Sometimes it is obvious where the world is headed, but some people and industries become frozen in place and time. They are like the duckbilled dinosaurs happily munching on the still-abundant plants around them when the meteor strikes instead of the small furry mammals underfoot who take cover every day by natural habit. In the print newspaper industry, it’s the same story. Everyone wants to wall off the Web and keep grazing on declining ad revenues.
A week ago, I wrote a post based on a conversation I had with Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor Marc Andreessen in which he made the case that print media companies would be better off shutting down their print operations now (“Burn the boats”) and move forward unencumbered into the digital age, no matter how painful that may be. That suggestion hit a deep nerve, and continues to do so.
Just yesterday, Allan Mutter, who writes the blog Reflections of a Newsosaur, took exception to Andreessen’s advice. By his estimate, in 2009:
Print-driven newspaper revenues still are running at better than $30 billion a year. It doesn’t take a certifiable Silicon Valley genius to see that no business can walk away from some 90% of its revenue base without imploding.
Mutter’s indignation is typical of the response to the article, even among enlightened newsosaurs. But that is exactly what Andreessen is saying. As I noted in my original post, he is quite aware that “at risk is 80% of revenues and headcount” (or 90%, if you take Mutter’s numbers).
Yes, the Internet media business is much less lucrative than the print side, and may never replace it in terms of the revenues it generates. But Andreessen’s point is that the meteor is on its way and the sooner that media companies start looking for cover, the more likely they are to survive.
He is not trying to be an alarmist. He’s just a realist. In the technology industry, similar disruptions happen all the time. The companies that survive are the ones that adapt and jump onto the next wave of technology before the one they are on finishes cresting. So the real question is one of timing. How long will it take that $30 billion print business to go to $20 billion, $10 billion, or zero? No doubt, it will take years, probably decades. But how long do print media companies wait before they leave their old business behind?
The people who read print newspapers and magazines are getting older and older, while advertisers always chase the young and impressionable. That audience is already on the Web. And they are no longer satisfied with getting all of their news from one or two trusted sources. They get their news from all over the place: newspaper sites, TV news sites, blogs, Twitter, Facebook. More and more, the news is coming to them through their friends and the various streams they consume. The old days of cross-subsidizing political news with ads from the Travel and Auto sections are over.
The longer media companies wait, the bigger disadvantage they will have when they cross over to the other side and find a whole new host of competitors who never had any print legacy businesses to protect. Those competitors right now are blogs and online news hubs who are still furry little rodents in the underbrush, but who won’t stay little forever. The sooner print media companies cross over, the sooner they can be on pure offense. Their online strategies and business models won’t be crippled by any allegiance, or need to protect, to the old print business. If they wait until their online revenues become 25 or 50 percent before they fully commit, it will be too late.
But that is probably what will happen. Media companies are still surrounded by $30 billion worth of leaves that look mighty good.
Photo of duckbilled dinosaur fossil by Ed Schipul .
Great post, and so very true. Adapt or die.
I can’t understand why everyone fails to take the next step though. Apart from pure opinion/rant blogs, all the blogs and online news sites that the post refers to as the “furry rodents” get their news from actual reporters who work for print publications. Then they post 2-4 paragraphs in (sometimes) their own words.
Once the true journalism hubs die out, these blogs will have to start paying reporters, sending people overseas to get stories and fighting to survive just like the “old model” news centers are doing now.
Exactly.
“News”, my friends, does not fall from the sky. It is not harvested from a million twitterers tweeting. It is not free for the taking. It is created, curated by competent trained people who like to eat more or less 3 times a day.
So, te question really is, if not the print media — and, I agree it may not make sense for them to do so in the very long run — then who is going to make sure those journalists get fed, their sources vetted, their copy edited?
Why do people think it takes a PHD in Journalism to pick up a phone and call a source or go to a town hall meeting?
Access and interviews go to those with readership. Quality bloggers are being vetted by their editorial skills now, but in the future all they’ll need to do is pick up a phone to fill that gap.
News comes to those who are following their beat. TechCrunch is a great example. They get scoops because the companies they follow are going to them first. That’s real reporting. Guess what? It’s online too.
Sorry, Tech Crunch is real reporting?
What I’m seeing is diary jobs, rewritten press releases, follow-ups on other people’s stories, and commentary on the above.
Strawman. No one said it takes PhD. It takes paying people. I’m here commenting so obviously I like TC, too, but the point was that most general news (not just info on the latest start-ups) comes from old line news organizations that still rely on selling subscriptions.
Do you have any examples for a general purpose news source like the NYTimes or Washington Post that’s either user gen, or DIY?
If online news is worth far less than print news, wouldn’t the wiser companies just get out of the paper news business altogether. Its not about burning the boats, its about reducing workforce to just a blog/website. ITS Not about print to Online. ITS about print to TV to Online. There is far more value in TV news than print.
Print will just die but the news will morph. Local Print will stay alive because a lot of people still like to read the local newspaper, but national news and large cities will get a smaller workforce.
