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Why the End of Newspapers Is Not the End of News
Today’s collapse of the Rocky Mountain News has prompted the usual hysterics and hand-wringing over the death of print—but people need to get over the notion that quality news only comes on paper.
OK, so now it has begun. The Rocky Mountain News, Denver’s 150-year-old daily newspaper, is shutting its doors tomorrow. I fear this will begin a stampede to the exits for many of the nation’s newspaper companies.
There can be no doubt that bad news continues to pile on in the newspaper industry, with the economic downturn providing the knockout blow to an already-staggering industry. The Philadelphia newspapers and the Journal Register Company both filed for bankruptcy over the past week. According the Associated Press, four owners of 33 newspapers have sought bankruptcy protection over the last 2 ½ months.
In recent years most newspapers weren’t doing that kind of journalism anyway. Rarely did investigative reporting win out over covering the local sports franchises, for example.
The Hearst Corp. announced that it might close its papers in Seattle and San Francisco if it can’t sell them or find other solutions to the millions of dollars they are losing each week. (That’s right, each week!)
In recent days, both Time and the New Republic have printed huge pieces speculating on how to save the newspaper business, joining a chorus of voices calling for help to save investigative and in-depth reporting by saving the newspaper industry.
Enough already! Let’s do something the industry hasn’t done in years: Listen to its customers. Let’s try giving them what they want. And guess what, they want news. And history has shown us that people will pay—one way or the other—for something they want..
A new poll from the respected Pew Research center tells us that for the first time in history more people say they get their national and international news from the Internet than from newspapers.
It’s time for the industry to listen and follow their customers.
Forget the newspaper industry. Let’s launch the News Industry. Say hello to News Inc. Let’s do what every industry does: Identify consumer demand and meet it.The good news is that consumers are just learning all the new ways they can get news and are still figuring out what works best for them. There is still time for those of us in the news industry to work with them and find out at the same time.
Many of us in the new-media world have known this for a long time and have been building outlets that are serving millions of readers. MarketWatch.com, TheStreet.com, Huffington Post, and The Daily Beast, among many others, have built audiences and businesses on this concept, without the benefit of having a traditional media product or news operation as our base. We built these businesses from scratch.
With the head start most media companies have, they should be able to build their digital platform businesses even faster. Some have. More people read the New York Times and the Washington Post online than in print.
What simply must change is this hand-wringing attitude that if newspapers die, so will responsible, in-depth reporting. Enough already. In recent years most newspapers weren’t doing that kind of journalism anyway. Choices were made, and rarely did investigative reporting win out over covering the local sports franchises, for example.
So let’s get this straight. There is a big future for news, journalism, investigative reporting, analysis, in-depth reporting, and terrific storytelling. But we need to do some work to create the business models that will support it.
Let’s stop arguing over whether there is enough advertising to support this, or if there needs to be other ways people pay for content. There are a huge number of alternatives and we just need to do what every business does: Test each possible method. Something will work.
Those models exist—just ask the people at MarketWatch, or Politico (which by the way includes a PRINT newspaper among its products), or TheStreet.com, YahooNews, MSNBC.com, or countless others.
We need to partner with people who know this new medium, technology and consumer habits. We need to launch new businesses with different revenue streams.
We can build these businesses out of the existing news businesses, but they must accelerate their ability to change and behave more entrepreneurially. They must explain what they are doing to their shareholders and their audience. No one said it would be easy, but they could capitalize on their brand value as trusted sources to their audiences.
But they have to change their focus.
The time has come for News Inc.
Let’s build these new news businesses around the content they cover, not the format in which they deliver the news. There should be one or more newsrooms on Wall Street that will cover Wall Street for every possible kind of outlet, including television, newspapers, BlackBerries, cellphones, magazines and the web. It should be obsessed with informing the public about everything going on in their financial center, good and bad.
There should be another newsroom that covers every major city. Another to cover Washington, or parts of it. Maybe one should just cover Capitol Hill, and another should just cover the White House. Maybe one should cover your state house or your city hall.
Or maybe one should cover your whole city, or just your neighborhood.
In some ways, this looks a bit like an old-fashioned wire-service model. One news-gathering force that supplies its output to many different news outlets. That AP reporter in Moscow would write a story that showed up on the front page of many newspapers across America the next day.
These news companies don’t even have to own their own outlets. They could create their news for partners in each media form: newspapers, phone companies, broadcasters. Each will pay for their news.
If we are going to create models to support news operations in the future, this is the way we will have to do it. Let’s rebuild an industry around its audience.
Larry Kramer is senior adviser at Polaris Venture Partners, a venture-capital firm. He served as the first president of CBS Digital Media and previously was chairman, CEO, and founder of MarketWatch.
