

This is why your newspaper is dying - rmason
http://www.bradcolbow.com/archive/view/the_brads_this_is_why_your_newspaper_is_dying/

======
coffeemug
Traditionally, the newspaper business was about delivering unique information
quicker than other newspapers (or, in the case of local newspapers, delivering
unique information that wasn't available elsewhere). Newspapers are dying
because in an environment where instantaneous content delivery is done at
essentially zero cost, fewer and fewer people are willing to pay for
undifferentiated content. The author is confusing cause and effect -
circumventing popup blockers and failing to invest into content formatting is
most definitely the effect, not the cause.

Publications that have differentiated content (e.g. Wall Street Journal, NYT,
Economist) seem to be doing just fine, but having thousands of papers that
rehash the same content without any edge on each other whatsoever is just not
sustainable given the current state of information technology.

EDIT: I only considered revenue from the subscribers, and ignored downward
pressure on advertising revenue. The point still stands - the market can no
longer sustain undifferentiated content (people don't pay for it anymore, and
advertisers will pay less than before because they have better options), and
differentiated content is probably a worse business than it used to be (people
will pay for it, but the revenue from advertisers is still being diverted to
Google).

~~~
joshu
subscriber revenue only accounts for 15-25% of total revenues...

i definitely agree that bland, undifferentiated content is killing the
newspapers. what happens when revenues are down? fire the newsroom, get
content from AP.

unfortunately, i am the one who is to blame for all the share buttons.

~~~
coffeemug
_subscriber revenue only accounts for 15-25% of total revenues_

Ah, that's incredible, I didn't know that. I think it's really easy to connect
the dots here. Since news is a commodity and global distribution is cheap,
journalism becomes a business of extremes, much like books and startups. A
tiny percentage of journalists who are really good at writing will be in huge
demand, while the overwhelming majority will barely be able to sell anything.
If you couple that with downward pressure on advertising prices, local papers
cannot be "saved" - there's just not enough revenue for them in the market to
sustain them at all. I don't think the total market size is shrinking, just
that small newspapers can't effectively compete.

That means a few big brands will emerge and take the lion's share of the
revenue. Or perhaps even one brand that will take everything, "the facebook
(or paypal) of news". It was supposed to be Digg, but I guess not...

~~~
ericmoritz
I suspect that the vacuum left behind by dead local newspapers will be filled
by local blogs. I haven't researched this but I wonder if the markets that
lost their local paper if blogs have made up the loss. Knoxville, TN has to
really nice local blogs even though we have both an alternative weekly
(Metropulse) and a paper.

* <http://knoxify.com/> * <http://www.notawigshop.com/>

~~~
khafra
If you do research it, I'd appreciate it if you'd write up a guide to finding
good local blogs and submit it to HN. I don't know of any in my area, and
aside from googling my city name, I can't think of many ways to find them.

------
bradcolbow
Thanks for linking to my little comic strip. I've never been to this site
before but I'm really impressed with the intelligent discussion going on here,
I'll definitely be back.

The main point I set out to make is it's not just about driving traffic to
sell ads but something more near and dear to my heart, user experience. If you
put pageviews above building loyalty among your base what you're doing is
selling out long term reader loyalty for short term gain. The New York times
is a great example of a site that has chosen to adopt the web as its own
medium and because of that its paywall is actually working. (or at least the
paper as a whole is profitable, maybe someone can provide me with more details
about the paywall's profitability). The NYTimes has built a unique and
recognizable brand built on quality.

All the tactics I outlined in the comic point to one thing: They care more
about page views than the actual human reading the site. It's true most people
will not pay for news because it's a commodity but I think there is a large
number of people who would pay for news, myself included.

This is true in any industry. Look at Starbucks, look at Apple. They are
selling product for 4 times more than their competitors yet people buy them.
Why? It's all about the user's experience, they are buying more than just
something that works.

In they end your customers will treat you the way you treat them. If you're
going for cheap traffic it means you care more about churning out content than
building brand loyalty and you will always be chasing short term traffic
instead of a long term community that be loyal to your paper. These guys are
hurting online because they have failed to build long term loyalty which their
print counterparts have (or had).

