't work, and if newspaper executives on both sides
of the Atlantic follow Mr Murdoch's apparent lead, I predict we will witness
the collective suicide of scores of news organisations in the US and
elsewhere.
The Sun and the New York Post get an "astronomical" number
of hits when they have a celebrity scoop, he pleads, but he's talking about
a few stories a week at best, and a scoop is only a scoop for a fraction of
a second on the web.
2 more annotations...
- The problem with many papers is not what they charge for what they do. It is
  what they actually do. A vast amount of content duplicates information
  available elsewhere. In any other industry, we would call this overcapacity.
  The reallocation of resources that must come, towards investigative
  journalism and high-value comment and analysis, will be more painful for
  some newspapers than others, and competition is much fiercer in a
  multi-platform world.
- Many newspapers that introduce online fees
  without reforming what they do could end up looking little more than
  high-priced aggregators, a kind of Huffington Post that isn't free.

11 Oct 09

AP’s Curley v Curley and News Corp’s Rupert v Rupert

Kevin Anderson points out that Tom Curley and Rupert Murdoch have changed their tunes considerably over the past few years.

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Rupert Murdoch Tom Curley Associated Press News Corp newspaper business models Kevin Anderson Strange Attractor

Rupert Murdoch Says Google Is Stealing His Content. So Why Doesn't He Stop Them?

They'd rather blame someone else for their failure to compete in a changing marketplace. They happily take all the customers Google sends them for free, and then accuse Google of theft. Classy.

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Rupert Murdoch Tom Curley Associated Press News Corp newspaper business models Weston Kosova Newsweek

Curley and Murdoch's macho outrage is calculated to be quotable, but it is fake.
Instead of stealing, I would call this something else: a free service that drives lots of readers to news Web sites that wouldn't get nearly as much traffic, if any at all, if Google didn't link to their sites for free. That may not be as pithy as crying "thief!" But it has the advantage of being true.
1 more annotations...
- Yet neither AP nor News Corp. has taken this simple step to stop the marauding Google pirates from pillaging their cargo. Why? Because they know that their traffic would dry up overnight. They'd rather blame someone else for their failure to compete in a changing marketplace. They happily take all the customers Google sends them for free, and then accuse Google of theft. Classy.

AP, News Corp bosses tell search engines to pay up

Rupert Murdoch and Tom Curley say everybody's stealing their content, making money off it and not compensating them -- and they mean to stop it, by gum.

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Rupert Murdoch Tom Curley Associated Press News Corp newspaper business models

"Crowd-sourcing Web services such as Wikipedia, YouTube and Facebook have become preferred customer destinations for breaking news, displacing Web sites of traditional news publishers," Curley said. "We content creators must quickly and decisively act to take back control of our content."
- Right, you admit that news customers want their news from sites like Wikipedia, yet you will deny them that? Do you honestly think that dictating terms to your (rapidly fleeing) customers is the best business model? - on 2009-10-11
Add Sticky Note
"The aggregators and plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content. But if we do not take advantage of the current movement toward paid content, it will be the content creators — the people in this hall — who will pay the ultimate price and the content kleptomaniacs who triumph," the News Corp. chief executive said.
1 more annotations...
- News Corp. already owns the newspaper industry's most successful Internet subscription model in The Wall Street Journal, with more than 1 million customers who pay for online access.
  - The WSJ is a special case. People pay for it because it serves up quality content that is (a) useful and (b) can't be had anywhere else.
    
    This is a sign that paid models can work if sites have useful, unique content. It is most certainly NOT a sign that paywalls work in general. - on 2009-10-11
  Add Sticky Note

News’ Forbidden City

Murdoch and other media leaders are meeting in China. Jeff Jarvis thinks they're a self-appointed group of "leaders" only looking for ideas amongst themselves -- ideas to prop up outdated business models.

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Jeff Jarvis business newspaper business models Rupert Murdoch buzzmachine

10 Oct 09

A double dose of denial in Denver

Alan Mutter on why a pair of news start-ups, founded by former Rocky Mountain News writers, failed.

