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.'"
Newspapers and SEO (Score:5, Interesting)
Another way newspapers are failing on the web is the use of terms in headlines that generate high ranking on search engines.
Stories like the iPhone Nano that the Mail ran a few weeks ago, and that was linked to from here are perfect examples of it.
Journalism is second place to the SEO it seems.
Charlie Brooker wrote about it a couple of weeks ago, but the best example he gave was from the Telegraph where journalists wrote: "Young women - such as Britney Spears - are buying more shoes than ever"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jul/21/charliebrooker.pressandpublishing [guardian.co.uk]
Viewtron (Score:5, Interesting)
In 1983, Knight Ridder and AT&T joined to launch videotext service Viewtron. Anybody with a dedicated terminal, phone line, and $12 a month could access news from the Miami Herald and the New York Times, online shopping, banking and food delivery, via a 300-baud modem.
This happened in the mid 1980s so it had nothing to do with the web. It sounds like a brave early attempt to anticipate the web. Good on them. Sorry it failed but they were clearly before their time. I wouldn't call it a botch.
Re:Newspapers and SEO (Score:5, Interesting)
Charlie Brooker wrote about it a couple of weeks ago, but the best example he gave was from the Telegraph where journalists wrote: "Young women - such as Britney Spears - are buying more shoes than ever"
That one is a bit much but isn't this just the next logical step from the classic headlines on the print edition? An "Extra" that would have large block text of DEATH, SEX, SCANDAL, TRAGEDY, or whatever that could be seen on the newsstand when you were still a block away. It is a way to get attention.
Today it's page hits yesterday it was copies sold.
Go Team Netly! (Score:2, Interesting)
Gone but fondly remembered are Netly News, Nando Times, SatireWire, and (last and least) the Worst of the Web. Fucked Company seems pretty fucked of late, as well.
Re:Newspapers and SEO (Score:4, Interesting)
That's true, but it's really not a reflection on newspapers, but really a reflection on the fact that search is not -- in any way -- good enough. In fact, if anything search is getting worse. There's Google and some also-rans. SEO-spamming Google is what everyone needs to do on the web. That just should not be. It wasn't even that bad before Google, newspapers didn't used to do that. Everyone HAS TO now.
Google needs competition, for the good of us all, including themselves.
Re:Paper and gasoline-based dinosaurs (Score:5, Interesting)
A success of sorts: StarText - Ft. Worth, TX (Score:4, Interesting)
The Fort Worth Star-Telegram [star-telegram.com] ran a dialup news-delivery service called StarText [wikipedia.org] from 1982 to 1997. The Internet and newspaper's web site eventually supplanted it. Until a couple of years ago startext.com still pointed to the newspaper's web site.
Here [archive.org] is a snapshot from 1996.
LA Times (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Paper and gasoline-based dinosaurs (Score:5, Interesting)
I work for a newspaper company.
We have an internet presence, and even though it costs less than our very expensive physical product, we still make far more money off the physical product. Advertisers are still willing to pay more to have a physical insert in the physical paper, and they don't seem very interested in recreating that via PDF or Flash, or whatever online.
We actually drive our paper in all directions, as far as 7 hours away, DAILY. Do you know how much we pay in transportation? Yet, this is still our most profitable model.
I've suggested printing the paper locally in each location, and sending electronic copies to those cities rather than trucking them, but my company is actually more committed to putting out the best product, even at the expense of profit. We have really nice presses in our main facility. If we printed our paper in small towns, rather than deliver it via truck, the quality wouldn't be as good.
No doubt, our company will shift more and more online in the future, but print isn't dead yet if you put out a quality product, cater to your audience, and sell advertising like mad.
Re:Paper and gasoline-based dinosaurs (Score:5, Interesting)
As someone who worked for one of the bigger newspaper chains in "new media" for two years, I have to agree with this. In theory local information is something that local papers should be able to dominate in online. The reality is the papers spend basically squat on local presence and are centralizing all their web presence. Google, and MSN and Yahoo for that matter, have way too many people all smarter than the people running the online newspaper business. Those companies will eat the newspapers for lunch and they won't know what hit them.
The paper I worked for had just spent 30 million dollars on a new press facility, while online media was me (engineer), my boss, a designer, and an online editor, and we were lucky to have that much. Our servers were handled centrally and we paid nearly a quarter of a million dollars per year for the privilege. For what we got out of that money, we could've bought a couple servers, dropped in a DS3, and hired another person and done way more than what we did. We spent a lot of our time wrestling with their byzantine CMS, when we could've done the whole thing with Drupal or some other decent open source CMS and some customization.