-Brad Colbow

~~~
eru
Welcome to HN. I hope you'll like it here.

By the way, you don't need to sign your posts. Your username appears above it
anyway.

------
timr
This is a red herring. The New York Times is "dying" too, but (other than not
linking outside the site, which is of _debatable_ consequence to site
revenue), it doesn't do any of these things.

This is mainly a list of one person's pet peeves, asserted to be the reason
that newspapers are hurting. I have another theory: the advertising market for
newsprint is being _decimated_. The pop-unders and massive ads are probably
the only thing keeping your local newspaper alive.

~~~
blntechie
Author has added a note. NYTimes has linked to the external sites but it was
Denver post which republished the article who removed the links.

"Quick note: The first panel is taken from the Denver Post, not the New York
Times. I didn’t notice the byline in there. The story’s author actually does a
very good job of linking out to other sites"

Denver Post - <http://www.denverpost.com/business/ci_18451993>

NYTimes -
[http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/07/technology/personaltech/bo...](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/07/technology/personaltech/boating-
apps-help-sailors-get-there-and-back-again.htm)

~~~
freejoe76
To be clear, The Denver Post didn't remove the links -- we never had the links
in the first place.

------
jdietrich
The Times of London is behind a paywall and doing everything right, but still
can't pay the bills. Producing quality news content is _expensive_ and people
seem largely unwilling to pay for it.

The newspapers that seem to be hanging on all appear to be cost-cutting like
mad, moving from reportage to opinion and chasing the lowest common
denominator.

The most successful news website in the UK (and second in the world behind the
NYT) is The Daily Mail. Their web content is completely different to their
print content. Offline, they're a populist rag specialising in paranoid scare
stories about gypsies, muslims and cancer. Online, they rely heavily on
linkbaity celebrity gossip and pictures of Pippa Middleton's arse. They've
worked out that what drives traffic is different to what sells papers.
"Quality" is the _least important_ aspect of a news operation, at least in
terms of profit.

~~~
timr
It's not just subscriber revenue. As others have pointed out, for most
newspapers subscriptions were/are a minority of revenue.

The fall of newspapers is actually a perfect storm: classifieds (something
like 40% of revenues, historically) have been gutted by sites like craigslist,
and CPM rates for print have been on the decline because the internet has
essentially _infinite_ inventory. In the web world, we think a few dollars'
CPM is pretty decent, but the newspaper industry is built around the
assumption of much higher rates (i.e. in the tens or hundreds of dollars per
thousand "impressions"). You can't build a strong local newspaper with paid
reporters, investigative journalism, etc., on a $2 CPM. The market is too
small.

~~~
eli
You left out another element of the storm: the bread and butter newspaper ad
clients were: real estate, finance, auto sales, and national retailers. Guess
which industries have cut back drastically on marketing during the recession.

------
ecaron
Only thing missing in this is the local newspapers lacking local news point. I
honestly don't read the St Paul Pioneer Press for reviews on the iPad - there
are much more relevant places for me that information from more intelligent
sources. I read the local paper to know what's happening locally.

Can you imagine a newspaper without any AP stories in it? So clean. So
relevant. So free of redundancy from the kind of information I already
digested 12 hours earlier... Excuse me while I go get a scissors and get to
work.

~~~
chc
Except that producing your own stories is more expensive (unless you want to
hire middle schoolers), and you need something to put in the space between the
advertisements. I agree that a newspaper that actually fills its niche well is
desirable, but it's unfortunately a tough business model.

Frankly, I kind of suspect that local news will eventually be dominated by
passionate bloggers. They don't have the overhead that a newspaper does, so
they can deal with smaller budgets. Every community in my area has at least
one local blog, and honestly, they're _great_ for local news.

~~~
knieveltech
If the kind of local news you enjoy is event coverage then yeah, local
bloggers are great. Uncovering government corruption? Not so much.

------
mrkurt
Newspapers are dying because it's expensive to produce content, there's
serious downward pricing pressure on advertising, and they've had a really
hard time getting their traditional small print advertisers to buy online ads.
It's not even a given that an equilibrium price in online ads is enough to pay
for content. Assuming a given article gets a $10/cpm and costs $100 to
produce, they need 10,000 impressions to break even. It's crazy.

These things lead directly to the quality issues you're seeing. It's difficult
to justify high end online content presentation when you can hardly afford to
keep writers around. How many newspapers can really compete for engineering
talent when there are sexier, better paying jobs at not-a-newspaper, inc?

------
rmason
This is really only the beginning of a list. Most newspapers don't realize it
yet but its getting pointless for them to even publish national and world
news.

Most twenty somethings i know never read the newspaper. Yet as they buy houses
and have kids they develop an intense interest in local news about their
community. The company that gets local right will be the new Hearst of this
era. I am pretty sure it won't be one of the giants like Gannett.

Right now I learn as much local news on Twitter as I do the local daily
newspaper I read every morning.

