The news business
The basic premise is that ad money follows the audience. The audience is now more fragmented, it is true, but audience laws still follow a power law and there will still be larger and smaller vehicles for ads. The ease of advertising online I don't think can be blamed. While it may be easier, that should allow more people to do it. It isn't clear why this makes the total market shrink.
I suspect that the ugly truth is that newspaper advertising was never as valuable as it seemed. It was just that there was no alternative. Another ugly truth is that newspapers aren't as valuable as they used to be. This is for two reasons. First of all, there are way too many. There is no reason why there are 100 microphones in front of someone at a press conference. A couple will do. The market is being asked to pay dozens of distributors to do the job of just a few. There's no dramatic regional angle why we need 20,000 similar stories on the strife in Gaza. Wouldn't 2000 do the trick? Or 200? Or perhaps 20? There is a gigantic oversupply of news. And at least the Gaza story is substantive. We need barely any coverage of the various celebrity-scandal-o-the-day type that many newspapers waste effort on.
In other words, if the market were consolidated into say a dozen or so large national newspapers, the quality of news would probably actually go up, not down, and those organizations would be able to draw the kinds of audiences to make a go of it. Local papers would be very heavily locally focused, perhaps syndicating articles, perhaps wrapping their sections with the national bits. Perhaps going free.
Oddly, I wonder whether it is in fact online entities which will end up becoming these organizations. I wonder if the newspaper business is too wedded to the past to be able to adapt, and that with perhaps a couple of exceptions, will just die out, and be replaced by expanded online news organizations with growing budgets and an appetite to become news hubs with print components to add to their electronic presences. ¶ 9:25 PM
Monday, January 12, 2009
The news business is in trouble. There are various theories about what's going on, but basically, it is much harder to have an ad-supported newspaper than it used to. Why? Aaron Swartz points out that it used to be hard to deliver ads to people, and now it isn't. Is this really the issue?
The basic premise is that ad money follows the audience. The audience is now more fragmented, it is true, but audience laws still follow a power law and there will still be larger and smaller vehicles for ads. The ease of advertising online I don't think can be blamed. While it may be easier, that should allow more people to do it. It isn't clear why this makes the total market shrink.
I suspect that the ugly truth is that newspaper advertising was never as valuable as it seemed. It was just that there was no alternative. Another ugly truth is that newspapers aren't as valuable as they used to be. This is for two reasons. First of all, there are way too many. There is no reason why there are 100 microphones in front of someone at a press conference. A couple will do. The market is being asked to pay dozens of distributors to do the job of just a few. There's no dramatic regional angle why we need 20,000 similar stories on the strife in Gaza. Wouldn't 2000 do the trick? Or 200? Or perhaps 20? There is a gigantic oversupply of news. And at least the Gaza story is substantive. We need barely any coverage of the various celebrity-scandal-o-the-day type that many newspapers waste effort on.
In other words, if the market were consolidated into say a dozen or so large national newspapers, the quality of news would probably actually go up, not down, and those organizations would be able to draw the kinds of audiences to make a go of it. Local papers would be very heavily locally focused, perhaps syndicating articles, perhaps wrapping their sections with the national bits. Perhaps going free.
Oddly, I wonder whether it is in fact online entities which will end up becoming these organizations. I wonder if the newspaper business is too wedded to the past to be able to adapt, and that with perhaps a couple of exceptions, will just die out, and be replaced by expanded online news organizations with growing budgets and an appetite to become news hubs with print components to add to their electronic presences. ¶ 9:25 PM
