5 Ways Newspapers Botched the Web 136
nicholas.m.carlson writes "Remember Knight-Ridder and AT&T's Viewtron from 1983? With a $900 terminal and $12 a month, you could access news from the Miami Herald and the New York Times, online shopping, banking and food delivery, via a 300-baud modem. After sinking $16 million a year into the project, Knight-Ridder shut it down in 1986. That's just the earliest of the 5 newspaper failures on the Web that Valleywag details in this post, writing: 'each tale ends the same way: A promising start, shuttered amid fear, uncertainty, and doubt.'"
Anonymous sources (Score:5, Insightful)
Well they've sure taken a strong lesson with the anonymity of the web. It seems every headline I read is based on an anonymous submission, a source who detailed events under the protection of anonymity, et cetera.
Not sure how we still call them news agencies.
Paper and gasoline-based dinosaurs (Score:5, Insightful)
Newspapers are paper and gasoline-based dinosaurs. This is what is causing their demise. It will soon cost too much to actually schlep all this stupid paper from the printing plant to the houses.
Newspapers traditionally do the following things:
- Inform their readers what is happening in the world.
- Inform what is happening in their city, town, or neighborhood.
- Provide a forum for information private sales and rentals, e.g. the classified ads.
- Provide a network for a common political viewpoints.
- Provide a central source for commercial ads of local retailers.
- Provide an accepted 'source of record' for local events and legal notices; weddings, bankruptcies, public legal notices, etc...
The web does all these things better:
- CNN, BBC, Digg, and Slashdot tell us what is happening in the world.
- CraigsList and eBay provide local ads and private sales information.
- Blog and political websites provide a forum for persons with shared political views.
Newspapers are still good at local city and neighborhood news and ads for local retailers. And the web has nothing for being a 'source of record' for legal notices, and all that stuff. Newspapers have permanence: once something is printed in the local paper it stays printed and accessable. It can't be changed by some cracker like web site info. Newspapers have credibility for that reason.
But their dependence on paper and gasoline to move all this paper makes them irrelevant nowdays. Soon it cost too much to distribute all this paper and newspapers will be gone, like typewriters are now. Ever used a typewriter? They were a real pain in the neck.
Re:1 Way Slashdot is Turning Into Digg (Score:3, Insightful)
Slashdot isn't Digg, even if the Idle experiment is trying to make a Digg-like Slashdot. While the quality of Slashdot submissions are sometimes crappy, on average they are pretty decent and topical. And even when they are screwed up, the userbase is smart enough to figure it out and add the relevant corrections.
Smart userbase + decent stories (on average) = Slashdot.
Barking retards + junk stories = Digg.
Irony (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Paper and gasoline-based dinosaurs (Score:5, Insightful)
You have some valid points, but there is a distinction which is often overlooked between those who generate hard content by reporting the news, and those who serve as portals or brokers for news content that has already been generated by others.
It's not hard to see how Google, Slashdot, and others can make a good business out of aggregating and selecting the best work of others, some adding value by providing forums such as this one. But who's going to do the original reporting? Some say that the Flikr model works best. Good luck with that for coverage of stuff other than disasters and staged events... how many private citizens will be cultivating sources inside the administration, Congress, and state and local governments so they can report what and how policies are being made, and provide meaningful analysis? Sure there are millions of bloggers out there, but who has time to determine which of them are trustworthy, instead of being misinformed or having an axe to grind?
So I think it's in the interest of all of us to consider ways in which established primary news organizations can continue to thrive.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Paper and gasoline-based dinosaurs (Score:5, Insightful)
Newspapers are still good at local city and neighborhood news and ads for local retailers.
I read about things via Google news the day before they're printed in the local paper.
emp. added
Congratulations on living in a major metropolitan area.
If you live in a place with a population < 500,000, most of the local news stories won't make it to Google news - and if they do, it's because the local newspaper did a write-up on it. No one from CNN/ABC/FOX cares about a crime wave in Paduca, or the effect of the local grain elevator closing in Peoria. And the only time you get election coverage for small-town council elections in Google news is if one of the candidates is in a sex scandal.