Point taken, Scott, but you’re ignoring the big picture. Obvious example: sending a reporter overseas to cover a war is very necessary, and costs a heck of a lot of money.
When comparing online news to print news, I prefer to look at websites as sections. If you look at it that way, NYTimes.com et. al. are aggregators in their own way. For example, an online newspaper’s tech & biz section could include TC, front page is another site, I have several politics pages, comic section is xkcd, and classifieds is (of course) Craigslist. That’s a pretty huge workforce, and while it doesn’t have the budget newspapers had (and it may never will), it covers everything I need on a budget thanks to ingenuity.
In fact, I see more creative ways to cover their respective beats than I’ve seen in print in decades. Plus, we’re getting statistics and visual graphs to decrypt hard data easily, polling doesn’t require a phone call at dinner, data is flying around everywhere behind the scenes, quotes can be culled from Twitter. It’s a journalist’s playground online.
Funny, twitter and FaceBook today are becoming the source of news may it be authenticated or not.
Love live journalism that is…
No one wants to kill professional journalism, or what’s left of it these days. In fact one can claim that the bigger threat to journalism is the commercialization and greediness of the incumbent media industry. The $30bn challenge is to come up with a model that enables good pro journalism without the assumption of walled gardens and reader lock-in that are no longer sustainable on the Internet.
truly said,..bt wat if reporter=social media commoners?
Re: “all the blogs and online news sites that the post refers to as the “furry rodents” get their news from actual reporters who work for print publications.”
Complete bullshit. Seeing is we’re reading techcrunch, let’s take that as an example. Are you really saying that all the techcrunch stories on e.g 12 March were taken from print publications? Looks closer to *none* of them were.
Also everyone knows that print publications publish yesterday’s news. That’s how printing works. So you’re saying that all blogs and online news sites are also commenting on yesterday’s news. That beggars belief. Never heard of news on Twitter, or television for that matter?
Not true. CNN already has the model. The cell phone and consumer reporter. The I-Witness Report. These days, the traditional Media is too slow, even the electronic Media. True Real time news are the blogs that blog Cell Phone video. When News breaks these days, even the traditional news-media and especially CNN and Atlantic Magazine through their Atlantic Wire and now PBS through their Radio and Video Podcasts, broadcasts live blogs and live videos. Iran was almost toppled by Internet News and blogs. Iran cut the ‘Net and blogs, especially VBlogs. The same thing is now happening this week, in Thailand, because one of the protaganists, Thaksin, happens to be a Cell Phone Carrier magnate that understands the power of the video blog and Cell Phone consumer reporting, too. We’ll see if Thaksin prevails. This is Rodney King on an International Scale!!!
Legacy print = cash cow. If legacy media co’s “Burn the boats”, then they’d be forced to find $ for their new media products elsewhere, for likely much less-favorable terms (i.e. from venture capital).
Burning the boats makes about as much sense as burning an annuity. Andreesen & newsasaurs understand that print is dying, but only the newsasaurs understand the the present value of free cash flows – yes, even the present value of a DECLINING stream of cash flows.
What Marc Andreeson and the Tech community are missing, is that what’s at stake is not Technology, convenience or even economics, it is pure Socio-political control. The newspapers can’t let go, because right now, they can control the content and therefore the political forum. The Internet, by definition puts the control into the hands of the people that share the information. sharing is the key. Once it is shared it can’t be controlled. The fight over digital rights is neither economic or technological. it is political and therefore social. Once MP3′s and DVD Copy protection is eliminated, the genie is out of the bottle. The political control is lost and with it the control of the content and how much money it makes. Obama’s health reform is a typical example. He controls the votes, the goals, the money in the government etc., but he can’t control what is discussed. That is controlled by the Media – newspapers, the newswires – essentially the owners of the Media. That is still controlled by the GOP, directly or indirectly – even if it is done by manipulating the Tea Party movement. Obama doesn’t control the agenda that is discussed in the public forum, or at least the part of the forum that needs to be reformed. With all respects to Marc, Netscape is a typical example. He succeeded, not because Netscape and Mozilla, which is its successor, wasn’t technologically up-to-speed or not liked by the IT community, but because Microsoft controlled the Forum. Once he attacked the source, Microsoft, he started to prevail. I said started to prevail, because he didn’t succeed just by fighting Microsoft head-on. He had help. Linux became public domain and the end-user pushed their clout and their preference. Obama cannot win until he has the control ceded to him by the end-user, the Patients. The newspapers won’t stop trying to print, until the readers stop reading the printed press or at least its different iterations that will spring up to retain control of the agenda; to control the forum and therefore the social forces. That is what is at stake.!!
I think the newsosaurus is related to the record industrisaurus that didn’t see Meteor Mp3 coming until it was almost too late.
It’s a pity news media typically make the journalist the victim. It’s however not journalism that’s the problem. It’s the medium used that’s becoming outdated. If journalists adapt and prepare, they will survive when the newsosauruses vanish.
