

How to save the news - ilamont
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/04/how-to-save-the-news/8095/1/

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ilamont
That's the official title, but I would rather have entered "How Google views
the news industry". There's very little in this piece about saving it, and in
my opinion Google (as described in the article) is missing a few important
points on the monetization picture:

1) Relatively few local businesses are savvy enough or sufficiently interested
in online display advertising, even though Google (and Facebook, ESPN, etc.)
have tried their darndest to make it easy for them. The only way most
newspapers and other local publications have been able to sign up local
businesses for local print campaigns is by employing boots on the ground to
cold call and visit in person these companies, and pressure them into buying
ads.

2) There is a huge oversupply of online information sources for people to turn
to, including news sources from all over the world, company websites, social
networks, forums, etc. The increase in the amount of available pages on which
to serve ads, combined with the decreased amount of time that people will
spend on news sites, will greatly reduce the price of news pages that contain
display advertising. The article did not address this fundamental problem with
the online news industry going forward.

One other thing: Eric Schmidt was quoted as saying, _In the future model,
you’ll have subscriptions to information sources that will have advertisements
embedded in them, like a newspaper. You’ll just leave out the print part. I am
quite sure that this will happen._

To me, this seems like a 1990s vision of the future of news -- basically
duplicate online what newspapers are doing in print. While this is already
happening, it's not working. Considering the two points listed above and the
many other online trends working against the news industry, I don't think the
industry will shift to a successful version of the vision described by
Schmidt.

