How Traditional Media Can Thrive Online
It is well known that the newspaper industry is struggling. Subscriptions are down and advertising revenue has decreased drastically while at the same time the costs of maintaining a news organization have continued to increase.
A major player in the collapse of the traditional newspaper is the Internet. In December of 2008, the Pew Research Center for People and the Press published a study showing that the Internet had overtaken newspapers as a news outlet. At the time, 40% of those surveyed said they received most of their news about national and international issues from the Internet — a substantial increase from 24% in September 2007. Importantly, this was the first time a Pew survey found that more people relied more on the Internet for news than on newspapers.
The Internet’s rise as a purveyor of news came about because it increased the amount of information available and gives users the ability to learn about breaking news when it happens, without having to wait for the morning paper. Sites like the Huffington Post and the Drudge Report are two of the most trafficked sites on the Internet today because they provide the latest news — ahead of the traditional news cycle.
In short, the Internet provides more content than traditional media, and provides it faster than traditional media. The trick for newspapers and other traditional media outlets now is to find a way to effectively harness the power yielded by the Internet and direct media to bring back older readers and amass a strong following of readers from younger generations who spend a majority of their time online.
Similar to its power in the political world, direct media is also highly influential in the online news world. Internet users want content to come to them — which is why they are increasingly looking to Twitter and Facebook for the latest news. In fact, a recent study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism found that “75% of online news consumers say they get news forwarded through email or posts on social networking sites and 52% say they share links to news with others via those means.” Online news organizations should take advantage of this by using direct media, including email, Facebook, and Twitter, to deliver news to consumers — just like they would leave a newspaper on a doorstep.
A great example of this is Mike Allen’s Politico Playbook. This daily email pulls out the most important nuggets of information from many different news sources and compiles them into one easy-to-read morning email. So rather than scouring twenty different news sites, users can depend on Mike Allen at the Politico to deliver the most important information of the day. This allows the news site to reach its target audience — Washington insiders and others who care about the latest news from Capitol Hill — with a product that is highly relevant.
Another important aspect of online news is that it is a social activity. The latest Pew study explains, “News consumption is a socially-engaging and socially-driven activity, especially online. The public is clearly part of the news process now. Participation comes more through sharing than through contributing news themselves.” Indeed, Internet users who share news with their social graph act as modern day gatekeepers as people look to their friends for the latest news, similar to how they rely on their peers for product information.
This is how the Huffington Post has found real success. Included on each individual piece of content are prominently placed buttons which allow readers to easily share it with their networks on Facebook, Twitter, and other direct media sites with the click of a button. I have heard that 40 percent of the Huffington Post’s traffic comes from Facebook — a statistic that confirms the Pew study’s findings.
An effective content distribution strategy is a vital part of success for any online news site because no matter how good the content is, no one will find out about it if it isn’t readily available on sites they are already spending time on. Put simply: if you don’t have a plan to distribute your content effectively, don’t bother creating content.
The conundrum for news publishers is their desire to produce revenue to cover the increasing costs of running a news organization, and many of them are now looking to paid subscription models to do so. But only 19 percent of Internet users are willing to pay for news online. And that number includes those who already pay for online news.
These publishers need to remember why the Internet was able to overtake traditional news organizations as a news provider in the first place — it made news widely and easily available.
Transparency and availability is the future of online journalism. Widely available, real-time breaking news coupled with direct conversations with reporters will bring users into the story — similar to the car chase phenomenon — and ultimately establish a strong connection between the user and the news outlet.
That’s why publishers of online news cannot afford to fall into the mindset of restricting their content’s availability to its own site. To bring new readers into the funnel, these individuals must first be compelled by your content, which is why it is so important to lower the barrier to entry for newcomers. Distributing fresh, interesting content to popular sites that many Internet users are already spending time on every single day is an easy way to attract new readers and bring them into the funnel. Only after that can they be persuaded to come to your site on a regular basis.
Traditional news media is about three things:
1. Control
2. Control
3. Control
Without control traditional media becomes a fish out of water.
It flips and flops and flails wildly..
Gasps, then dies.
No. The reason news organizations are struggling is back in the 90s they created a free channel online that competed with their own paid channel. And the free channel, the Internet, didn’t generate the same level of revenue — it also allowed other web users to use their content for free. Massive copyright violations through bloggers also changed the picture. Free classified sites like Craigslist, meanwhile, chewed up another of their major revenue channels.
The Wall Street Journal got it right — the customer pays for the reporting the news organization conducted.
