More To The Story (Or: Timing Can – Unfortunately – Be Everything)
Posted Jul. 31, 2009 by Casey Flanagan
Filed under: Trends
The fate of newspapers has been reported on and debated ad nauseam. Time will tell, but itʼs safe to say that in its current form the newspaper model of today faces significant challenges.
And the newspaper industry is, no doubt, to blame. An article by Jack Shafer from earlier this year made a compelling case that newspapers shouldnʼt be surprised by any of this. As early as the 1970s, newspapers “considered themselves vulnerable to new entrants and were worrying aloud to anyone who would listen about falling readership.” That said, once technologies – like long forgotten videotex – were determined to pose no threat to the newsprint model, papers were happy to move on. Too much defense, not enough offense. But thatʼs another subject for another post.
Two interesting perspectives that have seen fewer headlines:
The first is a Malcolm Gladwell thought experiment: “What if we had started with everything online, and paper was only invented five years ago?” Weʼd no longer have to “lug our laptops to the breakfast table every morning.” The new solution would be lighter and more portable. Said another way, being first isnʼt always best.
The second is from a Bill Simmonsʼ podcast on espn.com. I realize that this is not the epicenter of leading business thought. But the observation is insightful. (Side note: Simmons is also responsible for one of my favorite, yet-to-be-established positions: The VP of Common Sense
.) At the time that newspapers were trying to figure out how to
monetize the online experience, nobody (not you, not me, not anybody) was comfortable buying things online. If The New York Times was just going online today, the proposition of a daily paid subscription would be *much* more palatable than it was in 1995.
I get my news online. We donʼt subscribe to any papers at my household. So Iʼm no newspaper-apologist. But the easy answer (Newspapers are dumb! The internet is better!) rarely gives the full perspective.
One Response to “More To The Story (Or: Timing Can – Unfortunately – Be Everything)”
Posted on Jul 31, 2009 by Andy
Seems fair, but I’m still not convinced that the revenue model behind even electronic media will allow it to thrive. What if electronic and paper print media as we know them today BOTH fail? As an advertiser it just seems to make sense to stick with a well targeted search ad rather than a more inspecific banner on a more general website. Heck, I’ve been mentally blocking out banner ads now for nearly 15 years. I’m not convinced any journalism will be revenue generating in any meaningful way in the future. Which begs the question, what is going to happen to the quality of media/reporting if margins get continually sqeezed? Will all reporting be the Wikipedia equivalent where all information needs to be taken with an even larger bit of skeptisism? I think the answer could be yes, which scares me. I personally (and I believe we as a society) rely heavily on quality jouralism. I remain skepical for the future.
Of course, a more liberated and less constrained press is the flip side. Perhaps it’ll develop. But with news sites like Drudge and ever more blogs gaining more credibility, who knows who to trust anymore?