In truth, the media's general liberal leanings aren't the key culprit behind the bankruptcies of newspapers. The real driver is plummeting ad revenue because paid readership is down, not simply because people don't like to read people with the same persuasions as Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich and Paul Krugman (all who are doing quite fine at the New York Times, I believe), but because people would much rather read the same articles and columns for free on their laptop or Blackberry. Besides, have you tried to navigate through reading a newspaper on a train with minimal elbow-room? And the newsprint ink gets my delicate and perfectly manicured hands all dirty.
So where do newspapers go from here? Some have proposed a pay for online access model, but this is going to be a tough sell as newspapers play a prolonged game of chicken with each other. If online ad revenue is driven by visitors, every media outlet is going to be terrified of the prospect of risking alienating its user base by charging for something that had previously been given away for free. Once this happens, there's no guarantee that making your services free again would ever bring them back.
Their only hope is some sort of collusion where every single media outlet agrees to impose their visitors a fee for reading content (let's ignore the antitrust violations for a second). It's sort of like the prisoner's dilemma scenario in which the benefit of colluding leads to the reasonable gains for everyone. Unfortunately per the theory, inevitably somebody cheats - in this case offers their news services for free - thus causing people to flock to their website at the expense of everyone else.
I wonder if what will happen is the "you get what you pay for" phenomenon. Over time, the quality of news will suffer and people will be left reading bland "ticker" quality news releases supplemented with hack blogger opinions like those provided by people like me. Who knows? Maybe over time people will decide that informed news and thoughtful analysis is something worth paying for. In the meantime, I'm afraid droves of people in the newspaper business are going to need to adapt quickly.
Posts
1 comment:
my dad has been a newspaperman for his entire career. after more than thirty years at the same paper, he recently had to take a salary reduction because the paper is in danger of going under (miraculously, he has escaped round after round of layoffs). Actually, subscription revenues from his paper have not really dropped off. A much larger problem is decreased ad revenue, and this is true of all the papers. (This particular paper has the larger problem that its owner is $400 million in debt and the paper is his largest asset.)
As far as online access goes, newspapers' biggest problem is the desire of people to get news instantly. There is a tendency now to "post news now, fact check/edit later". The different publications are in a rush to post news first, regardless of its accuracy. Frankly, this is really shoddy journalism. I constantly see misprints, grammatical errors, and factual errors on reputable news sites. However, I think that the American public, which is often borderline illiterate and unbothered by poor grammar and more interested in sensationalism than responsible journalism, doesn't mind the mistakes. The days of the copy editor carefully checking for mistakes of any nature are gone. That is a huge reason that newspapers are floundering and is symptomatic of a much larger cultural problem. (you should hear my dad rail on and on about the disgraceful state of journalism today!)
Post a Comment