Journalists are not the victim – the reader is. And online news is not the suspect – it’s 24 hour news tv. Traditional news journalism just plain sucks these days because it lacks substance, vision, and value.
I don’t think newspapers need to unplug the presses. But they do need to unplug the print mentality: headlines should be cute and clever (no, headlines should help out SEO), a feed works fine for social media (people work a whole lot better), we’ll trick out the pages to force readers to click again to finish the story (driving them off in the process), put only summaries in RSS feeds so we’ll force folks to the site (I’m not going to click through, but if you give me the whole article you’ll engage me and I might), count on going viral to meet the pageview goals and call that “building readership” (building a community works better.)
Can all of that happen while still printing a product every day? Sure it can, but it takes some retraining. In some instances, it will take “leadership” changes. I worked for an editor once who referred to the paper’s Web site as its “online supplement.” How it can be a supplement when it’s offering more information and offering it faster is beyond me.
If the “retraining” doesn’t work, it takes fiat. Do not accept “I work on the print side” as an answer. No, you work for the organization, an organization that’s likely to be solely online before you retire. Are you interested in saving your job? Then you best climb on board.
I agree with your general thesis, “I don’t think newspapers need to unplug the presses. But they do need to unplug the print mentality” Not so sure if SEO matters to a printed document…
There is huge value in print. Its easier to read. What has to change the actual content. Part of the reason people move away from printed news is because its regurgitation of online and TV news. The role of the morning paper is no longer to break the story to the public. Rather than rushing to the press with crap, they should massage the stories and cover content that has meaning over time rather than the blurbs TV and the internet throw out at us.
They should also use the print version to drive online traffic to their own site and vice versa.
In the internet age there is no need for cable news site, network news sites… corporate news should build their own portals and limit (free) online access to their own site. In publishing the story they should also craft an official blurb that other sites can publish but must link to the main story.
…There is a lot to learn from the music industry. What it does right. And what it does wrong.
I agree. Print news needs to adapt or die. But its not about burning boats and syndication.
I totally agree. The whole point is to control the forum, not the content. The newsmedia will be happy to continue controlling the forum, even if print dies. The only problem is that not all the current population is tech savvy, so print will not die completely. Print should be used to attract people to the website. It should be the “coming attractions”. To make people want to pay to read the website, it needs to be in-depth – not just news reporting, but deep discussion, as news was originally.
CNN has already figure it out, CNN Headline News is not news anymore. The Internet News Aggregators, like Newsdotcom, and News Gatherers, like Reuters and Bloomberg took care of those. Fox is “Entertainment”, it is not real news but opinion shaping. Boring after a while – only 2 points of view. Conservative and Liberal. The American Newsmedia has to be more like the BBC, in depth but still vibrant and uptodate and changing. What then do you do with the PBS, who now delivers it for free???
It is time for Newsmedia to reconsider how to sell the news. But not by printed news, but how to drive the content to their paid sites. It is time to rethink those set-top boxes that they tried to use before the PC became mainstream. Microsoft had it right, but too early. Give away free X-Box Live Connections to the non-tech savvy. Then Sony can use the extra 500 Gig Drives they are putting in Asian Bravo TV sets, but not in the US. Use the Nintendo WII Controller interfaces to drive content to paid News websites by the non-tech savvy, like paid cable TV. Then people will see the need for Obama’s new plans for High Speed Fiber Optic Networks. Then we can really have New Jobs; not jobs in Hyderabad, India like what Facebook is proposing!!.
You nearly hit it, and I can’t understand why the argument of print vs. digital continues to persist.
It all starts with the content. What is a newspaper without content. What is a TV station without content. What is a Web site like this without content.
Now, that said, newspapers for too long have missed the boat that started on the internet with message boards and interest groups on Prodigy — targeting niche markets and bringing them premium content. For too long, newspapers have tried to be all things to all people — even those who for decades have preached the hyperlocal news model.
Really, in 2010, the print vs. digital argument should be about which platform (product) is best able to present that content, and needs to be broadened to include any means that a media business can delivery information to its audience.
Me, I drink coffee from a travel mug. My wife drinks coffee from a cup. Some use paper cups. It’s all packaging. What matters is what is inside.
Do too a newspaper, radio station, TV station or Web site.
That said, some packages are better used for presenting coffee than others. A travel mug will keep my coffee warmer, and can carry more, but I need to spend time washing it and can’t just toss it in the trash.
So too in the media business. Print has some inherent benefits over digital platforms.
And back to content really quick. Some coffee is better than others. So you could offer any new whiz-bang, faddy way to get your coffee in the belly of your customers. But if it isn’t any good, they are down the street at the other place.
So in order to burn the boats, are at least keep fewer of them in the fleet, media companies gather and create better content and deliver that to an audience in a platform they want.
So how do you do that? Figure out how to produce your legacy product in a more efficient manner while devoting more resources to developing new digital products and filling them with premium, quality content that will diversify a your revenue streams until you can burn the boats, or at least a few of them.
