DISQUS

Charlie Terry · 3 months ago

Amen! I was at a conference obstinably for saving newspapers. When I said newspapers are dead as a business model the dean of the sponsoring journalism school yelled at me: "AND WHO DO YOU THINK SHOULD PAY FOR THE PRINTING PRESSES AND TRUCKS"! And trucks...that really got me. I informed him that consumers have never paid for news but we do pay for delivery then we read for free what we want. It's just that the newspaper delivery model is fatally flawed in this day of infinite and essentially free bandwidth, storage and cpu. Rupert recently said that the Internet model was not going to be around long!

gordon Macmillan · 3 months ago

Good piece although it is unfair to say newspapers no longer break news. They do Whether its the New York Times and General McChrystal or the Daily Telegraph in the UK with expenses scandals. They still have power and space.

While I thinks subscriptions are far easier and option, no one thought micropayments for music would be such a hit and look at Apple followed by others.

graubart · 3 months ago

Thanks, Gordon.
To clarify, what I said was "Newspapers no longer “break” news in print", though I probably could have been clear in the way that I said it.
Newspapers absolutely break news; it's just that they do so on their websites, so the traditional experience of reading the morning newspaper to learn about these events has disappeared. Instead, newspapers have to change their role so that print provides insights, rather than breaking news in that forum.
Many newspapers still provide stock price quotes and sports box scores in the printed paper, yet I don't know anyone who turns to newspapers for that type of information any more.

caraerickson · 3 months ago

Agree! We all need to keep making the distinction between the newspaper industry and journalism; the latter is thriving and the j- schools keep increasing their enrollments, despite the massive re-evaluation in the business models for news. As one who spent a chunk of my early career at the NY Times, I do believe it is one of the few brands that can survive a paid model, although I appreciate the balancing act that they face in figuring out how to optimize ad revenues and monetize traffic while also maximizing a subscription or online paid content model. Even in our own household (heavy news junkies) we're schizophrenic about how we want to read, when, and at what price, and we've all been experimenting with this. Another folly is the dismal record of collaboration within the newspaper industry; it may need its consortia (AP, etc) more than ever for the industry to succeed in whatever new form it takes in the years ahead.