Newspapers Have Lost Their Prime Product Advantage
There’s been a lot written recently about the demise of the newspaper. Circulation is down, daily freebies and Craigslist are battering the economic model, and journalists are having to share their professional space with citizens (quelle horreur!).
As we’ve thought about why consumers interested in news have abandoned newspapers, we’ve tried to go back to basics, to look at a newspaper simply as an information product.
Every product has a competitive advantage, a product feature that gives it a value to customers. What’s the advantage for printed news?
Newspapers, like TiVO, have allowed time-shifting, giving readers the ability to read the news when they've wanted – on a park bench with lunch, on the subways on the way to work, at home on the couch in the evening. If you wanted news from radio or TV, you had to tune in at 6 or 11, or on the top of the hour. Newspapers freed consumers from the tyranny of the scheduled broadcast.
Newspapers kept that advantage through the 80s, until CNN and other around-the-clock news programming arrived. At that point, the jig was up. As the
At the end 90s, circ figures really started to move down. As the Internet grew in sophistication and size, more and more readers drifted online for news - the product that allowed still better time-shifting, providing up-to-the-minute news whenever a reader wanted it.
Alas, newspapers can’t compete with that innovation. The trend is clear for printed news organizations: Either develop a new product advantage, or continue to lose readers to the always-on, always-updated, whenever-they-want-it network.
And next? Wireless news delivery – from the online aggregators (who now have the lead and technical expertise) and local-news and citizen-journalism sites (Backfence, et al, who now have the lead and technical expertise), not newspapers. What do you think will happen then?
5 Comments:
What will happen next?
On the provider side: One possibility is that branded, trusted news organizations who actually "do" journalism may engage an aggressive, legally-binding embargo system that attempts to control the time and venue of release of their intellectual property -- their text/photo/video/multimedia reports. The aggregators only thrive because -- right now -- no such controls exist. Whether providers and aggregators can reach a more mutually beneficial model remains to be seen.
As to what will happen next with regard to actual printed news reports: That will be up to news consumers and advertisers -- not providers. If there is a market for printed news, and there is money to be made form that market, the market will respond. We who like to sit around and chew this over, and who tend to be rather star struck by the technology, tend to forget this sometimes, I think.
As an aside, the more interesting question, I think, is whether the public will be able -- or care -- to make the distinction between standards-driven journalism, opinion, rumor and libelous slander. As technology such as RSS flattens the presentation of information into one seamless mass, should we be worried that, even as the quantity, ease and speed of delivery improves, that the measurable outcomes of that delivery produce a less well informed public? I'm not optimistic. A recent Pew poll found that more Americans consider Bill O'Reilly to be a journalist than they do Bob Woodward. That's the kind of finding that ought to worry anyone in the journalism business, regardless of ideological concerns.
What may also happen next: Gil Asakawa, EP at DenverPost.com is onto something with his paper's podcasts. He's offering an eight-minute report for download -- soon to be available through much speedier RSS -- according to a report in Westword, the city's alternative weekly. Here's the link to that:
http://westword.com/Issues/2005-06-16/news/message.html
What's interesting is that he clearly sees his newspaper as a channel to compete with the drivel that passes for radio broadcast news in the Mile High City. Aside from the always-excellent public radio fare, the town is drowning in ClearChannel drool; DenverPost.com's podcast could fill a needed vacuum.
I would argue that news"papers" (can one intercap with quotation marks?) remain the favored domain for reliable, trusted, branded and standards-driven journalism. Pushing news"paper" content into the broadcast world, where there's a bigger audience but the content is entertainment value-driven, is an opportunity worth pursuing.
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But there's danger, too. You claim that the Good Ship (Tugboat, actually) Quality News can alter the course of the much-larger Aircraft Carrier Entertainment. A more likely scenario, sadly, is that news will be pushed in the direction of entertainment.
News is pushed towards entertainment only when the business model requires it. If the model is to only maximize page views -- to win a popularity contest, then serious, Woodstein-made-me-do-it journalism dies. But if the business model seeks a reasonable balance, then real journalism can find a home alongside trivial pursuits. Eric Clapton said once that he had to write sappy pop songs and cash in on air play so that he could afford to hit the road and play the blues.
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