Walter Isaacson, Chairman and CEO of CNN and the Managing Editor of TIME magazine, was on the daily show discussing the article "How to Save Your Newspaper," appearing in TIME magazine. He thinks that newspapers have got it all wrong by giving away the news "for free" online. He proposes creating a system similar to iTunes but for news distribution. I've added the video.
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This has been a debate for years in the industry.
ReplyDeleteThe catch – How do you get people to pay for something that they have been trained to get for free? And for free in so many different outlets?
If you are really interested in the debate here is a blog posting that has a dozen or so arguments for and against micropayments.
Personally, I don't think there is a way to "save" newspapers in their present notion. Three glaring reasons out of many: 1. They are companies too rooted into the ground in tradition and the lost sense of monopoly of being the messenger. (The industry has been standing frozen staring at the light at the other end of the tunnel for too long. It's a freight train.) 2. They are so over burdened with debt, they will not be able to recover, invest and innovate to the 21st century media landscape. (Some of the best talent and innovators are young, lack seniority and get cut from staffs.) 3. The advertising model is breaking down to small pieces too little to support large companies. (It costs the San Francisco Examiner $10 in newsprint and ink alone to produce the Sunday paper which is sold for $2.)
I may be completely nuts on this and wrong, but I've also spent way too much time following the issue for the last five years looking for a "savior plan" or what's next. Why do you think I quit my job at the newspaper?
The scary issue is who will pick up the baton of the diminished scope of the Fourth Estate and keep those in power under the magnifying glass?
Thomas Jefferson was savaged by the press. Excoriated. And he was human. He didn't like it. He went nose to nose with a couple of editors in Philadelphia. He said to one Philadelphia paper: "Nothing in this paper is true, with the possible exception of the advertising, and I question that." And yet that wise Thomas Jefferson, in a moment of truth, said, "If I had to choose between government without newspapers, and newspapers without government, I wouldn't hesitate to choose the latter."
I think that there is some truth to a publication such as time magazine being able to get away with a $.99 rate for one month's issue. But newspapers cannot and will not survive on that model.
ReplyDeleteThis is another example of an old school newsman who still doesn't get why things are different now. If he actually believes that the average moderate news reader is okay to pay for each article they want to read, he has clearly missed the point.
Furthermore, this is ignorant to another issue in regard to newspaper readership decline: people don't trust newspapers as much as they used to. Leftists are moving towards more rounded coverage by reading a variety of online sources and blogs, while conservatives think that any news that isn't fox news is biased. It's not the issue of payment that scared away so many readers (because a newspaper subscription was never that expensive) it was the fact that people didn't want or need them anymore.