Coffee is coffee, not matter how you package it. You got to get people to want to pay more for it. Starbucks is now floundering because people don’t want to pay for just better tasting coffee. But they are willing to pay for the alcohol etc. that might go with the coffee e.g. in Irish Cream. The content has to change, because otherwise it is generic. Generic coffee is 10 cents at the corner stop-and-go. But stop-and-go doesn’t have an alcohol license (yet). So the packaging, whether it says Starbucks or Stop-N-Go doesn’t matter. The forum does; if its a cappuccino at a 5-Star Restaurant or hotel, it still commands $5 – $10 bucks. You have to control and change the ambiance!!!. The forum!!!
I’m dealing with many Newsosaurs first hand as they continue to do their due diligence on my startup, Embed Article (www.EmbedArticle.com).
Large companies almost always move slower than smaller ones for a number of reasons, and that’s a difficult position to be in. You’re absolutely correct in the fact that those who continue to wait to make a bigger and more meaningful digital transition, with innovation and resources, may pay for it dearly down the road.
The problem is more like a metastasizing cancer than a meteor…
Looking at some of the public newspaper companies, it’s clear that a midsize newspaper can make $30 million profit per year.
How many year will it take TechCrunch, one of the most successful online only operations to clear $30 million?
You’re missing the point. It’s not a matter of comparing what a newspaper makes today or even in 5 years versus what an online news site makes. The point is whether the newspapers will even be able to exist at all.
The idea of printing news on physical papers with dirty print and then workers delivering them all of the city or country in trucks so someone can pick it up and read it for an hour an then throw it away is so archaic and absurd. The fact that traditional newspapers haven’t figured that out yet is the point of the article.
not so absurd for the printers, delivery drivers, and garbage disposal crews.
Buying coffee beans, grinding and brewing – or growing your own food is also archaic. That doesn’t mean they do not have value or benefits or, most importantly, quality.
When they figure out a way to digitize coffee beans, that TOO will become archaic and absurd…
@Tornadoes28 – It’s not that we (newspapers) haven’t figured it out yet. We read TC and live in the real world just like you do. The point is that newspapers still make good average revenues per user, where online simply doesn’t at the moment.
Print newspapers can support something like one full-time member of staff per 250 readers and still remain profitable. Online the ratio is more like one staffer to 100,000 users.
Taking an average regional newspaper, that means we could employ approx 0.5 members of staff. So we could have one part-time journalist who also posts stuff to the web (and hopes he doesn’t need the tech support guy who no longer works there).
What would you get — one, maybe two stories a day? That’s a far cry from the service people are used to from a staff of 200+.
Ideas, of course, are welcomed. But the answer aint easy.
Thank you for breaking it down like this!
There will still be a need for editors and people to launch the advertising and the come ons of the FREE printed media to the digital on-line content, which has to have different premium content. The rest will have to learn to be on the digital side completely.
We need to change the perspective. the paid Printed Media is dying. The Free Internet Media is dying. It will become the FREE PRINTED Media and the PAID Internet content. But for the digital content to be worth paying for, it has to be PREMIUM, and it won’t be premium NEWS content, because that is already generic or public domain. it has to be a PREMIUM FORUM. Nobody owns the News, it is generic. People own the Reporting – that is intellectual property. In whatever form or forum it is presented.
Eric,
This is a great article- last week the day I read “Burn the Boats” I took the train home after work that evening.
I immediately pulled out my phone and launched the web so I could start reading the sites & news I consume on a daily basis, TechCrunch being one.
As I waited for TC to load on my phone (3G to me isn’t exactly blazing on my BlackBerry Storm but that is another story) I looked around at the people I was sharing the train with.
To a person- everyone that looked to be 40+ was either reading a book, talking on their cell or reading a newspaper/magazine (or sleeping).
The under 40 crowd? just like me- people were on their cells doing, I am assuming, exactly what I was doing: browsing the web, using facebook, whatever. The point is they WEREN’T reading newspapers.
I immediately thought of “Burn the Boats”– there were a whole bunch of kindles (easily 10 in a train car of 40 or 50 people) and only one looked to be in the hands of someone “older”. (He looked like he was 60-ish)
Do I see ever see the under 40 crowd reading print material on the train? Yes I do..although I see magazines and books. I see the free “Red Eye” the Tribune company puts out..but I DO NOT see people under 40 reading newspapers they had to buy.
Your point was an excellent one- how long will it take for $30B in revenues to fall to $20B?
I would say a decade will have a HUGE impact- as the daily commuters age and the 40 somethings turn 50 somethings oand the 50 something turn into retirees, the 20s & 30s year crowd will keep using their digital devices.
One more point: I work for a digital news organization and our editor in chief used to work for a MAJOR print newspaper (One of Conrad Black’s properties) before joining us. She is a journalist and in her late 20s. She told me while at this paper all the old time journalists there called her “The Internet Girl” and talked about the Internet like it was a toy.
