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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.
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.
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Jarvis thinks they're a self-appointed group of "leaders" only looking for ideas amongst themselves -- ideas to prop up outdated business models.
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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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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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.
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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.
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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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.
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Many executives are just sitting around, receiving signals from their environment, waiting for the signal that a "quorum" has coalesced around a new direction.
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Don't Bail Out Newspapers--Let Them Die and Get Out of the Way
A bit of a rant about how newspapers are dinosaurs that need a healthy dose of business-model-induced evolution to kill them off so something new can replace them.
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As for all the hand-wringing about the great "in-depth" information that only a newspaper can provide, let's be honest: the typical daily newspaper does a lousy job. It tries to provide a little bit of everything—politics, sports, business, celebrity stuff—and as a result it doesn't do anything particularly well. Ask anyone who's an expert in anything—whether it's bicycle racing or brain surgery—what they think when they read a newspaper article about their field. Chances are they cringe, because the material is so dumbed-down, and because it's so clear that whoever wrote the article has no real expertise on this topic.
Post-Medium Publishing
Paul Graham reminds us that it's the medium that's for sale, not the content contained in it.
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Almost every form of publishing has been organized as if the medium
was what they were selling, and the content was irrelevant. Book
publishers, for example, set prices based on the cost of producing
and distributing books. They treat the words printed in the book
the same way a textile manufacturer treats the patterns printed on
its fabrics. -
If printed books are optional, publishers will have to
work harder to entice people to buy them. - 3 more annotations...
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.
The price of information online
Daniel Axelrod suggests that newspapers drastically cut their print product and use the savings to hire more reporters.
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So, media companies should cease printing paper editions or publish their print versions far less often, and they should channel all the overhead they save into adding reporters. Then, newly potent, rejuvenated newsgathering operations could focus on the kind of hyper-local coverage, investigative reporting and watchdog journalism for which advertisers and readers would actually pay.
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So, media companies should cease printing paper editions or publish their print versions far less often, and they should channel all the overhead they save into adding reporters. Then, newly potent, rejuvenated newsgathering operations could focus on the kind of hyper-local coverage, investigative reporting and watchdog journalism for which advertisers and readers would actually pay.
The trouble is newspapers still believe they offer something so special that people will always want to pay for them. But, in reality, much of reason the reason many people bought papers to begin with was they were monopolies. Yet, newspapers can still prove they have value by entertaining people with arts coverage and offering them the stories they crave on local sports, schools, taxes, politicians and other community issues.
Google developing a micropayment platform and pitching newspapers: “‘Open’ need not mean free”
Zach Seward at Nieman Journalism Lab looks at Google's proposal to use its Checkout system to manage micropayments for news content.
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Google believes that an open web benefits all users and publishers. However, “open” need not mean free. We believe that content on the Internet can thrive supported by multiple business models — including content available only via subscription.
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The idea is to allow viable payments of a penny to several dollars by aggregating purchases across merchants and over time. Google will mitigate the risk of non-payment by assigning credit limits based on past purchasing behavior and having credit card instruments on file for those with higher credit limits and using our proprietary risk engines to track abuse or fraud.
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Micropayments and the power of free
Joshua Benton at Nieman Journalism Lab suggests that newspapers target the readers who are willing to pay macropayments for quality content. It's better, he says, than chasing pennies and nickels.
Mark Bernstein: Newspapers Are Big, Not Bloated
Mark Bernstein says that newspapers' massive staffs are the result of being outfitted for print production. The staffs only seem bloated in comparison to today's slimmed-down online staffs.
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Why did columnists make so much money? Because they recruited readers, and because it wasn’t much money compared to the rest of the operation. Why did they have rewrite boys and typists and gofers? Because lots of newspaper reporters were still barely educated — reporting was a job for people with a high school education — and you needed someone to fix the spelling. (“Never let them know you can type,” my mother’s first editor told her.) Why fix the spelling? Because a bunch of readers have gone to college, and the advertisers badly want those readers. Fact checking? Same story. Why did newspapers have crime reporters and book reporters and theater reporters and society reporters, not just in New York but in Detroit and Denver and Des Moines? Because those columns sold a few papers, sometimes they attracted an advertiser, and the extra pair of hands came cheap.
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Why did they have rewrite boys and typists and gofers? Because lots of newspaper reporters were still barely educated — reporting was a job for people with a high school education — and you needed someone to fix the spelling. (“Never let them know you can type,” my mother’s first editor told her.)
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You Can't Charge For Something That Doesn't Provide Value
Mark Potts tells explains that newspapers may want to charge for online content, but they may have a hard time convincing readers their content is valuable enough to pay for.
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Most, if not all, newspaper Web sites aren't really very good—they're still (mediocre) newspapers pasted on a screen. They're clunky, text-heavy, unimaginative and hard to navigate. They're not designed for audience service; they're usually constructed for the convenience of the people who produce them.
