“If you want to know why newspapers are in such trouble, the most salient fact is this: Printing presses are terrifically expensive to set up and to run. This bit of economics, normal since Gutenberg, limits competition while creating positive returns to scale for the press owner, a happy pair of economic effects that feed on each other.”
“With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.”
“Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.“
Perhaps it is not the newspaper model, per se, that needs replaced. Perhaps it is the components of that model that need innovation: printing, distribution, and journalism. Let’s examine how.
PRINTING
DISTRIBUTION
JOURNALISM
What would it look like? Imagine the ultimate newspaper. It would have articles, editorials, advertising and other content that is custom tailored to your beliefs, lifestyle, affiliations and preferences. If you like to keep abreast of world news, so be it. But if you are also liberal-minded, these same articles would have a liberal bent to them. If you live in Cincinnati, but root for the Chicago Bears, your sports section would have Bears news, not Bengals. Even the obituaries would be connected to you and your world. If a great-uncle of your college roommate passes away, you would get to read about it. Your entire newspaper would be not only filled with the news and information that is relevant to you, but it is also written in a tone and orientation that matches your view of the world. For newspapers, this means instead of printing millions of copies of one version of the daily paper, they now have to print a million versions, one for each of a million different readers. Wow!
A custom newspaper has advantages for the advertisers as well. It is the advertisers, not the subscribers, after all, who subsidize journalism. With custom newspapers, advertisers could target their ads in line with the keyword tags so that the ad appeals to that subscriber’s interests and values. My bet is advertisers would pay more for this with the promise of more effective ad placement. More money on the table leaves more room for micropayments to journalists. The loop is closed.
As Shirky notes, “No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need.”
* “Pandora for the News” idea courtesy of David Showers, Washington, D.C.
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Nicely put. In addition to the innovation necessary to change the real distribution/collection/creation cost structures, most of today's news organizations are also hampered by financial leveraging that left them ill prepared to take such necessary steps. So unfortunately the majority of today's brands are probably going to go the way of the old TV set mfgs. Brand names bought and sold by nimbler, smarter competitors.
Fred, thanks. Interesting insight. Given the highly leveraged nature of this industry, that usually means one thing: consolidation. My guess, though, is that it will take more than a handful of struggling newspapers to join together. They will need some outside players, too, from other parts of the value chain...fresh money.
I don't think the title of your article matches the content lol. Just kidding, mainly because I had some doubts after reading the article.