The future of newspapers

There's a very thoughtful article by John Lanchester in the London Review of Books on the future of newspapers.  Basically, his point is that newspapers are going to get rid of their print editions - the big costs of printing and distribution simply are not being met by the current level of ad income and especially since classified ads moved to the Web.  I recall, in the late 90s being at a conference organized by a management consultant friend of mine.  Present was the owner of a local newspaper chain from the mid-West of the USA.  I asked him what he was doing about the threat of the Internet - he replied that he didn't see the main source of his income, classified ads, disappearing.  I wonder what he is doing now and what he might have been doing had he listened to what I was saying?  So, I agree with Lanchester - newspapers would find it cheaper to go totally digital and give away e-readers to those who subscribed.  Lanchester suggests some form of micro-payment and argues that people will be willing to pay to read selected material. Possibly. I think, however, they are going to have to be smarter at negotiating deals with all kinds of advertisers and Web services in addition to making it easy to pay for content you enjoy.

The death of traditional media

I watched this very interesting talk from Leo Laporte of TWIT (This Week in Tech) and I hope the link below works so that readers of this blog may take a look. Laporte is talking about the death of newspapers and also of the way network programming of TV works in the USA.



This talk, along with reading for review What Would Google Do?, by Jeff Jarvis, has firmed up ideas I have been having for some time about the direction in which scholarly publishing is likely to go.

I won't elaborate on that right now, but I hope to be able to get my ideas together in some more coherent form some time soon.

Paying for news

Big news in recent weeks has been Rupert Murdoch's conversion to paying for online news. Originally, he believed that online news could be paid for by advertising but, buying the Wall Street Journal and being shown the books was his 'on the road to Damascus' moment and he was suddenly converted to the opposite.

Now RM is a big media baron owning everything from Sky tv to The Sun newspaper - as well as Fox tv, the Times newspaper and dozens of other properties. Probably his aim is to take over the media world in its entirety.

But will he really get people to pay for news? The Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal are specialist business newspapers and subscriptions to their online content is likely to be a business expense rather than a personal expense, but is anyone going to pay for The Sun's content?

There's no denying that newspapers are in real difficulties - hit, on one hand, by the new technology, which makes the worldwide distribution of news so easy, and on the other hand by the recession, which has cut into their advertising revenue. To a degree, newspaper publishers are in the same fix as scholarly publishers - the technology has made them potentially redundant and they are desperate to find out how to 'monetize' their online activities. What business model will replace the existing one is hard for me to tell - not having the gift of foresight, but I imagine that one consequence, and a very undesirable one, will be to concentrate ownership of the news media in even fewer hands, with fewer journalists, little on-the-ground foreign coverage, and more and more regurgitated wire services content.