Sure, LA, SF, DC, and NY will get "local" coverage in Google News, but the only people covering local news here in "flyover country" is the local newspaper - I don't see that changing anytime soon.
Re:Paper and gasoline-based dinosaurs (Score:5, Insightful)
You're ignoring one of the most important jobs of newspapers: investigative reporting. While blogs and news aggregators like Digg and Slashdot do provide a useful service, they don't generate much news. Digg and slashdot primarily link to traditional news sources and would be bereft of content were such organizations to disappear. For an example of the importance of this role, just look at the past few years. If it were not for the investigations carried out by major newspapers (in particular the NY Times and the Washington Post) we would not know about the NSA wiretaps, the Guantanamo abuses, or the role of the Bush Administration in falsifying pre-war intellegence, just to name a few.
In order for a democracy to truly function, a strong, independent press is necessary (look at Russia for a "democracy" where this element is missing). It's hard to see blogs and TV news stations taking over that role from newspapers any time soon.
Re:Your daily newspaper by radio facsimile - in 19 (Score:3, Insightful)
We bring this up at work quite a bit. Radio was going to completely kill print. TV would completely kill print. Some newspapers are hurting right now, but the well run papers are doing just fine.
Re:Viewtron (Score:5, Insightful)
It's true that Viewtron was long before the Web, but it very much affected the way newspaper companies looked at new technology.
Knight-Ridder invested more than $50 million in Viewtron over six years and got nothing back. The money just went away. Gone forever. They could have bought a couple of mid-size daily newspapers at that price and had a solid rate of return.
Memories of Viewtron fed a lot of fear in the 1993-1997 era. That's actually when U.S. newspapers blew their opportunities to be leaders in what became the modern Web. Nobody was willing to place a really big bet. Nobody wanted to flush $50 million down the toilet. So newspapers got all tangled up in complicated, unworkable cooperative deals like New Century Network.
And when the dotbubble burst in 2001, people could say "see, I told you so!"
Life moves on. Suddenly everything changes, and big companies are caught napping.
So there you have it. Newspapers were among the pioneers in the online space, pushing content onto CompuServe and The Source, publishing on Prodigy, building entire national networks like Viewtron. Roll ahead a couple of decades and they're being reviled as a worst-case example of an industry caught sleeping at the switch.
Do you remember (Score:2, Insightful)
No.
Re:Paper and gasoline-based dinosaurs (Score:3, Insightful)
Newspapers are paper and gasoline-based dinosaurs.
Google still needs them to write the news. Bloggers won't do it for free.
Google (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm still amazed at how difficult conventional media say it is to make money off the web when Google makes billions off of dinky text ads.
Re:Irony (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Paper and gasoline-based dinosaurs (Score:5, Insightful)
You're right. The value proposition that newspapers bring is the investigative reporting. That is why the online presence of a newspaper shouldn't be powered by wordpress [wordpress.org].
Any newspaper that wants to get their online presence right just needs to study the NY Times. It's really all about the economics of distribution [transitionchoices.com]. Column inches in a paper is expensive. Disk space on a web server is cheap. Use the web site as a searchable archive [transitionchoices.com] for all content but run ads on the site to encourage users to subscribe to the print edition. Also give away banner ads as an incentive to companies to advertise in the print edition.
The same holds true for broadcast media [blogspot.com] and some companies such as NPR and CBS are finally boarding that clue train.
These are off the mark, IMO (Score:5, Insightful)
The #1 way newspapers screwed up was by trying to charge for stuff you can get for free. They tried to cram their existing model of paying for news on a medium where you can get a lot of good news for free and without a lot of hassle. Charging for their version of the same story, making non-home subscribers register or pay, the hoops we were made to jump through, all led to most newspapers taking a giant dump on the internet. Most of those schemes have been scaled back or done away with for many of the dailies I read online. I don't know if its too little, too late, but lots of newspapers are hurting and failing to correctly embrace the web had something to do with it.
Re:1 Way Slashdot is Turning Into Digg (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:A success of sorts: StarText - Ft. Worth, TX (Score:3, Insightful)
Audiotext was a project that most newspaper chains embarked upon in the early nineties, and like most of their other "new media" initiatives, it was a case of spending tens of millions of dollars to chase tens of people.