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Add Sticky NoteThis is a dangerous conundrum for the newspaper industry, at a dangerous time. To amp up the quality, newspaper managements have got to get a lot smarter and spend a lot more money. But money's tight, and in fact, resources are being cut, deeply, throughout the industry. Innovation is essentially at a standstill. Smart, visionary staffers have left in frustration. Upstart competitors are moving in on things that newspapers used to take as birthrights. Papers still aren't being daring enough about trying things that will really serve readers, that will really move the needle on quality, that will really attract new audiences and new lines of revenue. They're stuck in the past, unwilling and unable to truly move into the future.
- Sounds hopeless - on 2009-07-25
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Newspaper Model for Success: Ditch the Press, Dismiss the Staff
Newly crunched numbers show that an online-only news operation can run with 20 employees in a moderately sized city.
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the local, online-only newspaper of tomorrow, for a decent-sized city, will have a staff of 20 people. That’s 20 people, period. Perhaps six of them will be “news gatherers.”
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But no matter how you fiddle with the numbers, there’s no way that Josephson’s model gets you anywhere close to old newspaper staffing levels, whereby a paper like the Seattle Post-Intelligencer employed 150 people on the editorial side alone.
Xark!: The newspaper suicide pact
Dan Conover from Xark offers a long tirade, noting that the journalism crisis is really a crisis for the business owners who have run their companies into the ground, ignoring the way online content works.
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On the surface, paid content is the reasonable idea that people should have to pay for the professionally produced content they consume. Its core, however, is a post-rational demand that consumers abandon their habits of the past decade in favor of new behaviors intended to restore media companies to the profitability ordained to them by God Almighty.
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Quality journalism is expensive, and to the extent that it provides a public good, we will find ways to fund it. But top-heavy, poorly run, arrogant-to-the-bitter-end media companies? This is their crisis, not our crisis, and it certainly isn't about journalism.
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Why Readers Deserve No Journalism
A response to economist Robert Picard's claim that reporters deserve low pay.
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Picard and too many others assumes that technology has “stripped away” the journalists’ only advantage of exclusive access to information. But most of the information has been there all along. Knowing where to look, how to push, and making sense of what you learn make the difference. One might as well argue that anyone is the research peer of a trained librarian because a library’s resources are freely available.
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If commodity reporting is necessary, as commodities are, then someone must do it. As much as a certain type of technophile would like to believe that it will happen through blogs or Twitter, it largely won’t. The few available examples may show that it is possible, but by their scarcity suggest that it is unlikely. By and large, people will not head to the town committee meetings on a regular basis. They won’t develop sources in a government agency to uncover potential malfeasance. They rarely even vote.
Editorial - Newspapers’ future
A Financial Times editorial on the newspaper industry's current crisis.
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The profitability of papers in the late 20th century, when they had a monopoly of classified advertising, was an anomaly. Before that, newspaper barons owned them more to wield power than nurture democracy, while the 18th-century press was as partisan and rambunctious as any bunch of bloggers.
Three ideas to make newspaper pay walls work
Dave Lee gives some suggestions for how to make the seemingly inevitable paywalls work for newspaper Web sites.
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Add Sticky Note
Hey hey! It’s Free Column Friday! Or something. Let’s not just lie-down and say “right then, everything is 2op, off you go”. Let’s be inventive. Let’s have Alan Rusbridger’s five picks of the day for 50p. Let’s have five Jeremy Clarkson columns for the price of four. Let’s have a loyalty bonus: You’ve read Charlie Brooker for the past 5 weeks? Hey, guess what, Charlie loves you — here’s a sixth article for free. Hell, here’s an EXCLUSIVE article for free. Why not?
Put your online price right up there with your offline price. Advertise content with the online price tag attached. Make it seem like a bargain. Make the reader think “Hey, you know what, 20p isn’t bad. I put 20p in a charity box the other day, and thought nothing of it”.
- Why not do this? We should treat newspaper articles online like any other purchase; namely, we should offer deals like Lee says. Editor's picks. Bargains. It would open up a whole new world for promoting certain content. - on 2009-05-10
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Newspaper publishers need to get round the table and launch their own PayPal. It’s the only way it can work. I should be able to use the same account for every single newspaper on the planet. Or, at the very least, in the UK. But really, the planet. A PayPal for newspapers would be a revolution. It means I can keep track of what I’m reading, and spending, and not have to worry about signing in to 30 different sites.
Why feds can’t – and shouldn’t – rescue press
Alan Mutter gives his reasons why the federal government should not try some sort of journalism bailout.
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Government can’t, and shouldn’t, do anything about the stupendous – and lamentable – reversal of fortune that has scourged newsrooms, squeezed newsholes and shuttered such proud titles as the Rocky Mountain News and Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
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no similar argument can be made for newspapers, which collectively employ a mere 0.2% of the nation’s labor force and generate only 0.36% of the gross national product. In other words, newspapers, from an economic point of view, are not too big to be allowed to fail.
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