Plus, ease of publishing changed the picture. Anyone could suddenly do reporting and post pictures to the world — if they could attract attention. Experts also began talking directly to people, meaning the general-assignment reporter had to compete against many people who were experts in their field. For example, a securities litigation writer might have to compete against a big-law-firm partner writing a securities litigation blog, one which published material free, with more expertise, and faster. It’s hard to compete against better, faster and free. This is a revolutionary change on the level of printing press, IMHO.
These ease of entry into the media also meant that anyone could simply cover an event. Bloggers who were no more than kids got press credentials for the 2004 presidential conventions (you used to have to earn that) and that continues. Bloggers based popular opinion sites based on others’ reporting. Eventually, places such as Pajamas Media exploiting missed editorial niches to gain popularity, and sometimes does its own reporting.
The answer isn’t aggregatation and twitter — the news business as we knew it is already gone. Like all revolutionary changes, it will have positive effects and negative ones, just as the printing press in all likelihood led to the Protestant Reformation. I don’t know what those changes are. I do know they’ll ultimately be revolutionary.
The revolution was Gutenberg’s movable type, not the press that had been block printing for centuries. Earliest version of word processing?
Gutenberg never envisioned the chainsaw.(TM)
IB Bill,
Two of the metrics that determines success in advertising are “reach and frequency.” Print delivery has no chance vis a vis the network.
Richness? Print has enormous comparative disadvantages – charts, images, audio, video, links, coupled with searchable archiving and view/print-on-demand.
Might include traditinal print publishing in the death throes prescriptions. The competition is between those delivering “atoms” and those delivering “bits.”
These publishers need to remember why the Internet was able to overtake traditional news organizations as a news provider in the first place — it made news widely and easily available.
Plus it made news more truthful, or at least afforded the opportunity to examine any given story from angles other than what was put out by a single print version.
Just incidentally, in this process, many came to see legacy, (mainstream, entrenched) media of all forms as just a wee tad biased, yea even corrupt, in what they chose to emphasize and/or de-emphasize. Contrasting a wide variety of stories on the Internet with a single, print version, one could identify certain biases and lack of objectivity in so called “mainstream” reportage.
For your assignment, class, compare and contrast MSM current characterization of tea partiers with kid glove treatment of other protesters in the not-too-distant past…
Warning! your double standards meter will arc into the red
The MSM had a chance to start addressing this in the mid-1990′s. I know having been at the various print and ‘new media’ conferences that had some of the big name print publications come to them. Their answer on how to work with the ‘new media’ and internet circa 1994-99? A: We will figure it out Real Soon Now.
They still are.
The MSM has a problem in that they see themselves as the ‘gatekeepers’ to information and try to formulate opinion via that role. They are still at the gate… the fence, however, is missing.
Local media had and has some small time left to adjust and perform where the national media can’t in local news and coverage. Beyond the fires, murders, thefts, and local scandals there are actual communities to cover that individuals just might be encouraged to cover with small pieces and pointing their friends to it on local media sites. That requires a better distribution of trust from the newsroom and out into the public as a whole… trusted individuals who provide more readers and interesting works can get paid more, although not as much as the ‘traditional reporter’ at start. At some point there will be no ‘traditional reporters’ and that becomes a moot point.
And if the incumbent local media won’t do this, then the people in the community will for a far lower cost and without the bureaucratic overhead of an established institution. The press forgets that the right of a free press belongs to the people, not the press as an institution. Traditional press can either show that it can adapt, lose its baggage and become a relevant part of modern local culture, or be replaced by those people wanting to do that without them.
RSN has come and gone, now it is catch-up time… or fall back and disappear time.
Traditional “news” outlets have not been about “news” for the last 40 years. They have been about propaganda; about advancing the Socialist, anti-American, anti-Israel/Semitic narrative.
Any advice you would offer to them would be ignored. They are religious fanatics, and their religion is Marxism. The media is merely a tool by which to spread the gospel of Marx. It is not about profit, and hasn’t been for 40 years.
Losing money? No problem. Their sugar daddies in the Democratic Party/Obama junta, and among guilt-ridden rich leftists like George Soros will keep them going and going until they crush all resistance.
As for pesky little gnats like Fox News and talk radio? They’ll just use the Unfairness Doctrine and hate speech laws to silence it, just as the left as basically silenced all conservative media in Europe.
Newspapers don’t make money from news. Never have. They make money from advertising. Trying to sell news in the internet era is doomed to fail. Newspapers have to recognize that Google ads, Craigslist and all the other classified services are the competition.
