
A ‘Darker Narrative’ of Print's Future From Clay Shirky - grey-area
http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/publiceditor/2015/04/10/a-darker-narrative-of-prints-future-from-clay-shirky/
======
walterbell
Does anyone know the history of technology stacks used by NYT to provide
comments? Like HN, the comments are often more insightful than the article:

    
    
      Transactional revenue
    

_"... Yes, "think of subscribership as membership." But that doesn't mean "in
short, get some percentage of the loyal readers of The Times to pay more —
some of them a lot more." It means, leveraging the strength of the very real
community of loyal readers that the Times has, by building more and more
revenue streams from delivering more and more value to members of that
community."_

    
    
      Public debate
    

_"... A good place to begin would be with the comments areas, with the goal to
transform them from the current depositories of opinion into well moderated
forums for dialogue which instead of producing points of view stimulate
learning and advancement. Public intellectuals rather than know-it-alls would
be the result. That would be different!"_

    
    
      Weekly cultural ritual
    

_"... The Sunday edition of The NYT is different. I peruse this all week while
giving my electronic devices a break. I'm older and still enjoy the
serendipity of discovery. Yet I rarely look at the A-section. It's old news
and I've already digested all - more than likely I have digested it prior to
your pages being sent to the printing plant."_

 _" Truth be told, I'd be sad about the disappearance of all but the Sunday
edition from print, but more to the point: It's infuriating, and confounding,
that the Times insists on undermining its Sunday edition, a cultural
institution so important and dear to its readers' hearts."_

 _"... every Sunday morning I would buy the $$$Sunday London Times PAPER,
spending all the long day reading it because every article in that
preposterously-thick paper was delicious-even the sports section._"

~~~
A_COMPUTER
Their blog comments are far better than their article comments. I think it's
more about audience than the technology.

~~~
walterbell
It would be interesting if the non-paying audience contributes higher quality
comments :) Or maybe lower-traffic blogs attract less/different posturing than
comments on high traffic articles.

------
knowtheory
Shirky's post in 2009 was one of those great clarion calls. Failure is always
an option (and not the kind you learn from and pivot off of).

Noting that newspapers aren't necessary (but journalism is) is great, but the
problem is that a lot of (most?) journalism is still done in newspapers... and
the way the media is currently breaking up, where companies like the Tribune
Company and Gannett are splitting their television holdings from their
newspapers means that journalism and newspapers may not be inherently tied
together... but when it comes down to it, they are still for all practical
intents and purposes tightly coupled.

Web based news orgs like Vox, Fusion, Gawker and Buzzfeed are making some
moves towards funding journalism (Buzzfeed in particular has great
investigative reporters), but they are way too few in number to replace
newspapers as a home for investigative journalism even as the industry stands
today in its depleted state.

~~~
netcan
Here's a question: How much money goes in to hardcore investigative
journalism?

~~~
knowtheory
That's a hard thing to disentangle, because investigative reporting isn't just
done by people with "investigative reporter" in their titles.

If you want a random waypoint Propublica's staff costs for 2011 were around
5mil$ for a small but very investigative focused news org:
[https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/142...](https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/142007220)
(granted they're also not a typical news org).

------
stuart78
"2) Do more to cut costs, companywide. (“The most valuable long-term dollar to
an organization with declining revenues is a dollar you don’t spend.”)"

This one worries me. I don't have better proposals to save the industry, but
we keep redefining coverage to be less direct and less expensive and we all
end up paying for this by being further removed from news as it happens.

As a digital-only subscriber, I find NYT's current subscription model bizarre.
For the base ($20/mo) tier, I get access to web and iPad but not iPhone (which
costs an additional $10). This structure means I use and value the service
less, making me more likely to cancel. Feels like a business model that
privileges their needs over their customer's experience. And as a result, I
opine that it is not likely to meet their expectations. I'd rather see an
attempt to broaden the subscription base by aggressively lowering the cost
($7.99) and aggressively expanding the entitlement (sub includes crossword,
for example).

------
xbryanx
We (my partner and I) subscribe to the Sunday only print edition, which gives
us digital access. We shouldn't really be considered "print subscribers" in a
traditional sense. 90% of the time we scan the magazine and maybe read one
article in the paper. Then straight to the recycle. The majority of our
consumption, and engagement with ads, happens throughout the week as we share
a single digital account. The physical paper is more of a souvenir, or
possibly a house decoration, than a means of engaging with the stories in the
paper.

------
lisa_henderson
Also by Clay Shirky, and very much worth reading:

Healthcare.gov and the Gulf Between Planning and Reality

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6770039](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6770039)

------
flycaliguy
I'm waiting for the killer e-ink devices. I love my reader and am anticipating
it's evolution will eventually make it a staple for most adult millennials.
Once that thing is crystal clear, fast, cheap (and perhaps can be folded in
half), I find it hard to believe it won't rejuvenate the newspaper market.

~~~
knowtheory
better e-ink devices won't fix the problem that the internet has completely
changed the advertising market and how brands reach consumers.

It's hard to see what newspapers could do to get the same returns per unit
sold or page viewed as they have historically. And that means a couple
possible things: readers bear more of the cost, advertisements get more
intrusive (or crazier), or newspapers find some other way to make money.

~~~
jensen123
Personally, I would love to pay more for magazines and newspapers without any
advertising whatsoever. Advertising always seems to have some influence on
what is reported. A newspaper or magazine will be very reluctant to say
anything very negative about the companies/industries that advertise with
them, because they might lose those ads then.

