I've come to the conclusion that all the experimenting is a waste of time in terms of business models for the moment. The best model to support these publications has probably been around for some time. That is the Washington Post. Because they are financially diversified in companies like Kaplan they have some stability that other publications only wish they had. I feel this is the future of newspapers. In order to provide the type of coverage that we are used to receiving from publications they will have to create other sources of revenue that are not directly connected to the publication itself. Otherwise in order to make money a publication may have to sell their journalism ethics(their soul) in order to make a buck, which we are seeing more and more of.
That statistic about the average reader engaging for only 70 seconds on a newspaper is so frustrating. I fear one of the news industry's biggest problems is that presentation of so many headlines enables scanning behavior. Sure it's convenient for skimmers, but it does little to encourage people to dig deeper into complex stories.
That's our goal with the Carnegie-Knight News21 program, where nearly 100 of the nation's top journalism students are asked to experiment in ways to do in-depth journalism in innovative ways. The fellows are then expected to explain how they tackled their project and why, plus provide code to anyone who might want to take the concept to a new level or in a different direction.
One of the industry's biggest challenges with regard to experimentation is figuring out ways to share lessons learned, so we can move forward and engage readers in new ways. Collaboration is key. An universities have a lot to offer by tasking next-gen journalists with invention.
News21.com is part of the Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education, sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation and the Knight Foundation, and involves 12 of the largest graduate journalism programs in the country.
Very valid points. One can see the problems of paper newspapers in the Internet very easily when we dissect the business a newspaper is in.
Actually, a paper newspaper is not one but three businesses. The first is the readers' market. The reader pays the newspaper for the physical paper to get content he/she wants. The second business is the sales of the readers' attention to advertisers. And the third business of a newspaper is or better was to bring demand and supply together in the form of classifieds.
All three businesses are glued together in the past by paper. You needed the reach of the newspaper to get the attention of your target customers. You needed to reach a lot of people via a paper to get the right person for the job opening you had.
Not anymore. Now, we have niche markets with special interest were we can target much better our potential customers. And even worse, the Internet is much better in matching demand and supply in what used to be called classifieds.
The problems of the newspapers is that their business and content model was perfect for the paper age, but the Internet unbundles their business into three rather independent businesses. You do not need a newspaper website to run a market place for used cars. You find more on this subject on http://blog.business-model-innovation.com/2009/09/who-says-paper-is-dead-business-model-innovation-in-the-newspaper-industry/
Sorry, it is the changing economics that harms newspapers not search engines.
The biggest reason for newspapers' decline is very simple: loss of monopoly. For years each newspaper had a built-in monopoly because they were bound by physical location.
It didn't matter that the New York Times or the Washington Post had better news coverage. You couldn't get them. At most your local newspaper subscribed to their news service (not available to the general public) and published a few of their articles.
The technologies of the past decades have changed all that. It started with TV and news radio competing for our news reading time. Now the internet has put the final nail in the coffin. Every newspaper in the country is available to everybody. Suddenly the model went from monopoly (or at most a oligopoly) to a free and open market. The chaos that resulted (the closing of newspapers, the floundering of attempts to provide different revenue streams, etc.) is just the natural result of all that. It looks messy, and the "cause" of this demise is hotly debated today, but decades from now this will become a classic case study of what happens when monopoly is suddenly lost.
Great read. Raises questions about why WSJ is gaining readership. I think it's a great niche product and that's what makes its business model work. What's the parallel for NYT? Washington Post? LA Times? What niche could they each own? -- Mary Kay (Hi Hal---you were my professor at MIT in the 1970s. Ph.D. program)
Publishers + news corporations deal in information, whether it's news or advertising. Their customers are companies trying to sell a product, and the reader who's looking for information.
Google deals in information as well. They provide information on what we're looking for, and we pay for that with information on what we're looking for and where and how long etc. This information is fed back into the information we get from Google. The deal works as a give-and-take-model, based on the feedback from the customers.
The basis for the feedback-model of Google is learning from the customer, and responding to what the customer tells us.
Why not try to learn from the winner? If you connect the idea of the web as a platform for selling content with the idea of the web as the source of content where (new) content is generated, you may add the idea of Google (and others, like internet providers, as well) to offer storage space on their servers for users to store, share, administer and process their data they got from us > outsourcing their hard disc drives > providing a platform where users with an account
- can find and search content in any form (text, audio, video) - buy it for further use like reading, storing, sharing, copying, editing etc.
and where providers/publishers of content in any form
- can offer and sell their product (news, music, film, books) on their own terms.