The newspaper industry has two major problems.
The first is that they are sheep - nobody wants to take risks. They all see something shiny, then attempt to emulate it, spending millions in the process. I sat in many a meeting in my former life as a web manager at a group of small daily papers owned by one of the largest chains having others on the management chain, my boss the publisher and corporate execs telling us "we should look at what newspaper X is doing, we shouldn't reinvent the wheel."
Along with another poster in this thread, I tried for nine years to do unique and innovative things, but I was met with resistance throughout the corporate and local bureaucracy. I've left the industry and haven't looked back.
The second big problem is Wall Street. The dirty secret of the newspaper industry is that it's still EXTREMELY profitable. I'm talking 20-30%. The problem is, this is historically low, from the halcyon days when the margins were 50%+. Most business would kill for a margin in the 20's, and I suspect only healthcare and financial services still can match newspapers in that respect. Yet, because the returns are lower than in the past, stock prices fall, and the industry is considered a financial failure.
Re:Paper and gasoline-based dinosaurs (Score:3, Insightful)
You're the only one I saw who mentioned classified ads, which means people are missing an important aspect. Classified ads are one of the main profit sources left to newspapers and they are still botching it. My newspaper's classified ads get worse every time they redesign the website, which is about twice a year! Today, I discovered the most recent system entirely replaced with a worse one. To see the ad details now requires a click per ad with a two minute page load per ad. Or you can hover and see the details, but you can't cut and paste addresses. Worse, people who pay extra listed first, with multiple tiers. The problem is, I'm looking for estate/garage sales. The default is sort by date, yet it sorts first by tier, so most of today's sales weren't on the first page. Yes, sales from two weeks ago were listed first, just because the people paid more.
Classified ads are the last profitable monopoly newspapers have left and they are still botching it. No wonder the unregulated chaos that is Craig's List is killing them hard.
Re:Viewtron (Score:4, Insightful)
The point was that the newspapers gave up on it too soon.
So the 'failure', was short-termism from the management.
Re:Paper and gasoline-based dinosaurs (Score:3, Insightful)
Are all newspapers equally doomed? (Score:3, Insightful)
Your comment makes me wonder if all newspapers are equally doomed. Does the web threaten the major big-city dailies more than smaller local papers? At the other end, I suspect the nationally-distributed papers like USA Today and the Wall Street Journal are also better positioned than big-city dailies.
I imagine that all news-on-dead-trees will go away sooner or later, but I think some are going away sooner.
Re:Paper and gasoline-based dinosaurs (Score:3, Insightful)
This is just an example of the problem with online advertising.
The problem with online advertising is that it makes click-through rates very measurable. In the print world you never really know what the direct impact of an ad is (as in what the last ad somebody looked at was before they bought the car).
My thought has always been that the purpose of ads is to make a general impression on a viewer and keep a product in their mind. The Coke and Pepsi advertise, they aren't really competing against each other so much as the 47,000 generic brands of soda that somebody might otherwise buy if they didn't realize that there was something "special" about those two particular brands. Generic is generic because there isn't any advertising.
The problem on the web is that an ad isn't considered very effective unless soembody clicks on it. That is just silly. Nobody clicks on superbowl ads, and yet those are considered highly effective. Also - an online ad doesn't have the kind of durability that a print ad has. You can pick up a copy of the NYT and see that the ad did take up so many column-inches. With the NYT online the ad might not even be on the page at all when you happen to look at it - it just generates so many impressions per hour or whatever.
Online advertising is every bit as valuable as any other kind of advertising, but the fact that we can (mis)measure it so much more effectively makes it appear less valuable. I've heard a similar argument made as to why outsourcing is so popular. When you look at the department of 1000 people that you manage you can see what all the problems are and what your costs and limitations are. When you look at an outsourcer all you see is a cheaper cost and promised benefits. You've comparing reality against an ad - and then you act surprised when the glossy new car doesn't really do a better job of getting you to work than the 10-year-old car did.