Jack Shafer has a great story in Slate describing the many high-tech experiments by newspapers over the years. They haven’t ignored the web, by any means. But in the end, they’re failing. Why? Schafer writes:
“From the beginning, newspapers sought to invent the web in their own image by repurposing the copy, values, and temperament found in their ink-and-paper editions. Despite being early arrivals, despite having spent millions on manpower and hardware, despite all the animations, links, videos, databases, and other software tricks found on their sites, every newspaper website is instantly identifiable as a newspaper website. By succeeding, they failed to invent the web.”
I can’t help but draw the obvious connection here: every local TV website is instantly identifiable as a local TV website. And local TV has failed to invent online video. Or even come close.
No related posts.
these may be but six penny examples of nails in traditional media’s box (judge for yourself)
- over the objections of BOTH the prosecution and defense, a judge in colorado will allow bloggers and such into a high profile trial to report in real time.
- a legal requirement dating back 70 years that the sale of police property to be sold at auction be published (paid for) in the local papers has been canned in the boston area so departments can offer the stuff online via propertyroom(dot)com and such.
Cory – I’ll agree with your point about lumping television into the fellow’s perspective, but other than a nice little history of news delivery, I really don’t see the point of the article or undertand its conclusion.
It seems to point out that newspapers have tried to stay ahead of the game, by always jumping onto the next bandwagon and they were even early to the web, but what is it that he (or you) think they should be doing differently?
Right now, there’s very few profitable websites in general and those who are making money have little overhead or they’re serving a small niche. There are a couple with long histories that are making a few dollars, but those who are making money are few and almost none have production costs.
Newspaper and television sites are among the most trafficked, both worldwide and locally. There is a market for their products, but no one has found how to make money from online news and without some kind of paradigm shift in advertising, I really can’t see how mainstream media is going to make money without reducing costs to almost zero.
We’re all waiting for that golden ticket in advertising; Lost Remote, The NYTimes, MSNBC, Slate, everybody is wanting to find this new way of financing, but in the meantime, everyone just keeps turning out their product and subidizing it with their established, proven, old way of making money.
If I want headlines, I flip to CNN[dot]com and when I want depth about the incoming administration, I turn to washingtonpost[dot]com. This is the same way that I’ve always consumed news; When I want quick hits about local events, I turn to local television, when I want the immediacy of what’s happening in the world, I turn to cable news and when I want full coverage on a wide spectrum, I read a newspaper.
The mode of delivery may have evolved and most every news site that I visit have adapted to continual updates, but I don’t really care what my neighbor thinks about the events in Gaza, I want reporters on the ground. Perhaps some of that can be gathered by bloggers local to the area that’s currently in the headlines, but then they’d only be making profits when the news is in their backyard and to be honest, I don’t think we have any models that could turn a local blogger profitable, anyway. Not to mention that local color is nice, but it’s the history and balanced judgment of the known reporters that I trust.
Again, I really don’t understand Mr Shafer’s conclusion or what anyone thinks news is supposed to be doing differently. They’re doing what they’ve always done, adapting as it becomes necessary to compete and they’re attracting record numbers of eyeballs, but nobody has figured-out how to make money from it. Much like very few have figured out how to make money from the web in general, especially if they actually have to pay for the production of their product.
I mean think about it; Ebay, Craigslist and Google are supposedly making money, but they don’t actually produce any content. Hulu is incredibly popular, but it doesn’t bear any production costs. Yahoo! produces some content, they’re near the top of most traffic lists and they’re making money, but Wall Street punishes them because they suffer in comparison to other sites, when costs are factored into the equation.
Perhaps Gawker, Jupiter (mediabistro) and maybe even Arriana are making a little money, but they are the exceptions and they don’t have the depth, expenses or the resources of ABC News or Knight-Ridder.