I hear the executives talk the talk about how their industry must transform, but my brief experience indicated that they don't have clue one on how to do it. I wouldn't touch a newspaper stock with a ten foot pole.
Re:Paper and gasoline-based dinosaurs (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:most screwed up (Score:5, Interesting)
Newspapers are not going bankrupt. They just have to refocus.
It's not that simple. A few big newspapers are losing lots of money, millions of dollars a month. But most smaller newspapers continue to make money with operating margins that look good by most traditional business standards.
Newspaper operating margins traditionally have run between 10 and 45 percent of gross revenues (yes, really). A margin of 10 percent is just fine, unless you borrowed money under an assumption of 25. Then you're in big trouble. That is the core of the problem facing newspaper companies today.
If you bought stock in a publicly held newspaper company and assumed you'd retire on the earnings, you can forget about it. The McClatchy Company, which bought Knight-Ridder, was worth over $74 a share about three years ago. Today it's worth less than $4. Shareholders are abandoning newspaper stocks. Why? Loans and bonds come before shareholders. A company with a lot of debt and a suddenly sinking line of business is one that shareholders quickly abandon, especially if the news is full of chatter about how the Internet is destroying its business model.
If things get bad enough, a company could go into bankruptcy -- leaving shareholders with nothing -- even while it's still making a profit on regular operations. Debt service can kill you.
The Internet really is changing the world, but that's not the biggest reason U.S. newspaper companies are hurting right now. It's the economy. Local advertisers, which are the big sources of revenue, are cutting back. Employment ads, real estate ads, used-car ads are suddenly way down.
So what's unfolding right now is largely an ownership crisis. In the long term, smearing ink on paper is a bad idea, the Internet is a better way to distribute news and information, and old business models have been disintegrated. All that stuff is true. But the crisis right now is one of ownership and finance, not continued operation.
And I will not be surprised to see one or more bankruptcies in the next year.
Maybe I'm a cynic... (Score:1, Interesting)
... but I see Slashdot and Digg like this:
Pseudo-intelligent, one-sided userbase + decent stories, but with the summary written in a pseudo-intelligent, one-sided manner + dupes + flamebait + "I don't believe in imaginary property" + pro-Linux fluff + the occasional "balanced" story = Slashdot.
Pseudo-intelligent, one-sided userbase, one-sided userbase + lolcat pictures + junk stories/outright untruths written in a pseudo-intelligent, one-sided manner + Obama praise + McCain bashing + "lol RIAA sux" + pro-Linux fluff + human interest stories = Digg.
Seems like the same to me. Fortunately Slashdot is still the lesser of two evils.
For now.
Re:Your daily newspaper by radio facsimile - in 19 (Score:4, Interesting)
That's a great link!
I have an image of a Radio Craft cover from that era that I frequently use when I'm speaking at journalism conferences.
It shows a guy who looks like Bob (from the Church of the Subgenius) collecting a fax paper from a radio device.
The point, of course, is that radio unfolded on a completely different path. Cars are not horseless carriages. Websites shouldn't be "online newspapers." And that sort of thing.
In the late 1990s, I attended a future scenario-planning workshop with a bunch of newspaper folks. We all broke up into groups to brainstorm products. One of the other groups -- not MY group! -- came up with a great idea: We'll deliver fax newspapers, over the Internet. It was 1939, all over again.
William Gibson said the future is already here; it's just unevenly distributed. That's true. But it's also true that when it's here, most of us can't see it, because we're so desperately trying to fit it into a framework from our own past.
Re:Paper and gasoline-based dinosaurs (Score:1, Interesting)
Blogs and forums also have the advantage (usually at least) of not suffering from bad editing. So if there's an error, it's the person submitting it - not the editor changing or omitting pertinent information and misrepresenting what a person says. It's really annoying when a letter to the editor which makes it into print gets a hack-job done to it which makes you look silly. (Sometimes one wonders if some editors aren't too far from being like forum trolls or other mischief makers having the admin keys. Imagine the "That's not what I posted!" situations that ensue.)
Also with online news sources I don't have the "continued on page 7" only to go to page 7 and see that the rest of the article is missing. However they had no problems getting in that full page ad. Thanks News Sun! I appreciate paying for such work!
And even newspapers can't be relied on like they used to for getting the scoop from special sources. The journalists there actually go from the same blogs, wikipedia articles, and forums that anyone else can. Why pay for a particular spin, when you can find plenty of decent bloggers that do the same level of reporting for free?