~~~
MartinCron
Where I live, Seattle's Ballard neighborhood, we have an excellent hyper-local
blog called MyBallard.com. It's a great resource for news that I actually care
about but isn't at all interesting to people outside the neighborhood. The
company behind it has developed blogs for many other neighborhoods and seems
to be reasonably successful at it.

~~~
andyking
<http://forargyll.com/> is a brilliant example of this--they were originally a
group set up to launch a community radio station for a remote part of
Scotland. This was unsuccessful for a variety of (mainly technical) reasons,
so they turned to the web instead.

Now they produce a daily-updated, hyper-local blog covering a huge, sparsely
populated area. It's full of pics of local people, debate on local issues and
news not covered elsewhere. (People will buy a paper, or read a blog, if you
print a picture of someone they know. Why do you think local papers print
pages and pages of kids who are starting school every September?)

This is an area that didn't have a local press to speak of before. There was
one weekly local newspaper, but nothing on this scale enabling people who
might be 50 or 100 miles apart discuss shared issues instantly.

~~~
MartinCron
That's a cool example. I was thinking that hyper-local really only made sense
for densely packed urban environments. Good to see that I was wrong in that
assumption.

------
dasil003
No.

Your newspaper dying is why _this_ is.

------
nhebb
A major problem is that print editions have a comparatively high production
and distribution cost, but newspapers can charge more for advertising. As
readers shift to online editions, the distribution cost is minimal, but the
savings are dwarfed by the loss of advertising revenue, since internet ads
cost much less. Of course, they try to counter this by peppering the pages
with ads, which leads to about half the problems that this piece describes.

------
podperson
While the comic raises some nice points (mainly cheap shots), the final line:
"I would happily pay for news that doesn't treat me like an imbecile" (or
words to that effect) sounds like hogwash to me.

The NYTimes, Economist, and New Yorker (for example) all provide excellent
news through all kinds of channels, and in many cases with most, if not all,
of the points addressed. All the crap the cartoonist complains about is purely
driven by the need of newspapers to replace lost revenue, and there's no
evidence that most readers are willing to pay.

------
Groxx
"Linking to a random story in the middle of an article"

Thank God I'm not the only one that sees this as nonsensical and annoying. Who
first came up with it, and where do they live? I've got to return all the crap
they threw at me; I certainly don't want it.

------
ethank
You might as well just take out "newspaper" and put (arbitrary old model
content industry)

The examples cited are endemic problems in leadership, organization and focus.
I worked in newspaper for 6 years, then the music business for 6. There are
really smart people in both industries, most of whom have left or are leaving
because at the top, the motivation is to bolster justification for existence
rather than innovate.

Its often easier, and more profitable to let the ship sink. Sad as that is.

Of note, some of my former colleagues at the paper have done interesting
things, like Danny Sullivan at SearchEngineLand

------
rickmb
It may not be the reason why newspapers are dying, but it is one of the
reasons very few people pity them: in 20 years, there hasn't been one serious
effort by a newspaper to create an attractive, pleasant and useful online
experience people _might_ actually want to pay for.

