The media industry, as we know it, is in toilet. And if we weren't so distracted by the stock market, Bernie Madoff, face-eating chimps, and Octo-Mom, we might be talking about this problem more.
David Carr, in this week's Times, says that one way that the newspapers should deal with the crisis is to stop giving away the candy for free.
across the country, and consumers will have to participate in financing
the newsgathering process if it is to continue. Setting the price point
at free — the newspaper analyst Alan D. Mutter called it the “original
sin” — has brought the industry millions of eyeballs and a return that
doesn’t cover the coffee budget of some newsrooms.
The big
threat would be that newspapers could lose the readers they have, lots
of them. The mitigating factor is that a lot of those readers aren’t
paying anyway. And keep in mind that people are already paying for
quality content all over the Web: The Wall Street Journal, Consumer
Reports, The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Tiered Web access — from a
bare-bones free product to a rich, customized subscription — could be
among the solutions.
Yeah, because The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette is a daily read of mine. Dude, if people have to pay to read the Times, they are going to just go back to blowing things up on their computers. Frankly, I think that newspapers are going to have to pay their readers to look at their stuff.
Then he says that aggregators (and bloggers) are just stealing the work of journalists. Already, guys, check out this fab map of immigration patters in the U.S. My guess is that it took a staff of five three weeks to put this together. And it's yours, for free.
And then there's my favorite media critic du jour, Jon Stewart. In case, you've missed it, he's been really laying into the financial analysts at CNBC and CNN. It's good stuff.
Michigan Messenger (via Scott) has all sorts of good links with their responses, including Cramer trying to lamely respond on the Today Show. That was quality TV. And they wonder why their numbers are in the toilet.
Apt. 11d 
There’s a lot of content I’d be happy to pay for, but I’m lazy. I don’t want to sign up for a web subscription to a newspaper that requires a monthly payment on my credit card, that becomes a big hassle if I want to cancel, lose my credit card, or leaves my bill littered with 50 different charges. What happened to the great promise of micropayments we heard so much about? For example, I’d love to easily be able to pay for online access to my local paper on certain days, or avoid the predictable political reporting of the New Yorker while still paying for the rest of it.
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Stewart is showing CNBC for what it is: a channel rife with hacks who have no reason to be on TV. Jimmy C is going to go on Stewart’s show on Thursday as well. This should be fun though it would have been much more rewarding to see rick the pr|ck on the show instead. Cramer will stand by his guns saying that he works for a not for profit, donates all of his TV revs to charity, that there is a warning at the beginning of the show and that his show is for entertainment only. CNBC has come under fire because of the fact that it has turned into a propaganda tool for corporations. Where is Faber when we need him? He may come off as a t00l but at least he asked some tough questions a decade ago. They need to go back to basics.
CBNC would be better off doing longer term shows, with shown results or failures. Small bizness development ideas anyone? Having Suze Orman doing make overs and showing long term biggest credit score winners fix their financial lives. At least she tries to educate the masses.
And BTW, the pros don’t listen to CNBC’s squawk at all. The TV may be on but its muted and on Bloomberg or ESPN. ETA on extinction: 5 months unless they reboot.
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Does Carr remember what happened with Times Select? The NYT opinion page became virtually irrelevant because the NYT started charging for it. Maybe charging for news would work out differently. However, I’d point out that at the moment, the NYT’s most successful free product is stupid (but engagingly written) lifestyle stories–that’s the NYT product that zips around the internet like a golden snitch. The chances that people are going to pay for that are pretty low since it’s just a more highly polished version of what you can get for free. (If it’s any comfort, I believe the pron industry is also suffering from all this free stuff.)
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The only on-line content I ever paid the NYT for was the crossword puzzles. That was worth it back when I had free time. The only problem with doing the puzzle on-line is it is too easy to google answers.
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I pay for the New York Times.
There was an article about micropayments in the times the other day. The basic problem is that no one thinks it will raise enough money.
I still think it’s an experiment worth trying. But highly likely to fail. Remember the Steven King novel that was going to be sold chapter by chapter? Eventually people stopped paying for it.
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“There’s a lot of content I’d be happy to pay for, but I’m lazy. I don’t want to sign up for a web subscription to a newspaper that requires a monthly payment on my credit card, that becomes a big hassle if I want to cancel, lose my credit card, or leaves my bill littered with 50 different charges.”
Amen. Don’t forget the registration issues either. I’ve gotten a huge barrage of spam from the Minneapolis Star just because I was foolish enough to register under my own e-mail several years ago just to read a single article.
“Having Suze Orman doing make overs and showing long term biggest credit score winners fix their financial lives. At least she tries to educate the masses.”
Suze Orman is on my black list. I don’t watch her show (although I’ve enjoyed one or two of her books), but I know that until very recently, she was aggressively pushing her viewers into real estate, urging them to buy as quickly as they could. She also uses the term “good debt,” which makes my teeth hurt every time I hear it. There’s a big March 5, 2009 Time article entitled “Queen of the Crisis” that covers the ground:
“Home ownership is a cornerstone of Ormanworld, and a good FICO score makes it easier. “A home is flat-out the best big-ticket purchase you will ever make,” she wrote in The Money Book for the Young, Fabulous and Broke, which came out in hardcover in 2005 and paperback in 2007. “Just like your student loans, mortgage debt is truly good debt.” The book, which is geared toward people in their 20s, suggests that a 3% down payment on a home is acceptable in some circumstances and recommends a hybrid mortgage, which involves a fixed-rate loan that converts to an adjustable-rate one at some future date (“the Goldilocks option”). Under normal circumstances, this might work out fine, but if you had followed that strategy when the book came out, you might have been ruined when the housing market fell apart.”
