Tag Archives: newspapers

Beyond the parasitic news model (and why Kindle won’t save us either)

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So it’s 2009 and the search for a sustainable online newspaper business continues.

Even Google hasn’t quite worked out how traditional newspapers safely navigate past the Rusbridger Cross to emerge as businesses that generates most of their revenue from online operations.

The problem: print commands much higher premiums for advertising then the web does.

In order to compensate for that, web businesses either need to significantly scale up output, or significantly cut back on costs.

Currently one common solution espoused by those immersed in online business is to find someone else to worry about most of the costs for you.

The thinking is thus: the web is already awash with stories produced by other news orgainsations and these can be used as a free resource.

With a bit of repurposing and organising by a small team of copy editors, stories can be presented as an entirely new, high-volume, comprehensive news service.

It’s a smart model – one that could also disrupt the many news aggregation subscription services that exist.

You could also argue that, by combining stories from many sources, better organising them or by integrating social media, these news businesses are occupying a space that could/should have been filled by newspapers a long time ago.

But I still can’t see how their businesses can be sustainable in the long term. By relying on the mainstream media to produce their information in the first place,  they are tying themselves into the very business model they claim to be replacing.

If the mainstream media fails, these new businesses fail with it.

Mainstream media provides a volume of news online that is yet to have an equivalent.

I know it’s not a popular argument to make, but I’m afraid no other online content (as it currently stands) will cut it as a replacement. (If you don’t believe me, ask Eric Schmidt.)

Think about it: how many websites would you have to trawl through a day to find as many celebrity gossip stories as you would get from the combined feeds of The Sun, The Daily Star and The Mirror?

More scarily, how many websites would you have to trawl through a day to find an equivalent volume of quality business news that you get from The Financial Times feed?

An alternative theory is that the news industry needs to learn from the music industry and to replicate  iTunes or create some other form of paid-for model.

I’m not so sure that works either.

I agree that there is much we can learn from the music industry (that lawsuits and protectionist attitudes won’t save you – for example),  but I think there are also very distinct differences.

For example, when consumers download music off the internet for free, they pretty much know they are doing it illegally. The large record companies are not putting out their content for free on their own websites and there is no official Google Music.

We also do not have a market where consumers understand they have to invest in electronic devices for the purpose of accessing print content. This, in my opinion, is why the Amazon Kindle is unlikely to be the answer to the newspaper industry’s woes.

Perhaps a more fruitful investigation would be into developing paid-for products and services that reuse content or closely ally to the media brand.

The market and the internet don’t care if you make money

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I think, from feedback I have received beyond this blog, that there is some confusion with regards to the importance I attach to journalism.

I want to clear this up now. I think a free press is massively important as a tool to help preserve democracy and to keep people informed about issues that they feel are relevant to their lives. My concern is finding ways to fund journalists in the future.

The thing is the act of journalism and the business that sustains it are two different things.

The business aspect has occupied my thoughts because I may care about journalism, but that doesn’t mean the market does. It is this point that has been put across very eloquently by Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0:

The web is the most disruptive force in the history of media, by many orders of magnitude, destroying every assumption on which traditional media businesses are based.

But the market should care, you say. What would happen if we didn’t have the newspapers playing their Fourth Estate watch dog role?

Here’s the bitter truth — the feared loss of civic value is not the basis for a BUSINESS.

The problem with the newspaper industry, as with the music industry before it, is the sense of ENTITLEMENT. What we do is valuable. Therefore we have the right to make money.

Nobody has the right to a business model.

Ask not what the market can do for you, but what you can do for the market.

This is the best analysis and assessment of the disruptive nature of digital that I have seen yet.

Newspaper brands – “crucial as records of facts”?

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I just wanted to quickly and shamelessly point out again that a rather fantastic debate has broken out underneath my post about how most news doesn’t need journalism.

It has prompted a very considered and interesting comment from Steve Dyson – editor of the Birmingham Mail and the Sunday Mercury.

An extract:

Local newspaper brands have great reputations for reporting trusted facts. Let’s not dilute this too quickly without knowing what we’re diluting it with. Yes, add interaction, online and in print, but let’s clearly label what is what.

There is more, including comments disagreeing with his stance.

Brand identifiers – or what’s important about how you get your news?

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On my last post a mini-debate has broken out about whether our exisiting news organisations really need journalists to investigate stories.

A debate also broke out on Twitter between myself and Bobbie “I probably have one of the coolest jobs in the world and get to live in San Fransciso” Johnson of The Guardian.

