Okay, question time: Imagine you’re a major national newspaper whose crosstown archrival has somehow obtained two million pages of explosive documents that outed your country’s biggest political scandal of the decade.
While many professional journalists fondly remember the work they did in college–covering townie news for the university paper or radio station–some are trying to erase their past work from the Internet because it shows up prominently on search engines like Google.
Researchers from City University London have published a report showing one European newspaper’s steep drop in revenue as well as unsteady Web traffic after it became an online-only publication.
Another weekend goes by and another old school newspaper guy writes a long screed condemning Google as a menace hellbent on destroying all that is good and right in the news business.
Last month an email message washed up at the offices of The Cook Islands News in the South Pacific. It was a request to place a half-page advertisement in the newspaper, which has a circulation of 2,500. The cost was $370. Even more surprising was who was paying for it: Google.
Hearst Corp. this afternoon said it may sell or close the San Francisco Chronicle if a new round of cost-saving measures cannot be accomplished in the coming weeks. Hearst said it will undertake “critical cost-saving measures including a significant reduction in the number of its unionized and non-union employees.”
Like Napoleon marching into an abandoned Moscow, Larry Page and Sergey Brin have led Google’s advance into traditional advertising only to find nothing to loot. Now begins Google’s long imperial retreat, starting with 40 layoffs. But the real cut here is to Google’s ambitions.
I’m not sure why the micropayments-as-the-savior-of-journalism meme seems to have taken off of late, but I’m glad there are lots of people trying to squash it: I’d particularly recommend Gabe Sherman and Clay Shirky. But in the case of Steve Brill’s “secret memo” on the subject, it’s worth responding to some of his specifics.
The newspaper is dead. You can read all about it online, blog by blog, where the digital gloom over the death of an industry often veils, if thinly, a pallid glee. The Newspaper Death Watch, a Web site, even has a column titled “R.I.P.” Or, hold on, maybe the newspaper isn’t quite dead yet. At its funeral, wild-eyed mourners spy signs of life. The newspaper stirs!
If you’re a tree, you’re probably feeling pretty good right now. We’ve long known that the traditional newspaper–a hard-copy compendium of the previous day’s events, printed on an obscene amount of wood byproduct–was terminally ill. But two of 2008’s big media developments–the Christian Science Monitor’s plan to kill its daily print edition outright, and the Detroit News and Detroit Free Press’s decision to radically scale back their print operations and refocus online–suggests that the traditional newspaper’s death will come sooner than anyone imagined.
A couple years ago, right around the time Dell’s exploding laptop batteries were getting a fair amount of media attention, I had breakfast in San Francisco with a senior Dell executive. He was seriously annoyed by all the focus on Dell, even though his company wasn’t the only one with the spontaneous combustion problem caused by Sony’s batteries.
Page by page, section by section, the influence of the New York Times is fading away. Great people on an important mission, but their footprint is shrinking and the company is losing stock value and cash and power and the ability to have the impact that they might.
1. Get out of the newspaper business. Culturally, you can’t look and define your business as the delivery mechanism. The business is truly content and distribution across all pipes. The asset is journalists and the brand. A print-based property is just one of the many ways to distribute the digital bits. Most newspapers have in charge of their leadership “newspaper men.” They should turn over the reins to young execs, women and people with diverse backgrounds, who are Web-based and consumer savvy and will NOT be wed and enamored with the print-based delivery system of the past.
We still occasionally encounter people who argue that physical newspapers and TV news shows have a vital role to play in the dissemination of news. These folks usually work for physical newspapers and TV networks, of course.
In any event, Zogby’s annual importance-of-news-source poll shows just how fast traditional news media are going extinct.
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