I couldn’t believe it..how could journalists of a major metropolitan newspaper call their digital editor “The Internet Girl” and not understand how their business was dying? She told me they were ignorant of the realities of the industry and suspected maybe they DID have a bit of a clue but wanted to pretend it wasn’t happening.
This article and Andreesen’s comments are going, I think, to prove very prescient
There is this generational divide that will keep putting downward pressure on those print ad revenues. The future is already here, it is just not evenly distributed, as the saying goes.
With life expectancy in the 75-80 year range, seems there’s gonna be a lot of folks who never read their news on an iphone (whether their eyesight permits or likely not), so the print journals have a lot longer to go before they become extinct.
Come to think of it, there are a lot of credible, successful new businesses that have started specifically to serve the aging boomers. If they see enough opportunity to start something new, how crazy is it to keep a highly profitable enterprise going for another few decades?
Andreesen and Schonfeld can burn their boats and claim the blogs; I’ll take the cash.
The reason is those 20 somethings are not really vested in their community the way 40-50 somethings are. They don’t have kids in school so they could care less about what the local school board is doing. They probably don’t own property, so they don’t give a rat’s ass about how their property taxes are being spent. Middle age folks like me rely on newspapers with good old fashioned paper and ink, because they along with local TV stations are the only agencies that regularly cover that kind of news. It takes time, money, and skill to cover “boring” agency/council/board meetings and weed out an issue that could have a profound effect on living in a particular community. When the Twitterers “grow up” let’s hope newspapers are still around when they search for that information because I guarantee they will and doubt Techcrunch will send a reporter out to cover the meetings.
Twitter is a much more powerful vector for delivering local news – the town would tweet out press releases and I will read them directly. And for people interested in the budget side of politics, like you and I, blogs that present the data in streaming, real-time graphical form (that integrate press releases and official budgets) are far more valuable. The reason is they are catering to someone of our level of interest as opposed to the general population, who would be bored/lost at that level of granularity.
And local television? Really? That subsidised garbage needed to be destroyed decades ago.
Well said Edward.
Your demographic observations are spot on, I have not bought a newspaper in several years.
One reason:
In the last 2 years I have had intimate personal knowledge of 3 news stories featured in the media.
Amazingly, in each case the reporter was utterly uninformed and the articles laughably inaccurate.
These clowns don’t deserve my money.
Hard? Its fun! Its like when you start a job out of college, before you become warped, and your ideas are spit on not because they are bad, but because they think you are to green. Now those ideas are and youth are killing companies and Newspapers just happen to be happening now.
The hard part is that these executives who are holding the company hostage as long as they can to keep paying for the mortgage and Beamer, will stay until they sucked the money/life out of them and get hired by some other company.
Someone needs to create a site that tracks these loser exec’s and lets employees point out all their flaws ( stealing ideas, hiring buddies, flat out stealing, overpaid, whatever, etc….)
That’s basically what Hearst did to the Seattle PI a year ago – shutter the print business and keep 8-10 people around to start an online-only version of the site. It hasn’t worked out well so far. The PI staff have tried to continue their same strategies of newsgathering, except they’re spread so thin that they have no ability to provide in-depth coverage about anything. seattlepi.com is pretty much puff human interest pieces and cute animal pictures now.
One could argue that Hearst hasn’t gone all-in since they still operate the Seattle Times. The folks in the PI organization are moving heaven and earth trying to make it work, though. There’s too much inertia from the way things used to be done, and not enough people who are really savvy about what makes for successful online journalism.
Lessons for any newspaper who is considering burning the boats: Hire people to run the online organization who are experienced in Web-based journalism, and expect the transition to be a lot rockier than you think it will.
Great point. Seattle PI did “burn the boat” however I think it’s too soon to say whether it was a successful move or not. It’s numbers over the next few years will be the most important. I personally think will it prove to be a smart decision.
Some organizations apparently won’t understand that “burn the boat” doesn’t mean you sit in deck chairs while you pour gasoline around you and throw a match.
To reiterate, excellent point. A negative associated with digital news is the downsizing of staff and the truncation of content. It is one thing to be abreast of the latest news but quite another to analyze and apply information in a meaningful way. The digital age is great because of informational access, but content and quality are lacking in many areas. And I believe many in the younger generation spread themselves a little too thin (in terms of substantive information).
In the end, I agree that newspapers and other print media will become extinct, but this doesn’t mean the digital age can’t learn a thing or two from them in this important transitional period. Primarily, the importance of in-depth analysis and maintaining high standards of quality and professionalism.
It is hard to watch, I agree. In particular for me because this story could benefit from the type of journalism that the writers at these “newsosaurs” (print newspapers) employ. Such as telling us how much some of the newspapers are investing in online vs. their printing costs, comparing the “meteoric change” to past changes in the media industry (penny papers to media behemoths, radio to TV,…) or any industry (horses to cars, typewriters to computers,…), and so on.
But alas, stories like this are apparently becoming dinosaurs, too. There was no actual reporting done and hardly any research done for this post. If this is the future of news, I don’t care if it’s in print or my computer screen: it sucks.
