

Henry Blodget: Why Newspapers Are Screwed - pg
http://www.alleyinsider.com/2007/08/its-easy-to-say.html

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mynameishere
I once suggested on some blog that the death of newspapers would be tragic
because bloggers are almost all writing editorials (and often much better than
editors do) but almost never peform reportage. Of course, I got _flamed_. Of
course bloggers are reporters.

But "Reporting" isn't blogging. It isn't even "writing". It's going out,
learning about a foreign subject in a day, driving/walking/tramping all over
the place, interviewing multiple people, establishing government, police,
underworld contacts, getting double and triple confirmation on key facts,
adhering to rigorous journalistic ethical standards, etc. That's reporting and
it isn't fun, and almost no bloggers do it--just like almost no open source
writers write accounting software.

The first fatality will be local news. God knows why anybody subscribes to
local papers, but they do serve the purpose of keeping an eye on local
politicians, who have a tendency towards corruption. Once the local rags are
gone, I dread what will happen to municipal governments...

Does the average blogger want to sit through the Lions' club chicken dinner
every Sunday in order to hear the latest about councilman X. Didn't think
so...

~~~
far33d
For once, myname, I'm actually going to agree with you. Blogging is, on the
side of techcrunch, basically the equivalent of rewriting a press release (ok
ok, sometimes he does some editorializing and "reporting" but not usually). On
the side of talkingpointsmemo, it's an ongoing "I watch CSPAN and
editorialize".

In the middle is what is being lost without news organizations. I'm not saying
that it can't exist, it just doesn't exist yet. To fund this kind of reporting
(which takes time and people) you need a revenue model that can support it and
you need that journalistic ethic - the one that tells you that losing money on
something is ok because it serves the public good. This ethical stance is the
one basically only left amongst major newspaper organizations (the national TV
news used to have it but they forgot it years ago).

------
dood
News moving from print to web is a fundamental shift in the nature of the
market, which brings many opportunities for growth by embracing the realities
of the net, and a high chance of failure by ignoring those realities. Some
thoughts:

The focus of the business needs to adapt to what is demanded online: giving
people want they want that other sites don't give them, and conversely not
providing things done better elsewhere. There is plenty of room for
innovation: treating news more like data
[<http://www.holovaty.com/blog/archive/2006/09/06/0307>], exploiting archives,
focus on analysis... In short, losing the mindset of transferring print to
web, sticking to core competencies, extending and innovating where
appropriate, and ditching the junk.

The organisation of the business may be able to move from the monolithic style
to a more networked model, with more freelancing, syndication and aggregation,
more 'citizen reporters' and a blurred line between bloggers and journalists.

The big newspapers have strong brands, and for the near future most people
don't want news from some random blog, or to have to trawl the net. NYT and
friends are well positioned to capture the new news business. But likely many
of them will refuse to change, or try and fail. So, a period of turmoil and
consolidation: many papers fold, reporters shift gears and go where the money
is online, the fit adapt and survive, the weak stagnate and die. But I think
all those reporters, all the net-folk wanting news, and a few savvy types to
put it together, will work it out in the end one way or another.

------
ivankirigin
There are two aspects to what we think of as a "newspaper": the physical
medium and the content - aggregation of mainstream print journalism.

The physical medium of paper is in many ways superior to our current
generation of displays. It won't go away until we have daylight readable
20000:1 contrast-ratio flexible displays. That doesn't mean the print-
newspaper business isn't doomed. Subscription numbers are in a nose dive, and
still have a long way to fall.

Yet the aggregation of mainstream print journalism via a different medium
still has a chance for success. The killer app for mainstream media is
producing quality content. Bloggers can't support foreign offices, for
example. Micheal Yon, Micheal Totten and other "embedded bloggers" are the
exceptions that prove the rule. Distributed locality where you don't need a
correspondent in, say, Beijing because Chinese Bloggers cover it, only
partially solves this. There is something to be said for an expert outsider
reporting news & trends.

So newspapers aren't necessarily screwed. If there were a way to directly
support good content proportional to its value, good written journalism
provided by online newspapers could survive and even thrive. The high hurdles
of subscription and premium content and the indirect path of ad revenue aren't
good enough. The article is right about the numbers.

I'm working on a startup that would allow a distributed set of people to
directly support online content. In this way, newspapers could evolve to
become aggregations of professional bloggers and journalists, providing high
quality content for a profit.

~~~
ivankirigin
These flexible video displays are amazing.
[http://www.sciencentral.com/articles/view.php3?article_id=21...](http://www.sciencentral.com/articles/view.php3?article_id=218392977)

------
far33d
This is damning analysis, and, I think, too conservative - I think the real
picture is worse for the NYT.

But, what should we, as a society, do about it? While blogs and other citizen
journalism have actually helped journalism, there is still significant value
in dedicated professional journalism. A significant amount of the raw material
that is discussed in the political and news blogs comes from the professional
sites.

Reporting is expensive and good reporting is hard - we'll be at a serious loss
if someone doesn't figure out a good way to pay for it.

~~~
nostrademons
I suspect we're seeing a classic disruptive innovation at work here. A new
technology (blogging) arrives that provides _lower_ quality than existing
markets demand, but does so at dramatically reduced cost. Existing solutions
have overshot the quality levels demanded by the marketplace - the average
American can't tell the difference between FOX News and the New York Times.
The existing market remains, but is dwarfed in size by the new market for low-
quality, shoot-from-the-hit journalism. Meanwhile, incumbents find they can't
meet the cost structures necessary to compete in the new market.

I suspect that the New York Times will go the way of the Betamax and the Lisp
Machine. It becomes a quaint relic of a technically superior age, but nobody
actually buys it anymore.

The good news is that once a disruptive innovation has taken over the market,
it usually improves to eventually match the original incumbent. So after a few
years of drek, we'll see the worst, most content-free blogs die off and be
replaced by people who put more thought into it. I suspect this is what'll
happen to the best reporters - after a few lean years, they'll start up blogs,
people will realize that those blogs give much better information than the
competition, and they'll end up making much more than they ever did while
working for a newspaper. After all, they don't have to share all the ad
revenue they generate with the print staff anymore.

Only the best reporters, though. It'll suck to be a mediocre reporter, just as
it sucks to be a mediocre real estate agent now and it sucked to be a mediocre
programmer in 2002. The field will probably shrink significantly, but that's
the whole point of capitalism - freeing up labor to work in fields where
they'll be more productive.

~~~
Jd
I'd like to think that is true but don't see evidence to support it. For
instance, blogs don't seem to solve the problem of aggregation, which requires
a special group of editors to evaluate content quality.

Consequently, I wouldn't expect the best reporters to be able to make more -
I'd expect the worst reporters to make the most money. That is, those that are
willing to dumb down/spice up the content so that it sells well. I call this
the News Corp/Myspace effect and don't see any effective counter.

Do you?

~~~
dstowell
The Economist has seen subscriptions rise recently, I think. People who want
quality journalism are willing to pay for it.