It may be easy for a guy working at a subsidized online magazine like Slate to throw stones, but his company’s not making a lot (or any?) money and it pays per piece for folks to express their opinions or they buy a per-word article that could’ve just as easily gone to Reader’s Digest in another era.
d_c,
hope your not referring to ANY us outlets when you say “i want reporters on the ground”.
have you been keeping up on the twitter feed from gaza?
english.aljazeera.net(or something like that) and click thru.
‘o’ has recently said ‘he’ll have alot to say about gaza’ after 1/20.
fwiw- before anyone thinks i’m taking sides and brands me “pro-this, or anti-that”, let me say that i am definitely pro… pro women and children (and not necessarily in that order.
@InvitedMedia – I hadn’t seen the Twitter reports, so thanks for the heads-up, but…
We’ve seen other outlets experiment or incorporate Twitter and for breaking news, it could have a place, but it’s sort of like any kind of iReport, YouNews or a blogger[dot]com source. It has it’s most value during breaking events; The reports are completely unverified (and in the case of the AlJazeera experiment, it’ll apparently even let me sit at my desk in New Mexico and up or down the credibility of the report) and individual prejudices or perspectives aren’t factored into the equation.
I’ve really mostly been following Gaza in headline form because I have my own opinions about the action, but in general: Unverified info from regular folks has a function, but I know the perspective and the balances of the known media correspondents, so I kind of trust them to give me an overall picture.
Twitter as a company is not profitable and they don’t have a revenue model. AlJazeera appears to be using the tool to supplement or draw readers/viewers to their more mainstream content and when you cut down to it, their actual product is the same as it’s always been. It’s packaged in a familiar format and though this use of Twitter is “new” like constant updates, pick and choose news and/or reader comments, their online efforts are being subsidized by their normal product (or in the case of AlJazeera, I believe oil revenue is actually paying the bills)
Though again, thanks. I’ll have to keep a check on their viewer tweets, but I don’t know that it’ll have the longevity from me, as did the blooger[dot]com reports from Riverbend or Salem Pax.
I think it’s an oversimplification to say that almost no one is making money online. Lots of people are making money. The question is whether it’s capable of delivering the margins traditional media companies expect to see.
And to be honest, it’s also a matter of control. The typical GM of a TV station barely understands the online world, and yet he or she ultimately wants the web site to do what makes them comfortable and what *they* think builds their brand.
I wish I had the space to get into my whole arguement here, but let me leave you with one thought. It doesn’t matter what anyone thinks about the level of online journalism, or whether the online reader is destroying your favorite TV station or newspaper. The change has already happened. The fact that people are still discussing how unfair the changes have been is an indication of the distance many in the industry still have to travel.
Yes, you may not get the same profits from your web site in the next few years that you’re used to from your legacy business. But it is possible to make money with an honest-to-god-affiliated-with-a-traditional-media-company web site. You just have to give up a lot of preconceived notions about what works, and realize that brand-building and supporting your core business should be at the bottom of the “to-do” list for your web site.
@Rick – I’ll admit that it is something of an oversimplification to say that nobody’s making money, but if you limit the sample to only those who produce their own content, without any backchannels or subsidies from other sources, the field gets even smaller and if you just include the broad definition of news, we’re left with very few players and they’re generally not making a lot of money.
But nonetheless, the question remains – What works?
What is this holy grail that can produce reliable and substantial content, which would also generate a profit?
I can think of a few ideas, but for every plus that could be listed on their behalf, I can also think of several negatives and pretty much all come back to traditional storytelling because that’s the way it’s been done since the beginning of time.
Cory mentions online video in his post, but a news video is a news video and though you might be able to experiment a little with delivery, unless you’re just going to rely on volunteers, it isn’t much different than what already exists and it’s subsidized by the traditional outlets.
In one of my earlier comments, I said something about “pick your own news”, but that’s the way the web currently delivers content. Folks go to a website and watch the stories that they want to see and though pretty much everyone has some kind of playlist feature, where the viewers could theoretically design their own linear newscast, I’d venture that at least 90% of consumers watch stories one at a time and completely ignore this option.