Agreed. As much as I like reading this site and others, most of their “articles” are just short opinion rants with few facts to support them.
“As much as I like reading this site and others, most of their “articles” are just short opinion rants with few facts to support them.”
This is the future of news when the print media goes away…
I am curious- as someone who prefers deeper news (and I get your point) – do you pay for a subscription to a daily newspaper?
I would have liked details too (like current subscription levels vs. a decade ago vs. 1990) but the article is dead on IMO
Not at the moment, as I don't want to sit in front of the computer reading page after page. But once applications like ipads become more common I can easily see myself paying for subscriptions to various magazines on that.
This might be a foreign concept to you, but if you follow the links in the post, you’ll find some supporting facts. I’ve been reporting this story for years, and I try not to repeat myself when a link will do.
Here, let me show you how that works. Just from one link you can find out (http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/09/google-hal-varian-news-never-made-money/):
—The cost of printing and distributing print editions, makes up about half the cost, while editorial operations only make up 15 percent.
—About 40% of internet users say read news on the Web every day.
—Overall, less than 5 percent of newspaper ad revenues come from the online editions.
There are a whole bunch of charts embedded at the bottom of that post showing the downward trend of newspaper circulation, ad revenues, and consumption as well.
What’s a link? My newspaper article doesn’t have them. Well, I assume that since it’s the *New York Times* that I can rely on the total honesty and goodness of their reporters and totally unbiased management to report all the news that’s fit to print by golly. Well, *they* never saw fit to actually provide accessible documentation and actual facts to support their totally unbiased and unslanted reporting! It’s all a matter of trust.
Sarcasm aside, it’s unfortunate that Steve Jobs chose the NYT online as an exemplar of the iPad online capabilities. Perhaps it’s one phony being naturally drawn to a group of them, while also reinforcing the view that the primary audience of the iPad will be people still reading the NYT (at all), in paper form, because computers are just so difficult to use.
Clown.
Explain what is ‘phony’ about either Jobs or the NYT??
There’s no ‘reinforcement’ of anything, just one business using another as an example of what can be done with technology.
Hm. Interesting to note, however, that at least some of those facts originated at a NEWSPAPER, the Wall Street Journal. Gathering facts from other news sources isn’t reporting–it’s research.
Then in a few years we should able to subscribe to cheap online magazines with a low amount of advertising and good deep articles. I am really looking forward to that.
I agree, most blogs are short on facts, but I think the preeminence of blogs is just a reflection of what the mass of users want, quick and easy news & information. Something fast to digest on the train, while at work, etc..
For more in depth analysis I think there will always be a place for outfits that produce in depth high quality content like the Economist or The New Yorker, both of which I will gladly continue to pay for my subscription for.
The death of crap journalism and print doesn’t mean the death of quality journalism, but it might mean that quality journalism will become a premium product (unless someone works out the micro-payment issue).
I agree that the notion of impending doom commented on in this and the earlier cited article “Burn the boats” are doing their best to ensure there can only be “I told you so’s” when the time comes. And why not? When it seems so plainly obvious which way the tide has turned and is moving like a tsunami towards, it must be frustrating to see the belligerence and disdain with which these hypotheses are treated by the media behemoths.
I would love to see some examples of large companies making the necessary steps to fragment and thereby become more agile and dynamic in smaller pockets. I don’t think that a wholesale digital transition would be possible or practical for a large organisation, as by it’s very nature, this strategy requires the agility and reactive prowess of a startup. With their resources, it would be a sight to behold. I wonder if any of them have the balls to it?
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”
Charles Darwin
Ditto.
I would like to quote from a well known, wise character, Chicken Andreessen-Schonfeld: “The [printed] Sky Is Falling!”
Something that Mr. Andreesen — and Mr. Schoenfeld, who has never run a business or had to make a payroll — fail to point out is that the creation of any business requires capital. So does the creation of content for a media business, real or virtual.
The newspaper industry is awash with executives who woke up one day to find their sun rising in the west and refuse to deal with it. But for those who are not paralyzed by fear, the revenues and (ahem) profits their dying core business is generating provide the capital — and time — they need to figure out a new business model.
Which is good news for journalists and journalism, because it seems there isn’t anyone else out there willing to invest on their (and our) behalf.
Mutter is right.
“Which is good news for journalists and journalism, because it seems there isn’t anyone else out there willing to invest on their (and our) behalf.”
Scratch a “real journalist” and you’ll find a leftist made that way by his leftist humanities professors who then considers it his moral obligation to slant the news to promote his own view of how the world should be.
Much to their chagrin, they’ve entered a world where other people who are not so inclined to slant the entire world to their left-wing views can report, or otherwise be speak, and to be heard, without hiding behind the physical firewall of the huge investment previously needed to create printed newspapers and magazines.