Taking that idea another step forward, you/we will provide an opportunity for our customers to exchange and interact with each other on our platform > a community > generating new content that will help us target and serve the interests and needs of our customers.
We, the publishers, may yet have to learn how to learn, and listen to our customers. They will tell us what they want, and it's up to us to come up with ideas on how to offer them more than what they are looking for > enrichment of our content > thus getting them hooked and coming back for more ...
What will ultimately get them hooked, I guess, is the chance to define themselves and be present as who they want to be > as Facebook's success tells us. If we can establish ourselves as a platform/community where they can find what they're looking for and where they can find people who listen to them > not least among them us > why should they go elsewhere, and where would that elsewhere be?
The lessons mentioned in the article are easily applicable to any newspapers out there.
Newspapers need to find a new business model fast, to survive n the new competitive environment.
Experimentation is the way to go, as mentioned. It's all about trying, trying fast enough in hope to hit the jackpot.
While tablets might seem like the popular thing right now, they are just about distribution - getting content to people. That doesn't change the way how people will want to part their money.
Let me end with two quotes from Albert Einstein which I think are applicable here:
"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."
"The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them."
My question about this: if going only online is such a huge cost savings then why do newspapers do this? What is holding them back?
A close family relative passed away a few years ago and part of closing her estate was ending her multi-decade newspaper subscription. While doing so I asked who unsubscribes the most and the clerk said people like my relative.
Are the news papers really trying to hold on to those readers? People of that generation are dying at an exponential rate and that day of reckoning has to come soon (if what I said is actually true).
I've come to the conclusion that all the experimenting is a waste of time in terms of business models for the moment. The best model to support these publications has probably been around for some time. That is the Washington Post. Because they are financially diversified in companies like Kaplan they have some stability that other publications only wish they had. I feel this is the future of newspapers. In order to provide the type of coverage that we are used to receiving from publications they will have to create other sources of revenue that are not directly connected to the publication itself. Otherwise in order to make money a publication may have to sell their journalism ethics(their soul) in order to make a buck, which we are seeing more and more of.
ReplyDeleteThat statistic about the average reader engaging for only 70 seconds on a newspaper is so frustrating. I fear one of the news industry's biggest problems is that presentation of so many headlines enables scanning behavior. Sure it's convenient for skimmers, but it does little to encourage people to dig deeper into complex stories.
ReplyDeleteThat's our goal with the Carnegie-Knight News21 program, where nearly 100 of the nation's top journalism students are asked to experiment in ways to do in-depth journalism in innovative ways. The fellows are then expected to explain how they tackled their project and why, plus provide code to anyone who might want to take the concept to a new level or in a different direction.
One of the industry's biggest challenges with regard to experimentation is figuring out ways to share lessons learned, so we can move forward and engage readers in new ways. Collaboration is key. An universities have a lot to offer by tasking next-gen journalists with invention.
News21.com is part of the Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education, sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation and the Knight Foundation, and involves 12 of the largest graduate journalism programs in the country.
Very valid points. One can see the problems of paper newspapers in the Internet very easily when we dissect the business a newspaper is in.
ReplyDeleteActually, a paper newspaper is not one but three businesses. The first is the readers' market. The reader pays the newspaper for the physical paper to get content he/she wants. The second business is the sales of the readers' attention to advertisers. And the third business of a newspaper is or better was to bring demand and supply together in the form of classifieds.
All three businesses are glued together in the past by paper. You needed the reach of the newspaper to get the attention of your target customers. You needed to reach a lot of people via a paper to get the right person for the job opening you had.
Not anymore. Now, we have niche markets with special interest were we can target much better our potential customers. And even worse, the Internet is much better in matching demand and supply in what used to be called classifieds.
The problems of the newspapers is that their business and content model was perfect for the paper age, but the Internet unbundles their business into three rather independent businesses. You do not need a newspaper website to run a market place for used cars. You find more on this subject on http://blog.business-model-innovation.com/2009/09/who-says-paper-is-dead-business-model-innovation-in-the-newspaper-industry/
Sorry, it is the changing economics that harms newspapers not search engines.
The biggest reason for newspapers' decline is very simple: loss of monopoly. For years each newspaper had a built-in monopoly because they were bound by physical location.
ReplyDeleteIt didn't matter that the New York Times or the Washington Post had better news coverage. You couldn't get them. At most your local newspaper subscribed to their news service (not available to the general public) and published a few of their articles.