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Larry Kramer is senior adviser at Polaris Venture Partners, a venture-capital firm. He served as the first president of CBS Digital Media. Prior to joining CBS, Kramer was chairman, CEO, and founder of MarketWatch Inc. Kramer spent more than 20 years as a reporter and editor at the San Francisco Examiner, the Washington Post, and the Times of Trenton.
Hey Larry, send some venture funding towards an local online news network in the top markets, put some smart people in charge of it and I'll write the software for it.
As long as I pay $50 -$75 a month to ISPs for internet access I will have little or no money for content. Someday internet access, like broadcast TV, will have to be deemed a right and be provided to everyone free (are you listening Google?). Then there will be some money to pay the content providers. The current system has all the money going to the middleman at a time when middlemen are dying in almost every other industry. Free WiFi Now!
Yes, there is a future for the news and journalism beyond the paper. Yet, framing the problem in that limited way lessens the impact of the larger issue... the fracturing of the news. While the advent of cable and the internet brought those interested in the news more of it all of the time, the growth of these sources also provided specialized outlets to find the news that you want with the twist that you want. Specialized news, tailored news, left leaning, right leaning, conspiracy theory, comedy leaden news. Its all there. And with it goes the unifying reporting that all read/see/hear. With it goes local reporting. With it goes the reports that tell us something "new".
Yes, there are times that I like my news to make me laugh or agree with my world view... there are other times that I want the news to educate me so I can form my own opinions. I mourn for the loss of the papers. I worry that without the papers we are all left less connected while we are "plugged in".
Alas poor me. Soon I will not be able to get my papers go to Starbucks and enjoy the news and crossword puzzles at my leisure Reading editorials and doing puzzles on the computer is down right repulsive. I guess the next catastrophe will be the closing of Starbucks
There is nothing that says the emerging news world will have a standalone business model. At very least an industry with billions of dollars in revenue and tens of thousands of jobs may become a billion dollar industry with thousands of jobs.
In fact news has not been a standalone business for many years - it's a loss-leader supported by entertainment stories and classified ads, both of which have become their own standalone businesses with the rise of the internet.
If you look at most of the content available on line, most of it comes from newspapers who give it away. Perhaps when they all go out of business, the online sites will start paying for news content. The problem isn't so much the model it is that the dollars available for advertising didn't increase (and probably has decreased in the recession) and the number of ads expanded incredibly. Its the reverse of the "you can't fit ten pounds of shit in a five pound bag rule".
The new electronic media is able to give advertisers such targeted data that it will hard for newspapers to compete head to head. The days when my old boss at an ad agency could tell a client who complained the ad budget was too high, "yes sir, I'm sure that half your ad budget doesn't work. I'm just not sure which half." Everybody used to laugh and go have a few drinks. Today, we want to know where the leads live, how long they looked at the ad, conversion rations, etc. It is going to be tough to beat that. The author is right. They need to be a part of something new, not cling to the old. Will they, probably not. The creative Mass Communications majors went in the advertising, not journalism,
I will reluctantly adapt and read the news online, but one of life's simple pleasures is pencil on newsprint while doing a crossword puzzle..I can't tell you how sad it will be for me to have to give up this daily ritual.
This comment has been removed by The Daily Beast's editors.
Larry, give me a billion dollars and I'll set you up. HQ in Denver? I hear they have some space available... There are plenty of talented reporters and photogs ready, willing and able. You handle the ad sales side ok? After you sell a billion dollars of ads it is easy money!
The largest local in my area has the most barebone web site, I imagine in hopes people would continue to subscribe to paper. Their site is the equivalent of reality tv, full of lots of enthusiasitic comments about the local sports team and blogs from local citizens and organizations with a smattering of headlines. Very, very few of the actual articles they print.
Why in the world did they cling to paper instead of making the transition? I would have happily continued my subscription online if the content were the same. The amount of newsprint that collected in my recycling bin was guilt provoking, I couldn't justify it in this day and age.
Isn't this conversation getting old? Haven't we had enough of the philosophy? Where are the prescriptions and activations. We spend too much time talking and not enough time acting. Check out the Mumbai Mirror. Look what they're doing.
Check out this 'paper', the Daily Beast. Guess what? The it will one day be 'printed'....formatted in a way that looks and feels like a magazine.
You know it's a bit ironic that my comment follows "category5" since I'm going to remind folks of an important role newspapers play in times of disaster... No power, no cable service, no Internet. Look at the countless times in the wake of hurricanes that newspapers have served as the only means of keeping people informed about where to get basic services like food and water... Talk to all the people in Kentucky who went weeks without power recently following punishing ice storms. Think they were surfing the net to get their vital information?