Don’t worry, there’s the NYT online and Slate and other such “serious news” where these people can migrate. Just don’t expect the Dan Rathers of that world to be able to get by with their smug little lies without being called out on it by the rest of the world now. (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killian_documents_controversy)
Are you kidding me? “The creation of any business requires capital”
You are posting a comment to TechCrunch- THE influential technology related site on the Internet which was started by an attorney in his spare bedroom who started a blog.
Ask Michael Arrington how many investors he had or how much capital.
Other than human capital, that number is $0.00
Well…I suppose he DID have to register the URL first.
Shhh! Don’t tell them the meteor is about to hit! A few might actually react and stick around. We want them all out in the field grazing happily when the thing hits the atmosphere.
You would rather have a news industry made up of opinion articles with no facts like this one than actual news agencies that fact check and have editorial departments?
You think there’s no facts behind the basic premise that printed newspapers (and magazines) are on the ropes and soon to be down for the count?
You know it’s true. That’s why it upsets you.
Straw man argument, sir. Nobody said they don’t want quality factual journalism- they’re saying said quality journalism should be published digitally rather than on a dead tree.
The Economist is good journalism. They also have a website that earns both subscription and ad revenue. PC Mag is a leading, quality tech magazine that went 100% digital 2 years ago and discontinued the print edition at a stroke.
Facts? I’m still waiting for the “news”papers to properly report on the Tea Party movement. Let alone understand it.
How will they explain Nov 2, 2010 to their readers?
And where did the OFs who in the main make up the Tea Partiers get their info? Not from the “news”papers.
Or ask yourself why Fox is growing and the rest of the networks shrinking.
Let me give it to you straight: there is no news in “news”papers.
I think a more apt analogy would be.
Net media = furry little critters
Big media = Apatosaurus
Sure the apatosaurus was so large it had no real competition but it was also unable to adapt fast enough to survive because of it’s size.
No, the size mattered because unlike the little furry critters who hid underground or in hollow dead trees, the dinosaurs were out in the open when a global hailstorm of blast-furnace temperature debris literally roasted the dinosaurs. No place on the surface of the earth escaped it because the impact was so powerful that it sent billions of tons of debris out into space which then fell back and burned up. However, it was a short enough thermal event that creatures hidden underground or with some other cover, survived it. To become us.
The Apatosaurus (Brontosaurus) lived during Late Jurassic Period, more than 140 million years ago. The meteor event that you reference occurred 65 million years ago, which marks the boundary between the Cretaceous and Tertiary geological periods.
Apatosaurus died out 75 million years before the meteor event you reference.
oops… sorry about the re-post. For some reason my original retort disappeared then reappeared.
Ok, then something else killed them apparently. Or they evolved into something else…
Not so sure that TechCrunch and Andreessen aren’t the dinosaurs.
What the web is now, is not what it will be tomorrow. Companies like Conde Naste might be preparing for the next meteor. Andreessen seems to be describing the last one.
Wow, very good points indeed. Something to think about.
Jo
http://www.isp-snooping.es.tc
Erick, newspapers have already done what Marc suggested. One example is the Seattle PI, which stopped printing last year but kept publishing to the web. The PI folks struck innovative partnerships with online businesses and aggressively worked local news with a skeleton crew of mostly freelancers. What’s your take on their effort?
One more question, do you think anyone trying to charge for content is a dinosaur, or just journalists who try to charge for content?
Newspapers need to change, and already have to some extent, but some folks seem to hope they will die, even now that some newspapers are increasing earnings. You don’t want to be one of those folks.
They can also read Clayton Christensen’s “The Innovator’s Dilemma” on how the indumbents lose everything when protecting current customers and revenues…
Is a company not capable of doing two things at once? There is no reason for a news source to leave the print businesses until it is no longer profitable. It still doesn’t mean they can’t develop their web strategy and adapt.
Ignoring entire markets is just as much stupidity as not adapting fast enough.
Interesting post.
I’ll take up for the Newsosaurs.
As Schonfeld’s post mentions, political news has always been “cross subsidized” by advertising revenue that flowed into daily newspaper monopolies.
Expensive feet-on-the-street reporters, and their editors, never did pay for themselves. The Newsosaurs know this, and are doing their best to squeeze every bit of life out of the current model, for fear of what’s beyond.
It’s easy to bash them for being slow to embrace change, but let’s credit them for doing their best to hold onto something that’s truly a public good–namely robust community journalism.
I work for a newsosaur’s website. We’re trying our best to succeed online. But when a quick, snarky blog post like this gets 10x the page views of a quality, well-researched article about a social issue in Africa, it’s hard to ever imagine beating you at your game. In fact, to get page views, much of our online coverage is sounding more like Tech Crunch and Huff Post. It works for now. We get lots of traffic from loud mouth opinion pieces. But it’s not a long term strategy for our brand. In the future sources like NPR and BBC may be only places for high quality journalism.
Ok, who are you? Do you have an “advertising” plan to get known or are you “happy” being lost among the multitude of other sites?
You have to beat your own drum if viral doesn’t exist for you !!