I mean, this whole discussion started because some dude at a low overhead opinion journal, owned by a traditional media company threw stones at his employer’s industry and didn’t suggest any solutions. If you operate under the idea that something is failing and if you don’t think that your very existence isn’t very “maverickery”, then it’s real easy to point out what’s wrong, but it’s much more difficult to produce a solution.
I think the whole story was an air sandwich.
This story reminds me of when ten years ago I invented a better search engine algorithm with an innovative keyword auction-based contextual ad targeting mechanism…. was all set to go and then the phone rang and I had to go cover a 2-alarm fire in Tonawanda. D-oh!
@discreet_chaos: Very good points about the cost of content versus the online return, which is the core of the matter here.
I think a lot of it boils down to this: newspapers and TV stations’ cost structures are completely out of whack with the new downscaled revenue reality that digital media provides. Everyone keeps trying to replace bleeding analog dollars with digital revenue, but arguably, it’s not — and won’t be — replaceable at the same level.
This effort to replace revenue leads to ignoring digital opportunities that can grow into nice businesses but not at the same level or revenue or margins that local media has come to enjoy. For example, why pursue advertorial video for small businesses when it goes for $300 a pop? The net return would be zero (or less) after you factor in your costs (photographer, sales exec, web development) associated with it. So as a result, local TV stations don’t pursue it, allowing others (city guides, yellow pages) to build video directories of local businesses.
There are many other examples, but the point remains: very few local TV stations and newspapers will EVER be the big multi-million dollar businesses they once were. If they don’t streamline to pursue new digital businesses, they’ll be left with nothing in the end.
Just curious … is it possible that part of the problem is that newspaper and TV news — the journalism — isn’t what people want anymore?
Gotta agree with Rick above: “You just have to give up a lot of preconceived notions about what works, and realize that brand-building and supporting your core business should be at the bottom of the “to-do†list for your web site.”
Laugh off blogs, personal video producers, etc., as amateurs but, hey, what if it is what the audience wants?
Or, said another way, maybe your audiences aren’t just “going online” they are getting stolen by folks who understand 21st Century journalism?
Maybe the problem is that “local, trusted brands” are starting to feel stale, even if they are on the web?
Looking for work after I was laid off last April, I got some real insight into how many local TV sites are run day-to-day. You would think that at this point, many of the dumb mistakes would have been made already, but trust me, you would be wrong.
I interviewed for a web manager job at a station in a top 20 market, and at one point the GM of the station was complaining about the web revenue. But they only had one person selling online exclusively, and he was the most junior person with absolutely no previous web experience. I can’t imagine why that wasn’t working.
I would hope that at this point having a person from the web staff in all the news meeting would be a given, but I hardly ever found that to be the case. At a lot of stations, they would have two web staffers posting station stories from the night before during the morning news meeting. That’s a process that is wrong on so many levels.
And how many stations give the web manager the same level of managment juice as the head of any other department?
I’ll give you one last example, which I think I’ve mentioned here before. I was a managing editor at an O&O station 3-4 years ago, and at one point the station got a mandate from the network to add a live webcast in the mornings. The news director didn’t want to do it, and there generally wasn’t a reporter or anchor available at 10am. So I grabbed the assignment desk guy right after the morning news meeting, stuck him in an edit booth, and he just talked about what the station was working on, and punched up interesting new video that had just come in (and would be used later in the day).
Within two weeks, it was getting more views than any other video the station did. And at that point, the news director replaced the assignment desk guy with a reporter, moved the shot out into the newsroom, and had him read scripts from the morning show. All because he was concerned with “branding” the regular on-air broadcasts.
I’d like to say that shortsight type of move doesn’t happen anymore, but I know that’s not the case.
Why don’t you ask your own Mr. Day about this? He know a lot more about it than most, I would think. Ask him why TV shows are left to their TV station and the news and KTVB com/ZIdaho com are reduced to “hotlinks” and occasional ad campaigns now?
I’m more curious than anything else.
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