"Get yer newspaper! Read all about it!"
So sayeth the town crier from years past.
Click. Click.
So sayeth the keyboard from today's generation.
The age of information has brought around a type of economic "creative destruction" for the print media world: as we saw with MP3's and the iPod, audio media and the medium for which they were played on has turned the corner for CDs and CD players (anyone remember when CDs were the big bright idea of the future?)
Don't get me wrong, I am all for the digital age. I'm a "click, click" kind of person. You will rarely catch me watching the news or flipping through a newspaper on a regular basis (it's mainly because one was laying around and I felt like looking at the ads for LCDs and furniture, and of course wanted some black ink transferred to my hands and clothing). Checking out MSN.com or (thanks to TINST 207 at UW Tacoma) news on Google just saves me more time to check out the news I'm interested in and move on to my day. There are only so many hours I've got to live, right?
But there is some remiss in the passing of the journalistic torch to this new publishing outlet we call the World Wide Web. Some see it as the correlation between society's increasing illiteracy (http://blog.news-record.com/staff/jrblog/2008/03/reading.shtml); others as the next great opportunity.
Being immediate, easily distributed, shareable, updateable, and something almost anyone can publish on, the Web seems a better choice. From an advertising perspective, what better way to pitch your product than to pull up a list of metrics on who is looking at your material (number of "hits", demographics on readers, targeted marketing based on metatags in the material, etc)? Much easier to grab precious advertising dollars (those elusive monies that make the print media go 'round) when you can say "3 million people from ages 18-25 visit my site per month, 300,000 of those people like dogs, and 100,000 of those dog lovers buy dog food at organic stores, and then again 25,000 of them live within 10 miles of your organic dog food store" instead of "if you take 2.2 and multiply it by my distribution amount you'll come up with an estimate of about how many people might be reading and interested in local news."
So, how will the newspaper play out in the future? Who knows. It will definitely have to evolve to stay alive (here's a creative thought on it, the "Venetian screen" http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/10/the-future-of-n.html).
PS. The below article had some good insights into this topic. I cut out an excerpt, but you can follow the link for the entire post:
"From Print to Digital: What Changes, What’s Lost
The nature of a newspaper, both as a medium for information and as a business, changes when it loses its physical form and shifts to the Internet. It gets read in a different way, and it makes money in a different way. A print newspaper provides an array of content—local stories, national and international reports, news analyses, editorials and opinion columns, photographs, sports scores, stock tables, TV listings, cartoons, and a variety of classified and display advertising—all bundled together into a single product. People subscribe to the bundle, or buy it at a newsstand, and advertisers pay to catch readers’ eyes as they thumb through the pages. The publisher’s goal is to make the entire package as attractive as possible to a broad set of readers and advertisers. The newspaper as a whole is what matters, and as a product it’s worth more than the sum of its parts."
Complete article at http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2008/04/the-great-unbundling-newspapers-the-net/.
So sayeth the town crier from years past.
Click. Click.
So sayeth the keyboard from today's generation.
The age of information has brought around a type of economic "creative destruction" for the print media world: as we saw with MP3's and the iPod, audio media and the medium for which they were played on has turned the corner for CDs and CD players (anyone remember when CDs were the big bright idea of the future?)
Don't get me wrong, I am all for the digital age. I'm a "click, click" kind of person. You will rarely catch me watching the news or flipping through a newspaper on a regular basis (it's mainly because one was laying around and I felt like looking at the ads for LCDs and furniture, and of course wanted some black ink transferred to my hands and clothing). Checking out MSN.com or (thanks to TINST 207 at UW Tacoma) news on Google just saves me more time to check out the news I'm interested in and move on to my day. There are only so many hours I've got to live, right?
But there is some remiss in the passing of the journalistic torch to this new publishing outlet we call the World Wide Web. Some see it as the correlation between society's increasing illiteracy (http://blog.news-record.com/staff/jrblog/2008/03/reading.shtml); others as the next great opportunity.
Being immediate, easily distributed, shareable, updateable, and something almost anyone can publish on, the Web seems a better choice. From an advertising perspective, what better way to pitch your product than to pull up a list of metrics on who is looking at your material (number of "hits", demographics on readers, targeted marketing based on metatags in the material, etc)? Much easier to grab precious advertising dollars (those elusive monies that make the print media go 'round) when you can say "3 million people from ages 18-25 visit my site per month, 300,000 of those people like dogs, and 100,000 of those dog lovers buy dog food at organic stores, and then again 25,000 of them live within 10 miles of your organic dog food store" instead of "if you take 2.2 and multiply it by my distribution amount you'll come up with an estimate of about how many people might be reading and interested in local news."
So, how will the newspaper play out in the future? Who knows. It will definitely have to evolve to stay alive (here's a creative thought on it, the "Venetian screen" http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/10/the-future-of-n.html).
PS. The below article had some good insights into this topic. I cut out an excerpt, but you can follow the link for the entire post:
"From Print to Digital: What Changes, What’s Lost
The nature of a newspaper, both as a medium for information and as a business, changes when it loses its physical form and shifts to the Internet. It gets read in a different way, and it makes money in a different way. A print newspaper provides an array of content—local stories, national and international reports, news analyses, editorials and opinion columns, photographs, sports scores, stock tables, TV listings, cartoons, and a variety of classified and display advertising—all bundled together into a single product. People subscribe to the bundle, or buy it at a newsstand, and advertisers pay to catch readers’ eyes as they thumb through the pages. The publisher’s goal is to make the entire package as attractive as possible to a broad set of readers and advertisers. The newspaper as a whole is what matters, and as a product it’s worth more than the sum of its parts."
Complete article at http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2008/04/the-great-unbundling-newspapers-the-net/.
2 comments:
People often ask me to predict how long newspapers can survive in the Internet age. Ten years ago I believed newspapers would last another five years. Clearly I am not qualified to make this sort of prediction. But being unqualified has never dampened my enthusiasm for publicly embarrassing myself. I think it’s time to take another run at this prediction.
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williamgeorge
Search Engine Optimization
I am more of a "click click" kind of person myself. I found your post about the future of news interesting. When wanting to know the news I want to find out what I am interested in and find it in a matter of seconds rather then having to skim through an article in the paper.
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