Getting known is not our problem. It’s developing a profitable online business that supports good journalism. I totally agree publishers must beat their own drums. Following the pack does not work. A director at a major national newspaper told me something surprising recently: “we don’t try anything new until another newspaper has proved that it works.” Maybe it’s not surprising given where the industry is at.
“In the future sources like NPR and BBC may be only places for high quality journalism.”
More people should pay attention to this view and what it implies.
Too hard to compete out in the new world? Easy. Just go begging to the government – a government that currently loves your left-wing, sneering anti-business, so-called news slanting that epitomizes tax funded BBC and NPR – for even more money and more government funded organizations. After all, when it comes time to launch a smear campaign against, say, Toyota, because nobody in their right mind wants to buy the shit put out by Government Motors, you’ll be there to provide “public opinion” support.
Nice slash Phil. And dead wrong. There is such a thing as quality journalism but it’s clear you can’t recognize it. You should stick with Fox – keep life simple.
It’s “quality” because it’s paid for by extorted tax dollars and pushes left wing agendas that you endorse? Um no, that is not what quality means.
There is no meteor about to hit print media.
We’re probably at least 5-10 years away from a mainstream usable platform for serving digital news content globally.
Until a new (digital) delivery channel is truly ready, burning the boats would be naive at best. Obviously the “dinosaurs” will move to such a channel, if the users wants their content delivered that way, since that’s what their entire dinosaur competition will do.
If the argument is that journalism will loose out in favor of random guys from the street with a loud voice (ie bloggers), then I think the consumers desire for actual quality in news has been underrated.
It’s not presses and newsprint that eat the money, it’s all that labour-intensive newsgathering. Online ad sales don’t come close to covering it. If they ever did, it’d be trebles all round at Murdoch Towers.
Papers don’t print too many more copies than they can sell, and the rest of the press time can be taken up with (profitable) contract printing. In the UK, not many papers even have their own press hall these days.
So if you can’t pay for journalism with ad sales, and no one’s buying into paywalls, what bold new industrial revolution are all you wiseacres proposing?
I’m sure Henry Ford probably should have stopped building cars when the Wright brothers figured out how to fly too eh? That whole “driving” thing ain’t gonna last long. Especially that silly old combustion engine.
Erick,
Why don’t you (the collective TechCrunch “you”) put your money where your (or at least Marc Andreessen’s) mouth is, and start “NewsCrunch”?
Branch out from just Tech and Gadgets, and see if you can make a go of it covering world affairs, sports, politics, etc. Maybe it’s time to open “Crunch” offices in D.C., Baghdad or Kabul.
You guys seem to have the journalism cred, why not go for it? You could be this century’s NYT or CNN.
…or Newser.com, The Daily Beast or Huffington Post. Which already exist
WORD. +1 you know all the peeps who don’t work in newspub have all the answers. See you wiseacres on da other side. Good journalism trumps all your tech. And guess what? The good journos HAVE tech.
The funny thing is that if you want to get an unbiased account of Technology events you still have to depend on Economist or NY Times.
This is just not true. Why destroy a business still making money…?! A sudden change won’t do any good. They know what’s coming, they’re just making a slow transition. Same as the record industry. If one newspaper suddenly stops making newspapers, then the others will just grow their market share from the (plentiful) number of people out there who still buy physical newspapers. The way it simply needs to go is a slow, steady transition, gradually building your web business and moving resources there as that grows.
If you are seriously naive enough to think that the whole industry thinks the internet is going away.. you’re mad. They’re just trying to do it in a way that makes sense for them today, as well as in ten years. Nothing wrong with that.
Meteor or not, it is a matter of who will get your customers (revenue) in the future. You can “sell” them to yourself or let them go to a more astute competitor. Your choice. The former might even get some of your competitors customers, the latter is a going-out-of-business scenario — might as well auction off your assets today and distribute the results to your stockholders.
Erick,
Great post. There are been tension between online and offline since the first news site, I imagine – especially given some of these comments.
One thing lost in the discussion. $30 billion in revenue is great and all, but what if you have $40 billion in expenses?
Print industry: me thinks thou doest protest too much.
Mark
Alright, I should just give up on an institution I’ve used almost daily for the last 45 years. And a 400 year old tradition should burn their presses. Can I wrap-up a fish in your Blog? Can I use your Blog for a download in my puppy’s kennel? I know it’s all about the cash. Should close down Mom, she’s not on-line, about used up and doesn’t bring in the cash she once did. False sentimentality?
Don’t forget the part about reading your paper by the light of whale-oil lamps. Ah, the comforting flicker, the soothing smell of burning whale fat. False sentimentality? I think not.
Sarcasm aside, you should not lump every other “senior” into the same category. There are plenty of people who are 60+ who’ve found that the net, even if only via email, is a truly comforting reconnection with a world they otherwise find it difficult to physically interact with, or with those children or friends who won’t call but will email or Facebook or Skype or ….
You’re already using a website and a computer. Stop whining about the change and use something better than filthy, bacteria-laden, recycled newsprint to wrap your fish with.