Lots of fascinating commentary the last few days on the demise of print media:
Tim O’Reilly: SF Chronicle in Trouble
Jessica Guynn: InfoWorld To Fold Magazine
David Lazarus: Here, let me throw myself under this bus
David Lazarus: Gets up from under bus, throws himself in front of train
Print media is what it is. I can’t imagine anyone will be printing news on paper twenty years from now in the industrialized world, so the only question is when it will go away, not if. At some point, these circulation numbers will begin to vaporize. And when it’s over for the New York Times, I can’t imagine many others will be around, either.
But forgetting the print part of print media for a second, there’s the question of whether they can survive in some other form. The more proactive publications are trying new things, and will keep the stuff that works.
Hopefully, the publications that try really dumb things like charging for content will stop before it puts them out of business (Doc explains why - no one will pay, and oh yeah, the search engines ignore your content).
Newspapers need to get over the mentality that they and they alone are qualified to gather, analyze and write news (see Lazarus’ second post above for their side of the argument). Bloggers as a group are just kicking their ass all over the place, even when it comes to doing real, live journalism stuff. Like talking to sources and digging for a story. Most print journalists are 9-5 types, and many are union can’t easily be fired. That makes them lazy (I would be).
What you get if you blog for a while is a sense of how valuable your readers are, and not because they view and click on ads.
Here’s an example - If a newspaper is writing about a startup and the writer is fairly sure there aren’t any direct competitors, they’ll still write “Snoozy, one of the leading startups in putting people to sleep” rather than “this is the first company to do this, and the only one so far.” They do this because they must never write an incorrect sentence. So instead of figuring out the truth, they will usually just write a noncommittal sentence. I never really saw this until I started blogging. Now, half the sentences in the average newspaper article jump out at me like they are highlighted - watered down, ass covering statements of nothing.
Now, I’ll write the latter if I can’t find any competitors after talking to a couple of sources and doing basic research. And even though startups are my area of knowledge, there’s a very good chance that statement will be incorrect.
But I write it anyway. Then I watch the comments like a hawk. And in an hour I have 95%+ certainty if I’m right or not.
My readers do the final fact check for me. And if I’m wrong, I correct immediately.
Now I didn’t go to journalism school, and I’m certain that my method for fact checking will horrify those who did. No one taught me this, I just figured it out on my own.
When I write, I write to learn more than I write to teach. I am not preaching to the masses, I am inviting them to have a conversation with me, where I get to set the topic and have the first word. We go from there.
Doc has more words of wisdom in his post that I linked to above. Things like linking to other publications and bloggers, linking back to your own old content, etc.
But I still believe that it will be difficult for newspapers to stay around. Their best and brightest will keep leaving to do their own thing. In the past this was impossible, because there was no way for them to make a living. But today, a visit to Wordpress.com and a phone call to FM publishing gets you your publishing platform and your ad sales group. All you have to do then is write good content, and the audience will come.
Hopefully Lazarus will realize this before he’s the only one left at the Chronicle.
I agree with everything you say 100 percent, but differ with you about your prediction that newspapers won’t be printed 20 years from now.
There are at least two reasons I say this. One is something I’ve thought about for a long time, and sent you a copy of before your “debate” with Tim Bray. I posit that Web 2.0 is really about the web finding its own true voice.
What I didn’t note then was that media theorists speculated that each new technology would mean the death of the older ones. Radio was supposed to do in print, then TV was supposed to mean the end of both.
So my first reason for doubting the end of print is that there are so many who have predicted that for nearly 100 years now.
The second reason is more of a “why.” I wasn’t able to find a good link, this was as close as I could get.
Basically, the brain processes the reflected light of print differently than the projected light from a monitor. Having no printed words would deprive the brain of much deeper and more meaningful interaction with the words.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m a Web 2.0 entrepreneur, I spend nearly all my productive time in front of projected images of words. But I also spent much of this weekend with a book that affected me much more deeply than anything on any screen could. The same has happened with printed newspaper stories.
I also sit down each morning and read the funnies with my son over breakfast, and read him printed books before bed. I know that’s done less today than it had been in the past, but those printed-word pathways are already now set in his brain (he’s 3) so I expect he’ll want to have printed words around him his whole life.
He’s not alone, so that’s why I think we’ll have newspapers 20 years from now.
Your humble typist,
-Scott
Most print journalists are lazy? Please stay with subjects you know most about, like rewriting press releases and waxing unpoetically about your inflated sense of self-worth. Nobody taught me this game either, Mikey, and I can write and report rings about you amigo.