I doubt that anybody doing finance on TV can bear much scrutiny. I’m a Dave Ramsey gal myself and am doing his 13-week Financial Peace University at a local church, but I wince every time I hear him tell some homeowner in Florida that they can wait to sell until next year, because the market will probably be better then. His advice on where you need to be before buying a house (debt-free, 3-6 month emergency fund, substantial downpayment, mortgage no more than 28% of income, 15-year fixed) is very sound, though.
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Fund drives, maybe? Like public radio? I do think there’s a real fear that we’ll lose professional journalism. And that does worry me. Not all of it valuable but I think some is.
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The problem with “micropayments” is that it defeats the entire purpose of newspapers in the first place. You pay for a “bundle” of stuff, and the stuff you pay for subsidizes the rest of it.
The newspaper business would have already crumbled if you could buy just the Sports Section for a quarter of the price of the full paper. The percentage of people interested in all four slices of USA Today is a minuscule percentage of their readers.
The “media” is going to have to contract a heck of a lot more than it is now in order to be sustainable, even for the hardest of hard news. How many people attend the White House daily briefings? One hundred? Is there a reason that there needs to be more than a dozen?
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I think newspapers have thought that their reporting was their competitive edge, when really it was their geography – their capacity to deliver their paper to the living rooms of their readers.
I’m with Ragtime in a way. I think rather than dividing under a single geographical/editorial banner, news reporting will end up being profitable according to community of interest. Just not sure how we’ll get there.
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There are content sites that pay their way through online advertising. They have much lower overheads than major dailies, however.
I think the major papers are going to have to start thinking of themselves as portals that buy news from some common or pooled source of reporting rather than as autonomous operations that commission and edit work from dedicated employees. There are a lot of possible changes coming, some of them good, some not so good.
I did like the commentary last week that The Daily Show basically did investigative work using public records that no newspaper reporter had bothered to do. Sure, for a comedic purpose, but it really does underscore how poorly the mainstream media is doing its job, how dependent they are on information funneled to them from sources looking to buy or manipulate a particular spin.
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For me at least the worm has turned on paying for online content. I felt no compunction about reading the Chicago Tribune online when it was a healthy company; in fact if anything it seemed like this behemoth that would always be there, no matter what. I also felt no compunction about criticizing it endlessly when it was the only outlet.
These days, however, I am increasingly concerned about losing local coverage. What seemed like an unstoppable behemoth is now looking more and more vulnerable.
I’m fine if my local paper purchases its Washington coverage from Reuters. As Ragtime mentions, we don’t need 100 reporters at a single White House event. But the role the Chicago Trib and Sun-Times play in Illinois and Chicago politics is huge. I can’t even imagine what would happen if that reliable reporting went away. It’s already been dumbed down because of budget difficulties, and even that change is driving me crazy.
In any case, I’m finally ready to pay to read online content, if that’s what it takes to keep it credible and of high quality.
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I think the NYT made a serious mistake by doing TimesSelect with the editorials, because in fact we *don’t* need to know what David Brooks or Maureen Dowd thinks on any given day. I would have been much more likely to pay for news coverage – and where I live, I can’t buy the paper in hard copy, either. I’d probably also pay for Salon and Slate, though I have avoided it in the past with my willingness to click through extra ads (for Salon, at least; I can’t remember if Slate’s ever done that). The point earlier about ease of payments is important too.
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Ardemgaz can do it, because there is no place else to get the Arkansas news. If you need Arkansas news (some folks do) that’s where to get it. WSJ can do it, because they also have stuff which is theirs alone. Why should I pay the Times for stuff which I can get nearly as good from LA Times, or WaPo? Sometimes better, if Jayson Blair is doing the reporting for the Times, or they are printing crap about Wen Ho Lee or Duke Lacrosse?
I actually did pay for Slate, when they were subscription, and I send money to my local eleemosynary radio stations. I pay for NY Times and WaPo to my door, and I used to, and likely will again, for WSJ. But I’m an outlier, you can’t build a business model around me. My hyperlocal paper is doing okay from real estate ads – I don’t know why, it seems like Craigslist would be a better bet. But I don’t see much hope for MSM.
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Here is a rightie revelling in the death of the P-I. http://americandigest.org/mt-archives/these_just_in/buhbye_to_the_p.php Would a newspaper which didn’t have a constant drumbeat going for elite-left opinion have made it? I don’t know. WaPo seems to have paid some attention to the ‘I don’t believe the Post’ bumper stickers which were on a lot of cars ten or fifteen years ago, and it is in less desperate shape. New York Post is (I think, Laura correct me if I’m off on this) losing less badly than NY Times.
So I think there is a lot of structural stuff which is kicking all the papers in the teeth, and maybe that the ones which are going too far in telling their middle-to-right readers what they ought to think are doing worse.
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Mark Steyn dancing on the grave: http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZWNmMDJkNWI1OGJhOGMyZjU1NGYwYWY2YjUyYzExY2E=
I’m not convinced it’s really going under, although the numbers are dreadful. I do think Pinch Sulzberger is right up there with Neville Chamberlain as a prescient steward.
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Iowahawk take: http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2009/04/subscribe-now.html
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