The readers needs are way down the order or priorities, yet the readers paying
for content directly is the only halfway viable business model. It may not be
enough, but they could at least once have tried a strategy that puts the
readers first.

~~~
estel
I've seen a few decent attempts at this. Particularly the Guardian [1].

[1] <http://www.guardian.co.uk/>

------
JonnieCache
Sorry guys, but the death of the newspaper is largely due to the freefall in
advertising revenues, rather than a list of webdev pet peeves.

------
cafard
No, Craigslist is why your newspaper is dying, Craigslist and all the other
on-line advertising

------
idiot900
This is why I gladly pay for my online subscription to the Financial Times.
It's a high quality newspaper and the website is actually relatively pleasant
to deal with.

------
MatthewPhillips
Isn't SEO the reason they don't link in the body of their content? I recall
reading that Engadget only links to itself for this reason a while back.

------
Yesh
Wish there was a foursquare for news papers?

I was a long time free subscriber of nytimes.com but now after the pay wall I
switched to wsj.com because it clearly states the articles that are locked
(removes guessing).

------
Jarred
I don't think this is it --> <http://i.imgur.com/y7qWP.png>

------
danso
Why is it that a critique of newspapers in which the very first criticism is
about not linking to source material fails itself to link to the papers which
it rips on?

Actually I don't want a link to the actual live offense, but a link to a full
screenshot of the entire visible page seems to be warranted. Because I'd like
to see a) the context of these screwups (in the first panel, is it actual
content produced by the paper, or wire material in which re-editing presents
other logistical obstacles?) and b) I want to know what paper made the alleged
screwup. Because if the article has a nice link bait headline slamming the
entirety of the news industry, yet uses examples from the Podunk Gazette and
similarly sized papers, that's also worth knowing.

------
jacques_chester
While these things are annoying, the death of newspapers is down to economics.

Most folk don't realise that the cover price of a newspaper doesn't even pay
for the whole cost of printing.

[http://clubtroppo.com.au/2009/06/02/whats-killing-the-
newspa...](http://clubtroppo.com.au/2009/06/02/whats-killing-the-newspaper-it-
isnt-bloggers/)

------
molecule
really? critiquing websites via text presented in comic sans in one huge
image?

this is why your blog is IMAGE NOT FOUND

------
jessedhillon
Has anyone tried to read SFGate, the online division of the SF Chronicle?

The stories are good enough -- the comments are a trash heap and a den of
cluelessness, and this has been the case for years. The editors have done
nothing to curb the nastiness, which even Chron bloggers themselves have
complained about.[0] The least they could do is post the geographical region
the commenters post from, as it really surprises me to think that there is so
much negativity in SF. I don't even need to entertain the idea of them using
the FB comments plugin.

My point in bringing this up is to add another data point to the "newspaper
editors are clueless about how to run a website" narrative. But it also
corroborates the idea that these websites are such messes because of their
extreme financial situation -- the trainwreck comment sections are also an
attraction, in that they are frequently so outrageous and inflammatory that
people feel compelled to respond, and somehow that equals dollars.

Personally, the spinelessness of the SFGate editors has turned me off to ever
giving them a penny. I've gone from reading it daily to only occasionally
reading articles which are forwarded to me, and then, resisting reading the
comments.

[0] [http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-
bin/blogs/cwnevius/detail?entry_id...](http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-
bin/blogs/cwnevius/detail?entry_id=86578)

~~~
andyking
The local press here in the UK seems to attract the same sort of vitriol -
there was a fairly humdrum story in my local paper the other day about
nuisance pigeons in the town centre being culled. It took about twenty minutes
for the first comment to appear suggesting the local unemployed and immigrants
instead be culled. More seriously, a friend of a friend died during a cycle
race a few weeks ago, and it didn't take long for messages to appear saying it
was his own fault for taking part.

I'm sure this is great entertainment for the five or ten people who sit on the
internet every day, waiting for stories to be published and then posting their
spiteful right-wing rants. But for the vast majority of readers, the thousands
who visit to look at the news and click on the ads, it's highly likely that
the unpleasant messages are offputting, are a blot on the good reputation of
the paper and discourage them from visiting again. I visit the sites to read
the news, as written by skilled, qualified journalists. I don't visit to read
the unmoderated opinions of "BigMan69" in "Britainistan."

I run a tight ship on the local public radio station site I'm in charge of,
which publishes local news stories daily--I encourage people to leave their
real name if it's at all possible, and anonymous hateful rants are swiftly
removed. Station staff also regularly engage in the comment discussions, which
seems to help people self-moderate. If they can see that they're being read
and responded to by the people writing the stories, they aren't as likely to
go off on rants.

~~~
keithpeter
Back before the intertubes in a different world, they would have been the ones
sending in letters to the editor written in purple ink and ALL IN BLOCK
CAPITALS. On pages ripped from a shorthand pad.

Nice clean clear Web site you have there.

------
ItsTrueYouKnow
Your newspaper is dying because it can't connect to its database?

------
danielhunt
I don't know what the hell that site is doing, but even when fully loaded, my
Android phone can't pan around it because its CPU is having a heart attack