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Alan Mutter marketing business newspaper business models Rocky Mountain News John Temple

The start-up news sites failed for fundamentally the same reasons the Rocky did. People felt the universe would reward them for doing what they wanted to do, instead of doing what they needed to do to earn the patronage of readers and advertisers.

The editors doth protest way too much

Alan Mutter reminds us that constantly marketing our shortcomings and failures is not a good way to make customers want to buy newspapers.

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Alan Mutter public_relations marketing business newspaper business models

Customers only buy products – or, in the case of newspapers, use them for free on the Internet – because they see a value in them. They don’t do it because they feel sorry for the vendor or the vendor feels sorry for himself.

Yet, newspapers can’t seem to stop their incessant self-flagellation over the challenges facing their industry.

If you want to see how silly this is, ask yourself this: What are the chances General Motors would buy the following ad?

“Sure, we know we make lousy, gas-guzzling cars that are expensive and unreliable. Sure, we know our market share is dropping because we have inferior technology and styling. Sure, we are operating in bankruptcy and needed a massive federal bailout to save a few of the jobs that we haven’t already cut. But wouldn’t you like to buy a car from us anyway?”

Enough already.
Customers only buy products – or, in the case of newspapers, use them for free on the Internet – because they see a value in them. They don’t do it because they feel sorry for the vendor or the vendor feels sorry for himself.

06 Oct 09

Are you thinking, or "quorum sensing?"

Daniel Conover compares the way newspaper managers and staffers think to the way groups of bacteria will communicate via quorum sensing. In other words, it's only after enough individuals in your environment sense the same stimulus that the group will act -- all at once.

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quorum sensing Daniel Conover journalism newspaper business models newspapers business change resistance to change competition

We practice journalism today in the transitional period between an old equilibrium that has ended and a new equilibrium that has yet to take shape. The outcome cannot yet be reliably predicted, and the notion that the best, most productive ideas will naturally rise to the top is far from proven.
Many executives are just sitting around, receiving signals from their environment, waiting for the signal that a "quorum" has coalesced around a new direction.
5 more annotations...
- In other words, their actions will not be determined by an independent, forward-thinking assessment of individual ideas, but by their perceptions of where everyone else is going.
- You'd think that an entity that produces something new every day would be adapted to rapid change. The opposite is true. A newspaper is a physical object that is printed and delivered at the same time, every day. Only what goes into it changes. and so long as what goes in doesn't upset the production process or change the physical object, content barely matters.
  
  But try to change any of those variables -- deadlines, workflows, meeting schedules, the relationships between our print products and our electronic products -- and watch all hell break loose. A newspaper is a machine honed to perfection by time. It can't adapt easily to new things because it's become so efficient at doing the same thing, over and over.
- Print journalists want to talk about saving newspapers, and that's the wrong topic. The real issue is how we'll change journalism to function with 21st century tools.
- print journalists by and large still discuss new-media journalism based not on experience or study, but on their quorum-sensing perception of their peers' attitudes. New media tools like database/map mashups represent wonderful new opportunities for advancing the original goals of journalism, yet print journalists still tend to frame their internal discussions of new media as a narrative about civilized people besieged by barbarians. These men and women are not thinking about the future, they are conforming to their perception of the present.
- In other words, seeing the future isn't enough. We have to communicate that future over and over, spreading our good ideas and winnowing out our bad ideas. We have to understand that our decision-makers will have to see our ideas crop up in many places before they'll see them as valid.

17 Sep 09

Your News Content Is Worth Zero to Digital Consumers

News publishers expecting to make money from their digital readers will need to figure out how to offer something tangible -- and mobile represents big-time opportunity, especially for phone applications.

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Steve Outing Editor_&_Publisher digital online newspaper business models newspapers

News publishers expecting to make money from their digital readers will need to figure out how to offer something tangible -- and mobile represents big-time opportunity, especially for phone applications.

16 Sep 09

Statistical evidence: many newspaper execs not seeing reality

Steve Outing presents us with graphical evidence that newspaper execs and readers aren't on the same page when it comes to newspapers' free Web sites.

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web newspapers journalism newspaper business models business

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