Why would I want them to thrive? They are responsible for the demise of a great country, a powerful force for good in the universe. They are responsible for the resurrection of Marxism and it’s expansion into every segment of our society. They are responsible for stomping the truth at every turn, suppressing information and controlling the content and context of any allowed debate. Lastly, they are responsible for willfully and knowingly allowing an advantage to evil rather than support the Constitution and Bill of Rights and an honest discussion by the people and allowing that to determine the course the country will take and driving instead toward their desires instead.
Thrive? No. Choking off their air supply? It’s a start!
Mark Andreessen’s advice is to “Burn the boats”. In other words, if they want to survive in the new medium they need to dump the old. Otherwise, the old way of doing things will hinder their progress. Those who think the traditional media will survive just don’t get it. Media is not about survival it is about domination. Now how to dominate in the new medium is the multi-million dollar question.
Hullo–fancy seeing you here, David.
Ideological proclivities aside, I would say the problem is Graigs List, pure and simple. It has killed the income stream and profitability of the majors. A highly successful businessman once told me:”Everyone wants to eliminate the middleman–they just can’t figure out how to eliminate the middle-man’s costs.” Blogs are essentially parasitic taken as a hole–sucking the life out of major news organizations by by-passing the middleman and avoiding his costs–but NOT eliminating them. My prediction is that the blogosphere in toto will end up like the predator without any competitors who accidently wanders into an isolated oasis or billabong that is otherwise in biological stasis and begins eating everything in sight. Eventually all prey are killed and the predator, his food source eliminated, starves to death–biologists who later hove on the scene finding only skeletons including that of the outside predator.
Collection and analysis of news costs money. Neither individual bloggers nor blog groups have it in sufficient quantities to finance original reporting and research on a consistent, daily basis. When the MSM is gone, it will take much of the materials (in the form of news) with which bloggers work–especially individual “life-style” diary-style and essayist long-form cultural bloggers. The blogosphere will at that point shrink radically and, with the MSM largely gone, the ability to source news by the average individual will become more limited, fractured and haphazard. Craigs-list is the predator which crept into Eden. Without it the blogosphere would have prospered as a competitor/adjunct alongside the MSM by feeding off of it even as the mainstream print media continued on it’s merry way with MSMTV, who depends largely on print MSM in train.
As it is the demise of the MSM will, I feel, prove a Pyrrhic victory for the blogosphere.
(PS:I thought Dayton had a fair team this year–too bad they weren’t more consistent)
They will never go anywhere until they “get it” concerning performance. Every news media outlet I have ever visited has the most dismal performance compared to almost any other web site (blog, website, photo site (flickr, etc), Google, corporation, catalog (Amazon, etc), etc). Any website hosted by a traditional newspaper I’ve ever seen is unusable. My local one, Florida Today, is a particularly good representation.
The reason that they are failing is not due to their medium. It is because of their total lack of credibility and bias.
“As it is the demise of the MSM will, I feel, prove a Pyrrhic victory for the blogosphere.”
You are far too pessimistic. We will simply see an increase in reader donations and modestly successful business models. If the wider public perceives investigative journalism to be of benefit—and it most certainly does—then it will be funded in one way or another.
Of all the arguments I have seen over the years, all of them focus on the the “oldness” of print and television media and the “newness” of the Internet technologies for the media. I have yet to see addressed the actual mechanics and associated costs of creating real reporting. This is essential if the media companies and aggregators are to continue in existence. Here are two examples.
In Detroit, both the Detroit News and the Free Press have drastically changed their models of operation; to an extent. The reduced home delivery, shrunk the paper and offered more online options along with reducing staff. It is not clear how that change is playing out yet.
Two of the television stations in Detroit have notified investigative staff reporters that their contracts will not be renewed. The articles accompanying these actions indicated that in order to reduce staffing, this particular reporting activity which required a reporter, cameraman and producer needs to be shrunk to something akin to a reporter carrying their own camera. If this trend continues, it seems that hard reporting requiring time for background research, analysis, composition and presentation will be shrunk to the point that only police calls, accidents and the like will be within economic reach of the media companies. If this were to come to pass, media reporting and subsequent aggregation activities would be limited severely.
As good a service as aggregation provides, it is dependent on quality journalism. If a way to pay for that is not found, we are at the mercy of diminished reporting and dependence on prejudiced sources that can be paid for by on side of an argument.
Somehow, media, needs to be able to finance real journalism.
David
Your analysis seems incorrect. Two reasons.