Here’s something else. Newspaper writers often pull stuff out of their ass, fighting that daily deadline. Against the clock, there’s no time to revise. A blogger can click “publish” any time of the day, and it’s online. And like Mike said, he can click “Edit” too. Newspapers can’t do that! As they say in cyberspace: LOL!
mike,
as a former print journalist, I agree with a lot of your arguments. But you undermine them greatly by making statements like: “Most print journalists are 9-5 types, and many are union can’t easily be fired. That makes them lazy.” This is clearly based on your own personal “blogger vs. MSM” issues and not on facts. Have you ever spent time in a newsroom? Apparently not. For all that’s wrong with newspapers, lack of motivated, hard working reporters is not one of them. Sure there are lazy reporters. But should we judge all bloggers by the worst of the lot?
While papers that focus on national and international news may be in trouble, I don’t see the good local papers going away any time soon. In many places the 2 main sources of reliable local news are the local paper and the local TV news.
Local TV news just doesn’t have a lot of time to do in-depth reporting, and the TV news format discourages complex stories. For good information on what the county council is up to, for example, the local newspaper is still the best source.
If you get a paper that works *with* bloggers, that embraces them as part of the news-o-sphere, so much the better. I personally subscribe to my local dead tree paper, The State (www.thestate.com), and I feel like I’m a more well-informed person because of it.
Not enough reach vs. CNET Networks’ Business sites.
Doubt Infoworld will succeed online. One example is that CNET Networks Business sites: http://www.BNET.com , http://www.ZDNet.com , http://www.TechRepublic.com , and News.com serve more business technology decision makers than the COMBINED REACH of InfoWorld, eWeek, Information Week, AND ComputerWorld online.
I agree with a lot of this commentary too. Newspapers know the time is near for print to die entirely.. but I don’t think it’s fair to equate “print” with “journalism,” the death of which would spell the beginning of the end for a true democracy.
I also don’t agree with the bloggers vs. journalists mentality that so many bloggers naively fall prey to. The problem with newspapers has way more to do with a struggling old-world business model trying to find its way in a new world than it does with what you call “lazy reporters.” Give me a break. Lazy reporters?? Do you have any idea the layers of editing and fact checking a story goes through at a typical publication? Do you have any clue what kinds of salaries reporters make? It takes a person of special character and passion to work 12-hour days on a shoestring budget.
I think blogging is great and it’s really infusing a lot more conversation and two-way roads in media that is much needed. But even bloggers have agendas. Actually I’d go so far as to say that bloggers have much bigger agendas than a reporter making $30,000 a year for a byline. I think if you surveyed readers you’d find that far more distrust the word of the blogger than you are willing to admit.
“It takes a person of special character and passion to work 12-hour days on a shoestring budget.”
Then they might make good bloggers, tweaking code deep into the night. But even after your 1 millionth reader, how many of them clicked an ad? How much ad money did you get to keep? Then there’s self-employment tax, federal income tax, state income tax…
But just maybe, this fat pinata print monster hits the ground and the piranha come to feed on the bloody candy: ever-rising ad rates.
I’ve never understood all these XYZ-Is-Dead-things.
See my small cartoon:
http://geekandpoke.typepad.com/geekandpoke/2007/03/the_xyzisdeadma.html
Bye,
Oliver
Just as a qui
Two bits:
1. Your comment about your fact-checking strategy, well, that’s easy for you to say and do. The internet industry is a bit peculiar as far as communication goes. Heck yeah other internet startups in the snoozing industry are going to let you know you didn’t write about them — internet-industry information travels to its audience faster and with more success than any other information out there.
2. I work in online news, and my cubicle is right across the cube-aisle from where the reporter-cubes start. Want to know who’s lazy? It ain’t the union folk, that’s for sure… (my guess is it’s the ad folk upstairs)
I have a feeling I will still read my WSJ every day 20 years from now on paper. Bloggers like you are so proud of killing newspapers, but you have had nothing to do with it.
Craigslist is killing newspapers, and suddenly both old media and new media are in the same boat earning very little from adsense and FM.
If you are a “lifestyle” blogger, meaning as an individual doing everything you can make more money for yourself than you could as an employee of a newspaper, every day you should thank Craig Newmark for making it possible.
Evolve or die. News organizations will survive, whether tethered to ink-on-paper or not. Old attitudes may need to take an early retirement package, of course.
The bulk of blogs are (or is it is? where’s the proofreader? oh, wait a minute, there isn’t one) crap. How many blog posts are mere regurgitations of regurgitations, links upon links, sixteen-degrees-of-separation from the original source. We’re all (or perhaps many are) guilty of it to some degree. How much original reporting can a lone wolf do on their own?
Sure there’s great solo stuff out there today. No doubt about that. But it would (lets not say will) be a sad world if (not when) the great news organizations put it to bed for the very last time.
With the continuing development thin, flexible and inexpensive displays, it wouldn’t surprise me if traditional printed media finds a simulated counterpart in the coming years for live content publishing.
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