The technologies of the past decades have changed all that. It started with TV and news radio competing for our news reading time. Now the internet has put the final nail in the coffin. Every newspaper in the country is available to everybody. Suddenly the model went from monopoly (or at most a oligopoly) to a free and open market. The chaos that resulted (the closing of newspapers, the floundering of attempts to provide different revenue streams, etc.) is just the natural result of all that. It looks messy, and the "cause" of this demise is hotly debated today, but decades from now this will become a classic case study of what happens when monopoly is suddenly lost.
Great read. Raises questions about why WSJ is gaining readership. I think it's a great niche product and that's what makes its business model work. What's the parallel for NYT? Washington Post? LA Times? What niche could they each own? -- Mary Kay (Hi Hal---you were my professor at MIT in the 1970s. Ph.D. program)
ReplyDeletePublishers + news corporations deal in information, whether it's news or advertising. Their customers are companies trying to sell a product, and the reader who's looking for information.
ReplyDeleteGoogle deals in information as well. They provide information on what we're looking for, and we pay for that with information on what we're looking for and where and how long etc. This information is fed back into the information we get from Google. The deal works as a give-and-take-model, based on the feedback from the customers.
The basis for the feedback-model of Google is learning from the customer, and responding to what the customer tells us.
Why not try to learn from the winner? If you connect the idea of the web as a platform for selling content with the idea of the web as the source of content where (new) content is generated, you may add the idea of Google (and others, like internet providers, as well) to offer storage space on their servers for users to store, share, administer and process their data they got from us > outsourcing their hard disc drives > providing a platform where users with an account
- can find and search content in any form (text, audio, video)
- buy it for further use like reading, storing, sharing, copying, editing etc.
and where providers/publishers of content in any form
- can offer and sell their product (news, music, film, books) on their own terms.
Taking that idea another step forward, you/we will provide an opportunity for our customers to exchange and interact with each other on our platform > a community > generating new content that will help us target and serve the interests and needs of our customers.
We, the publishers, may yet have to learn how to learn, and listen to our customers. They will tell us what they want, and it's up to us to come up with ideas on how to offer them more than what they are looking for > enrichment of our content > thus getting them hooked and coming back for more ...
What will ultimately get them hooked, I guess, is the chance to define themselves and be present as who they want to be > as Facebook's success tells us. If we can establish ourselves as a platform/community where they can find what they're looking for and where they can find people who listen to them > not least among them us > why should they go elsewhere, and where would that elsewhere be?
Q: why did the average reader engage for only 70 seconds
ReplyDeleteA: Our data shows the average search engine reader engaged for less than 7 seconds
---
Q: is a bigger audience the solution?
A: Nope. YouTube has 360M + users, 2Billion videos a day, and...they're still not profitable.
---
Q: Has Google made any money from information search?
A: No, their $20B/year is from ads for products, aka shopping. Their free scraping is the equivalent of the newspaper's news.
---
Q: Does anyone (even Google?) make serious money with content on the web?
A: Nope. Remember, YouTube is losing money. And although consumers like the instant-access, only 21% of people PREFER to consume content online.
Solution:
Don't try to put valuable entertainment or news content online. Consumers don't prefer it, and nobody (not even google) has made any money trying.
It's not an ad model problem, or a content problem. The simple fact is that the medium (PC/Browser) isn't preferred.
tl;dr
Rupert, follow your instinct. The data supports you.
Here's an excellent article on the death of the Rocky Mountain News:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.johntemple.net/2009/09/lessons-from-rocky-mountain-news-text.html
The lessons mentioned in the article are easily applicable to any newspapers out there.
Newspapers need to find a new business model fast, to survive n the new competitive environment.
Experimentation is the way to go, as mentioned. It's all about trying, trying fast enough in hope to hit the jackpot.
While tablets might seem like the popular thing right now, they are just about distribution - getting content to people. That doesn't change the way how people will want to part their money.
Let me end with two quotes from Albert Einstein which I think are applicable here:
"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."
"The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them."
My question about this: if going only online is such a huge cost savings then why do newspapers do this? What is holding them back?
ReplyDeleteA close family relative passed away a few years ago and part of closing her estate was ending her multi-decade newspaper subscription. While doing so I asked who unsubscribes the most and the clerk said people like my relative.
Are the news papers really trying to hold on to those readers? People of that generation are dying at an exponential rate and that day of reckoning has to come soon (if what I said is actually true).