Re:Paper and gasoline-based dinosaurs (Score:3, Interesting)
Another important aspect is the editorials.
Even though quite possible in web, I havent seen any editorials in web which matches the quality of the ones printed in the national newspapers.
Re:Ha ha! (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, you'll note that some of these botches of the web actually predate the web. It is easy to mock in hindsight.
In the fall of 1994, I was the first editor of the third daily newspaper to go online daily (the Kansas State Collegian, which followed the Kentucky Kernel (which beat us by a few days as their school year started earlier) and the Raleigh News and Observer (nando.net -- now a McClatchy holding -- which was online with news everyday at some point that summer). In the spring of 1995 I had a newspaper management class and the publisher of the Kansas City Star spoke about how it had invested millions in this new thing that was going to let people read their newspapers at home on their PCs. When he was done, I invited him back to the student newsroom and showed him the Internet. ("It's kinda like AOL," I told him.) What we were doing -- for the cost of two part-time student salaries and one retired yet dedicated Mac SE 30 -- was almost exactly what he described. He was both amazed and pissed. The Star project was canceled months later.
We were originally going to do a Gopher site to archive our newspaper, but some jackass at the ever competitive University of Kansas had done a mock up of the University Daily Kansan as a web page (spring of 1994). Spurred into action, we changed our plans and did that web thing instead. Why? Because it let us display images with the stories. But if Kelly Campbell, our technical brains, hadn't been curiously checking out our options, we'd have done a Gopher site and it would have been complete obscurity. One curious tech was the difference between bleeding edge correct and looking goofy. (Kelly, btw, is a senior programer for Google now.)
When that KU jackass got his degree, he went to work for Knight-Ridder and led its Internet efforts. Then it created the "RealCities" horseshit that the article describes. I witnessed firsthand the RealCities disaster, as I was working at the Wichita Eagle (a Knight-Ridder paper), and called it when I saw it -- but nobody who mattered listened.
Pretty much everything after 1995 is open for mockery. But those early efforts are just bleeding edge research projects that could have gone any direction. The whole idea of open standards just didn't exist for anything but automotive cigarette lighters. We were all just guessing, and some were willing to put their money where their mouths were.
Newspaper is obsolete. (Score:5, Interesting)
Well not quite. For one, newspapers have a lot of room for things which aren't time sensitive. When it comes to news itself things are a bit different. The days of newspapers being able to stick AP articles into the paper are long over. To maintain relevance, newspapers have to (*gasp*) start researching, thinking about, and producing their own content. Today breaking news is available minutes after it was written, newspapers cannot afford to simply reprint what we've already read the day before. They have to put the effort in to consolidate and analyze all of the available information, as well as gather their own to produce something better.
Newspapers need to accept that all of this NEEDS to be duplicated on the web. The web should be thought of as nothing more than a free digital version of the newspaper. Advertising should be expected to support it.
Newspapers that can't pull it off, should shut down while they can.
The failed New York Times venture NY Pulse (Score:1, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
"Smart userbase" compared to Digg cretins (Score:3, Interesting)
You only used "Smart userbase" to suck up to the moderators. Admit it.
Trust me on this. For various reasons I stopped using Slashdot altogether for almost a year (2006 IIRC). During that time I started using Digg- which back then had been hyped as the best thing since sliced bread, the poster-boy of Web 2.0, and was being talked about essentially as a next-generation, improved Slashdot.
Yeah, it's hard to believe that now, but that's how it was seen then. Anyway, I eventually stopped using Digg and moved back to Slashdot because I got sick of the moron-level discussions and popularity-contest, attention-grabbing crap stories. Even during the few months that I used it, the quality of both seemed to go down significantly, and it was nowhere as good as it had been hyped even when I started. Perhaps the rot had already set in by then, but if you want a riposte to that "wisdom of crowds" bullshit, the kneejerk, cliquish, sheeplike, bovine-level groupthink, stupidity of the Digg userbase is perfect.
There was a really good article on Kuro5hin about it, but it seems to have disappeared.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, when I came back to Slashdot, the comments *genuinely* seemed like they'd been written by- if not geniuses- then certainly vastly more intelligent people. And if you're thinking that this was in comparison with Digg, which would make anything look good- that's the point. Once the novelty had worn off, the usual factors started to irritate me again, but trust me when I say that compared to Digg, Slashdot users *are* fucking geniuses.