After the Seatte Post-Intelligencer folded, after 146 years of existence as Seattle's leading paper, after the Rocky Mountain News went kaput in Denver, and with the Tuscon Citizen about to join the choir invisibule, many are in a panic.
It's not a failure in the country. It's not that the economy's current state is causing this (well, it doesn't deserve most of the blame)--it helped this happen, yes, but it didn't directly cause it.
You did.
Well, not you, unless you live in Seattle, Denver or Tuscon, but the growing trend in online media, such as the NY Times, and the Guardian in the UK, both of which now offer an API (Application Programming Interface), which is basically a bunch of code and documents so you can write your own code and use their content in your own nefarious ways, is for online delivery or other such means of content distribution, such as RSS Feeds (like how you're subscribing to all of your blogs and tweets and the like).
This is not surprising. Who wants to pay US$7.50 for the nineteen metric tonnes version of the NY Times when you can get all but all of it delivered to your Inbox or your Feed Reader for free? (Okay--little clarification. You can get most of the Sunday Times for free, just not the...okay, okay. You can get some of it on Sundays, just not the cool parts the Liberal Intelligencia drool over). And other papers are learning the lesson that online is just cheaper than using (and wasting) paper.
Ever wonder what happens to unsold newspapers? They get pulped. Except for the front page, which is sent back to the publisher so the POS (Point of Sale--get your mind out of the gutter!) can be reimbursed for most, or all, depending, of their wholesale cost as a retailer. The rest (i.e. everything except that front page) is recycled in a very costly process that gives back far less paper than goes in. In addition, advertisers are refunded for underruns. Say you advertise for a million copies, and only 900,000 are sold. Yep, most papers refund that money, and it hurts their bottom line.
So the loss of newspapers, especially in this age of immediate-availability media, is not surprising. Stop stocking dry goods and building bomb shelters. It's the Internet. I'd bet Tim Berners-Lee predicted this fifteen years ago. No, I'm not looking that one up.
But, seriously, newspapers found that they can make more money publishing online, which saves them the cost of printing, pulping, and all that jazz, they can do all the cool Search Engine Optimization tricks (SEO stuff) to make sure they get more hits, and they save money. The mistake made by the papers in Seattle, Denver, and Tucson is that they didn't see this coming and were way too conservative with their business model, so they, like all dinosaurs, went extinct. It's economics 101 meets the Dodo meets Darwinism.
Should we be scared? So long as the nineteen metric tonnes Sunday Times still comes out in print form, no.
On another note, very much related to the last paragraph, the Times needs to follow the Guardian's lead on this--publish everything electronically. Micropayments on a per-page basis, as the Webcomics world taught us, are a hideous, glorious failure. The NY Times needs to learn that they will make more money by putting it all out there, and that they will make far more money by giving away content.
It seems strange, yes, but giving your content away for nothing lets you focus more on quality, more on advertising and targeting and, yes, SEO, but it also saves money and generates more Net income (literally. No pun), not Gross. The right optimization, the right content, and the right ads means that you'll double, triple, maybe quadruple repeat visits, and you'll make more money and be happy and smile more. It's also good for your health. Literally. Less stress, which...etc. etc. etc.
So, the world isn't ending just because Dinosaur Newspapers are going extinct. It's just embracing a technological revolution that moved faster than they did.
It's not a failure in the country. It's not that the economy's current state is causing this (well, it doesn't deserve most of the blame)--it helped this happen, yes, but it didn't directly cause it.
You did.
Well, not you, unless you live in Seattle, Denver or Tuscon, but the growing trend in online media, such as the NY Times, and the Guardian in the UK, both of which now offer an API (Application Programming Interface), which is basically a bunch of code and documents so you can write your own code and use their content in your own nefarious ways, is for online delivery or other such means of content distribution, such as RSS Feeds (like how you're subscribing to all of your blogs and tweets and the like).
This is not surprising. Who wants to pay US$7.50 for the nineteen metric tonnes version of the NY Times when you can get all but all of it delivered to your Inbox or your Feed Reader for free? (Okay--little clarification. You can get most of the Sunday Times for free, just not the...okay, okay. You can get some of it on Sundays, just not the cool parts the Liberal Intelligencia drool over). And other papers are learning the lesson that online is just cheaper than using (and wasting) paper.
Ever wonder what happens to unsold newspapers? They get pulped. Except for the front page, which is sent back to the publisher so the POS (Point of Sale--get your mind out of the gutter!) can be reimbursed for most, or all, depending, of their wholesale cost as a retailer. The rest (i.e. everything except that front page) is recycled in a very costly process that gives back far less paper than goes in. In addition, advertisers are refunded for underruns. Say you advertise for a million copies, and only 900,000 are sold. Yep, most papers refund that money, and it hurts their bottom line.
So the loss of newspapers, especially in this age of immediate-availability media, is not surprising. Stop stocking dry goods and building bomb shelters. It's the Internet. I'd bet Tim Berners-Lee predicted this fifteen years ago. No, I'm not looking that one up.
But, seriously, newspapers found that they can make more money publishing online, which saves them the cost of printing, pulping, and all that jazz, they can do all the cool Search Engine Optimization tricks (SEO stuff) to make sure they get more hits, and they save money. The mistake made by the papers in Seattle, Denver, and Tucson is that they didn't see this coming and were way too conservative with their business model, so they, like all dinosaurs, went extinct. It's economics 101 meets the Dodo meets Darwinism.
Should we be scared? So long as the nineteen metric tonnes Sunday Times still comes out in print form, no.
On another note, very much related to the last paragraph, the Times needs to follow the Guardian's lead on this--publish everything electronically. Micropayments on a per-page basis, as the Webcomics world taught us, are a hideous, glorious failure. The NY Times needs to learn that they will make more money by putting it all out there, and that they will make far more money by giving away content.
It seems strange, yes, but giving your content away for nothing lets you focus more on quality, more on advertising and targeting and, yes, SEO, but it also saves money and generates more Net income (literally. No pun), not Gross. The right optimization, the right content, and the right ads means that you'll double, triple, maybe quadruple repeat visits, and you'll make more money and be happy and smile more. It's also good for your health. Literally. Less stress, which...etc. etc. etc.
So, the world isn't ending just because Dinosaur Newspapers are going extinct. It's just embracing a technological revolution that moved faster than they did.
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Re: The fate of old newspapers:
ReplyDeleteA.P.: I love the story about the death of the paper newspaper industry, but I wanted to send you some other information as well. I stumbled across this while I was watching "How It's Made." Apparently, cellulose insulation, which is not only fire resistant, and has a high energy saving rating, is also made up of approximately 90% recycled wood fibers such as newspapers. While this doesn't bring back trees that have already been knocked down, it certainly puts them to a more "Green" use.
-Cholo