Newspapers have been and should always be about public service first... God forbid that print dies out completely and we suffer some major disaster or attack that takes out the power grid. Can you imagine how quickly anarchy and mass hysteria would ensue?
There are no easy answers in this cyclical versus secular debate about the future for many newspapers, but I would suggest many of the problems are rooted in the corporate ownership structure and mandates for margins that simply can't be achieved in these tough times. It's much easier for local or family-owned papers to weather a period of single digit margins than it is for bloated corporate fat cats to try and explain that to Wall Street.
I'm not implying that any business model can sustain losses on an ongoing basis, but supporting CEO salaries of $1 million or more annually is a bit like throwing an anchor to a drowning man.
Ah, opinion, You have to love it. Of course papers would love to ditch their print models and move online. But the online model doesn't work for journalism as long as everyone wants it for free. The ISPs take the fees that should go to content, as Google takes the rest. Keep in mind, online is like a phone call - a person connecting to another person (or site). They don;t want an ad in the way, which is why display ads do so poorly online. People have to be willing to pay and they aren't yet. Reading this column is like every other bloated writer that writes "just DO it." Show us how The Daily Beast is making money. Show us how Facebook us making money. I am certain The Daily Beast will not make it. Search this site for an ad or sponsor (other than Barry) and it's slim pickings. You have the forum, but as usual, not all the solutions. So I say to you - let's hear your ideas before your criticism.
But so few pundits are idea people.
I am glad you joined the debate, Larry. But you leave out the crux of the issue. Most people do not get their news from the internet. That is the platform they use. They are still getting it from newspapers. Newspapers make 10 percent or less of their revenue on digital. That is falling, not rising. The idea of selling banner ads around free content is a death sentence. All the places you mentioned - HuffPost, Daily Beast, etc., are not making money. The do not have money for staff. They simply riff off of the news put out by newspapers. Until newspapers all fall silent, there will be no one paying to produce content or to see content, with perhaps a few boutique exceptions (tied, not surprisingly, to making money - F.T., Wall Street Journal). But you logic is fantasyland.
delfmast
editorialstaff net notes: Like 5000 lawyers, chained together in the bottom of the Marianas Trench, the idea of there being less surviving newspapers in America may well seem a "good start" to US news customers tired to death of biased reporting, and comment sections censored, or eliminated by the 97% liberal US Main Stream Media. Of course, the liberal rags shuttering their doors have never been main stream, and are no longer rightly the media, as US news customers have abandoned them entirely, reading Murdoch's Market Watch, WSJ, and other English language news sources, via www.aldaily.com, where fair and balanced journalism, with an eye to the tenets of journalism, (left outside the editorial office doors in the US MSM) provides unbiased news, printing reasoned commentary, by gentle men and women, on both sides of any issue, without censoring any comment by any remotely conservative writer, as practiced in NYT, WP, etc. After canceling my Economist subscription, when the editors interfered in a US election, against GW Bush, and finding www.artsandlettersdaily.com before it took over the world's news aggregation process, and shortened it's url, I have refused to renew all my printed magazines, newspapers, and such, to save the trees, and to help eliminate as many US media jobs as possible, since a 97% liberal press carrying water for the disloyal liberal majority, in it's drive to force Americans down the death spiral of socialism that has destroyed UK, old Europe, and every other feckless government that has tried it, is treason, against the last bastion of "liberty for all", as well as poor journalism, and is inexcusable.
The day news media outlets charge for news via the internet will be the day I become ill informed!
I enjoy reading what news I want and skipping that I don't want, and all FREE OF CHARGE.
They have advertisers who are willing to pay to get their product out for sale, let that be their sole income.
We already pay for internet access via dial-up, or DSL, thats more than enough.
As Dave Krieger, sports columnist for the Rocky said, it's unfathomable how a daily publication with a paid circulation of over 210,000 cannot find a business model that "works." As a Colorado native, I think the JOA is what killed both papers-the Denver Post is a piece of crap journalistically, $130 million in debt, also at death's door. Both papers have suffered in quality since the JOA came into being nearly 9 years ago-The websites of both papers had the identical 7th grade level layout-and their web presence appeared to be an afterthought.
The problem that big media companies have trouble wrapping their collective heads around is that the web has such low barriers to entry. Previously, it took real capital to be in the news business. Now the Daily Beasts and Huffpo's of the world can start up with relatively few expenses. Hell, they don't even have to pay their contributors. How do you compete with that? While print publications are burdened with debt and huge overhead, the online publications are getting by.
Thank you.
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