Topic: newspapers

More Newspaper Industry Musings

Dietrich Kappe, Friday, December 11, 2009 @ 4:05 pm

photo credit: dno1967

There's a good article over at the Guardian entitled Memories of a Paywall Pioneer by former Salon.com managing editor Scott Rosenberg. He reflects on Salon's experiences with various subscription and advertising strategies and muses on how Rupert Murdoch's move to charge for content is likely to play out. I especially like this succinct formulation of the bad business strategy being followed by "old media":

I start with the assumption that internet-based media will gradually come to dominate news distribution and consumption over the next, say, quarter-century. TV and print won't vanish but they will steadily lose readers, influence and revenue. They ought to be using their "legacy" revenue to fund the expansion of their online presence and experiments; instead, they seem today to be eager to squeeze their online operations for revenue to subsidize the old newsroom. It's the same kind of short-term thinking that has already allowed so many newcomers and interlopers to seize their readers and advertisers.

His point that once readers get it in their heads that your site is "closed" to them, they hardly ever come back, should give Rupert pause.

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Software Development

Destroying the Village — How not to Save the Newspaper Industry

Dietrich Kappe, Friday, November 27, 2009 @ 5:53 am

photo credit: Ian Muttoo

A whole lot of years ago, maybe back in 1992, I went over to Gary Becker's home to install a gopher client on his mac. I remember it was one of those brick macs, though those were already being supplanted by newer mac models. I also remember making a decision to install an early web browser on his mac, even though there wasn't a whole lot of content there compared to gopher. I talked his ear off about how it was so easy to put in actual links to other documents, sort of like citations that would take you to the other documents instantaneously. I thought at the time that this would change the very nature of how people would read and use written materials. Given how little text was actually online at the time, this seemed pretty far fetched. Witness that I got fired from a project in 1994 for having the temerity to suggest that Ameritech put it's Yellow Pages online. Well, it turns out that I was right.

Fast forward 16 years. Now that same Gary Becker is sharing a blog with the well known Federal Appeals Court judge Richard Posner. In a post from this past June 23rd, Judge Posner takes on the accelerating decline of the newspaper industry and proposes some legal solutions to the crisis. The nutgraph is this:

[I]t is much easier to create a web site and free ride on other sites than to create a print newspaper and free ride on other print newspapers, in part because of the lag in print publication; what is staler than last week's news. Expanding copyright law to bar online access to copyrighted materials without the copyright holder's consent, or to bar linking to or paraphrasing copyrighted materials without the copyright holder's consent, might be necessary to keep free riding on content financed by online newspapers from so impairing the incentive to create costly news-gathering operations that news services like Reuters and the Associated Press would become the only professional, nongovernmental sources of news and opinion.

Judge Posner's assessment of the situation and his proposed solution constitute a cognitive, practical and freedom of speech failure.

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Software Development

Everyblock, Another Missed Opportunity for Newspapers

Bernhard Kappe, Thursday, December 18, 2008 @ 4:25 am

Earlier this year I attended TECH cocktail's first Chicago conference. They've been filling a much needed local networking role for technology entrepreneurs, and their first conference here was both well attended and had a number of good speakers, with a heavy Chicago focus, from Threadless' Harper Reed & Scott VanDenPlas to Everyblock's Adrian Holovaty.

Recent events in the newspaper industry got me thinking about some of what Adrian has been saying on the subject.

Adrian, as some of you may know, developed an influential early mashup called chicagocrime.org that combined crime data from the Chicago police department with Google maps, and after a stint with the Washington Post, started Everyblock with a grant from the Knight Foundation.

Everyblock takes the concept of chicagocrime.org to it's logical conclusion, as a geographic filter that aims to collect all the news and civic goings-on that have happened recently in your city, and make it simple for you to keep track of news in particular areas. They collect information ranging from crime data, restaurant inspections and building permits to news stories and craigslist lost and found posts to help you answer the question "what's happening in my neighborhood?"

It's what newspapers everywhere have been trying to tackle with their hyperlocal strategy, but from a different perspective: The data is just as important as the story, if not more so.

That local data is what Newspapers are in a better position to collect than almost anyone else, if they made it their focus.  Instead it's a means to an end for them, an end that is rapidly looking grimmer and grimmer.  Meanwhile, folks for whom data collection, aggregation and synthesis are the end and not a means (like Everyblock,  or business focused aggregators like IMS, Lexis Nexis, Factiva, Choicepoint and Thomson) look to have a much brighter present and future.  Just another missed opportunity for Newspapers, I guess.

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disruption