1. Aggregation technology isn’t in stasis — Drudge is the most popular news site out there, and it is so due to being an aggregator; that is, there’s a short list of that which is newsworthy collected in a fast loading and simple format. One can scan the headlines quickly and choose that of interest. It’s not the speed of delivery that is the secret sauce, but the lack of useless garnishment.
The next big thing will probably be drudge-like but “programmed” by the site user, and google among others are working on the relevant technologies. Essentially the idea is that you go to the site which has been told that what you want to see would be anything about the 49ers, Cher, your congresscritter, etc all of which is depending on your needs. The newspaper-like “sections” thinking need not apply; the headline feed would be able to pull as needed from relevant sources. This isn’t new in that it’s simple automation of behaviours that are already common enough. Even now I look at a space aggregator, an archaeological aggregator, and a couple of others as part of my daily news scan. All that’s missing currently is the ability to pull the various feeds on to a single page.
“Mother gives birth to two-headed snake” and other silly stories traditionally used by papers as filler aren’t even part of that universe. Meanwhile Drudge and HuffPo et al suffer from this same problem, and the coming technology I’m talking about makes THEM irrelevant because the user isn’t wrapped up into HuffPo-world, but his/her own.
Overall, the point is that there might be 5,000 sources and which of these provides relevant information on a given day is immaterial.
***
2. Direct Media is a stopgap measure. Proper aggregation technology (as outlined above) obviates the entire raison d’ etre of “push” technology, which exists primarliy from a lack of better options AT PRESENT.
Imagine you have your aggregation site and decide to take a trip to Europe. You make some changes, take your flight. Now on your page when you hit the URL is the latest exchange rate, possibly a pointer to the train schedule out of Waterloo Station, weather forecast in [city you're visiting] and English language versions of news events that are relevant to your itinerary (and of course the latest on the 49ers.) There’s no need for push feeds as a rule, although certain people will always use push technology (e.g. stock market tickers) for specific reasons.
Upshot: Push can’t do very much that’s really interesting.
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Summary: the technology is continuing to act as a data concentrator when it is functioning properly, and newspapers are so out of that loop as to not exist.
English language versions of news events that are relevant to your itinerary
And who is going to gather that news for you? Bloggers? News organizations that have gone out of business? Aggregation is inherently parasitic.
Eventually, there will be nothing but government info, press releases, bloggers, SEO falsification stories, and official sources of info — plus lots of experts cranking out individual stories on individual topics. But no one is actually going to do any reporting. In fact, there’s already very little actual reporting going on. That’s the downside.
I’m not saying the media didn’t blow it — it did. It left a wide open niche for others to drive through. But it still serves a useful function, if they ever want to get back to it.
#17 IB Bill — And who is going to gather that news for you?
Robots.
Re news creation, broadcast networks do this. The discussion herein is about newspapers.
press releases
Much of science/technology reporting is already press release based; I’ve written a number of news stories myself. Reporters aren’t experts in these areas and never have been, nor does one expect them to be.
An example of the typical science/tech reporting chain. This page is an archaeological aggregator:
http://www.archaeologica.org/NewsPage.htm
Click on this story:
“Stone Age Scandinavians unable to digest milk” (from) EurekAlert
And the page is this:
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-04/uu-sas040110.php
Shazam. It’s a press release. (Who knew?)
Depending any number of factors you may (or may not) see this reflected in a week or two on CNN, sort of reformatted by a “reporter.” Or you may see this reformatted on any number of general purpose science sites. In 4 months you might see this in a Discover or Scientific American magazine as a short article. I’ve seen (press release) articles re Elizabethan interest post on this site in Feb and be reported in Renaissance Magazine in the Oct issue.
But it starts as a press release from the host, which in this case is Uppsala University. Not a reporter.
Ever heard of EurekAlert?
Gee-here’s an idea for the Mastadon Media: try reporting news and not your fascist opinion pieces, try not insulting your readers every chance you get, try not to deliberately conceal information, or distort or even fabricate to push your cultural Marxism. It won’t matter if it’s free, distributed per your suggestion, people don’t want to have the crap sandwich any more. The plain truth of the matter is that sites like this one and others are where many people are getting their news because you can’t find it elsewhere in the print media. Example: what news organization reported that HUNDREDS showed up in Searchlight to protest Harry Reid when the total crowd rocked in the thousands??? The sheer deceit is breathtaking and they are getting what they deserve. I can’t wait to read the most significant obit ever printed in the NYT: its own death.
How about truth ? Activist journalism & political spin/bias is not news.Todays unlimited choices quickly expose BS resulting in deserved reputations as bird cage liners for many so called newspapers.The NYT in the USA and Toronto Star in Canada are examples of junk journalism.