He was arguing that having investigative journalism was, in a way, a form of marketing for a news brand – a way to identify the product as being better than its competition.

An interesting point that got me thinking.

Russell Brand & Jonanathan Ross, the US elections, the Congo, Gordon Brown shaking hands with Al Qaida suspects – all of these are news stories and all of them have been covered by the UK’s media outlets in one form or another over the last week.

So, what are the things that make you choose to get your news from one organisation rather than another? I tried to make a list: Continue reading →

Journalists don’t know their own business

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“The most surprising thing about journalists is how little they know about the businesses or industry in which they work,” said an NUJ staff member who happened to be sitting opposite me at lunch.

It made me want to scream.

I prompted the comment by admitting I wasn’t au fait with all of Trinity Mirror’s digital acquisitions in the last three years.

I am all too painfully aware of my ignorance in this area and it is something I’m working hard to change.

A lack of business knowledge is, I think, one of the greatest threats to local and regional journalists, especially in this tough economic climate.

After all, if we don’t understand how our market is created, nor how we best make money out of it, then I would argue we know little about serving it properly

Despite having been told in the past that my arts and journalistic background may offer me a “creative” or “unusual” take on the fortunes of the industry, I don’t really buy it. You don’t understand anything unless you understand how the money works.

Continue reading →

How exactly are blogs adding to speculation in newspapers?

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Whilst pondering the email from the Telegraph employee that was published this week by Roy Greenslade (give me another day and I might have a respond to it!), a few questions came up.

I haven’t built on them, but I thought I’d list them here to get them temporarily out of the way whilst the other blog post is percolating in my head.

At any newspaper I’ve ever had experience at, one of the daily chores is to read through all the other newspapers published that day to check for good stories to follow up on. If you are a regional paper this means looking out for stories in your region and if you are on a national it’s looking for good follow-ups broken by the regionals.

If someone finds a good story they’ll put in a few calls and see if they can confirm or develop it for their publication the next day.

Isn’t this the aggregation we talk about – putting the best of what’s out there onto our own site? How does this differ from scouring blogs for stories? Is it because they are not consider “official” publications and, therefore, more likely to contain false leads or misinformation? If so how are the skewed stories that turn up in the national red-tops better than the skewed stories on a blog?

Also if we fear the media is going to turn into simple speculation and opinion, how do we justify the speculation and opinion that already exists in newspapers? Is it at a satisfactory level now, whereas the inclusion of a few extra blogs on a website might tumble it over the edge? How do we justify the stories that come out of the football transfer season, or the swathes of business and stock market speculation that seem to be produced at the weekend when the markets are closed?

Also, if newspapers are using blogs to try and host some of the conversation about their stories on their site, why is that affecting the original content? Is it the time factor it takes to write a blog? Does it really detract that much time from the act of story-writing?

Sorry, lots of questions, not many answers. That seems to be how things are at the moment.

Big changes for The Birmingham Post – reaction round-up

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We’re just come back from a big announcement about the future of Trinity Mirror Midlands, part of that was a major announcement about the future of The Birmingham Post.

I think I want some of the dust to settle before blogging my own thought (and don’t want to gazump my Editor!), but I thought I’d provide a bundle of links to other people talking about what is happening.

I will post my thoughts a bit later, so if you want to leave some questions in the comments, I’ll try and answer them. Suffice to say there are some very interesting times ahead.

A “dangerous question”: Why don’t reporters write headlines?

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It’s the question I asked on Twitter yesterday.

Some people found it a perfectly comfortable question to debate, others seemed to find it irritating.

If I am being naive then I would dearly love someone to fill me in.

So far, my thinking is that reporters do not write headlines because of the nature of print production i.e. because they are not the ones that lay the story out on a page and therefore do not know what space they have/what other articles are on there.

It surely can’t be because reporters are not expected to grasp spelling, punctuation and grammar?!

The public responses to my question (or the ones that I could find on Twitter Search) are copied and pasted below in reverse chronological order. (Wouldn’t it be lovely to have an app that collated responses to you on Twitter over a specified period of time.)

What every regional journalist needs to hear about their industry…

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In this Seesmic post Kevin Anderson, Blog Editor for The Guardian and co-author of Strange Attractor, pretty much covers many of the things I’ve wanted to say, but better:

Kevin Anderson on Seesmic

Kevin Anderson on Seesmic

He is answering a question posed by Birmingham City University’s Paul Bradshaw – with recent job freezes/cuts at UK newspapers, is there any point in universities running journalism degrees training students for the newspaper and broadcasting industries?