Then there's the problem of ads influencing me directly, causing me to spend
more money on other things, than I otherwise would.

I guess advertising in general, can cause reporters to have an attitude of "if
you have a problem, buy a product to solve said problem" rather than "if you
have a problem, here's some knowledge to solve said problem".

So overall, I would probably save a significant amount of money by paying more
for advertising-free media. But most people don't seem to understand this.

------
lifeisstillgood
I wonder if there is any data on the fixed costs of newspaper production -
digital or not? That is how much do they spend getting words to the
bifurcation point - where the words could go to a printing press or to a web
server?

That seems to me to be the important part. The words and knowledge of the NYT
is the important bit - whether I read them on paper or screen seems less
important.

And if they cannot afford to produce good words for a subscription only
clientele, perhaps they need to find ways to monetise "influence". Pay us and
we will keep influencing politicans on your behalf - essentially expand
lobbying out past the proprietors.

~~~
ghaff
I've seen some back of the envelope numbers [1] but not good data. It does
seem pretty clear though that, in contrast to eBooks, printing is a pretty
substantial part of the overall costs. I've heard it said that, as a rough
rule of thumb, subscriptions plus single-copy purchases historically covered
the physical printing and circulation of the paper while advertising covered
everything else (plus profit).

The problem is that you can't just move ad revenue from print to digital.

[1] A few years ago and Business Insider but FWIW
[http://www.businessinsider.com/2009/1/printing-the-nyt-
costs...](http://www.businessinsider.com/2009/1/printing-the-nyt-costs-twice-
as-much-as-sending-every-subscriber-a-free-kindle)

------
nopinsight
One idea is to monetize stories submitted by PR firms [1] and clearly label
the stories as such. At the same time, keep or increase the quality of such
articles to make it worth the reader's while.

To capture more of the value, the newspaper industry should also create a PR
platform (comparable to AdWords) that allows firms to directly and efficiently
pitch their products and their social/business impact to the editors. (Cutting
out the middleman) It of course should remain at the editor's discretion
whether and in what form to print the stories.

Increase in transparency (that the story originated from a PR pitch) and
monetization opportunity (to pay for investigative reporting) should benefit
both the reader and the newspapers.

[1]
[http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html)

~~~
ghaff
It's called native advertising and it's somewhat controversial. The problem is
that, even if it's labeled, it erodes the wall between advertising and
editorial. Many magazines have had "special advertising sections" forever, but
the more you blend in native advertising, the more readers are likely to
confuse your editorial with an advertiser's pitch.

Of course, especially in some areas, PR narratives do drive the choice of
story (as suggested in your link) a lot of the time. But it's still a slippery
slope to rent out column inches for content that purports to be a form of
editorial.

~~~
nopinsight
Well, the idea is to make sure the article quality be on par with other
editorials. This should include critical commentary and comparison of the
product or company in question to its competitors. This would be something
quite different from those special advertising sections, which almost always
feature only its positive aspects.

Since newspapers already publish these articles anyway (without labeling the
PR source), the slippery slope is already in action. Although I do agree that
money could make things worse for some papers, market mechanisms and
transparency could help balance things out.

------
Tiktaalik
This interview with Tyler Brule of the very successful Monocle Magazine, is
relevant and worth a read as he's been a booster of print. He draws the same
conclusion as point #3, that the iPad wasn't going to be a saviour, and I
think he would lean to #4 (subscription as membership) as being the best path
forward. At least that seems to be the direction Monocle has moved in.

[http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/03/how-tyler-brule-has-
extende...](http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/03/how-tyler-brule-has-extended-
monocle-beyond-simply-a-magazine-for-the-jet-set/)

~~~
walterbell
These points stuck out from the interview:

    
    
      Print-on-demand news
    

_"..Monocle newsstand near London’s Paddington Station. The kiosk will offer a
curated selection of magazines and newspapers as well as global newspapers
printed on-demand. Customers will be able to register online, request a
printing of newspapers ranging from Norway’s Aftenbladet to The Australian,
and then come to the newsstand to pick it up ... “It’s important for us to, I
think, remind the market that — is it really a crisis of print, or is it a
crisis of print distribution?"_

    
    
      Trend chasing
    

_"..We don’t have an issue of some digital guru or a friend or an investor or
a board member who says, Why aren’t you slapping that little bird on the
bottom of every webpage and every printed page? ... we don’t have that
influence surrounding our brand, that we have to follow the dictates of a big
parent corporation, and that’s been the great thing from the very start."_

    
    
      The companies they keep
    

_"..the power of adjacency, of being in with a core print product group beside
an ad for Cadillac, beside an ad for Cathay Pacific ... Here [his BlackBerry
again] I can go and buy space in like-minded editorial, but I’m never going to
be surrounded. I’m never going to have that pure adjacency right next to
another brand in the same way that I would in print ... Brands want to have
good adjacencies the same way that companies will wait forever to get space
between 57th and Madison and 5th — because they want to be in the right
company. I think that’s still very hard here."_

------
blumkvist
In my opinion media companies should primarily cash on loyalty, rather than
readership. Special editions with unique content, merchandise, and above all,
events. Events add a ton of value to attendees and is very lucrative
opportunity. Doesn't matter if we talk about industry conferences or TedTalk-
like type of event. Attendees get a ton of value out of it and are willing to
pay a lot for it. Same goes for sponsors.

It works out great for industry-based media. I don't see why it wouldn't work
for mass media organizations.

