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Old media develops dementia
werehippy
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
There hasn't been a discussion about journalism for months that didn't dwell on the fact that the old media models are failing. Readership and viewers are leaving the old standbys in droves, and advertising revenue was falling rapidly even before the recession hit. Whether it's the lose of a competitive advantage, the moving of classified business to craigslist, or the rise of new media is anyone's guess.
What is a more recent development is that a couple of titans of the old world, the New York Times and the Associated Press, have decided that simply staying the course in the face of inevitable doom was just taking too long. Being a proactive group, they decided to simply go insane instead.
Warming us up is the NYT deciding to charge $5/month for access to their web content. This isn't stupid per se, just pointless since they had been charging for their web content just a couple of years ago and scrapped the idea because it wasn't profitable.
The real genius is coming from the AP though. They aren't going to try and hide their content behind a subscription or stop people form using it. They are just going to embed "code" in each article that will charge anyone who sees their articles a royalty fee. Search engines, websites, blogs, doesn't matter. The code will see all and track all (and report back to the AP on usage, of course). I have to admit I'm not sure if I'm more confused by the insanity involved in thinking this is technically feasible, or the stupidity involved in thinking everyone will just go along. And this isn't some idle talk, or a CEO who doesn't know anything mouthing off somewhere, this is their honest to god strategy and they've sunk significant amounts of money into making it happen.
What to do with the old forms of journalism is an interesting question and one that will impact a staggering number of aspects in our day to day lives. Wasting time on idiotic ideas like this is just like being inside the music industry a decade ago, with the added twist that the morons involved will actually hurt society at large when they fail.
What is a more recent development is that a couple of titans of the old world, the New York Times and the Associated Press, have decided that simply staying the course in the face of inevitable doom was just taking too long. Being a proactive group, they decided to simply go insane instead.
Warming us up is the NYT deciding to charge $5/month for access to their web content. This isn't stupid per se, just pointless since they had been charging for their web content just a couple of years ago and scrapped the idea because it wasn't profitable.
The real genius is coming from the AP though. They aren't going to try and hide their content behind a subscription or stop people form using it. They are just going to embed "code" in each article that will charge anyone who sees their articles a royalty fee. Search engines, websites, blogs, doesn't matter. The code will see all and track all (and report back to the AP on usage, of course). I have to admit I'm not sure if I'm more confused by the insanity involved in thinking this is technically feasible, or the stupidity involved in thinking everyone will just go along. And this isn't some idle talk, or a CEO who doesn't know anything mouthing off somewhere, this is their honest to god strategy and they've sunk significant amounts of money into making it happen.
What to do with the old forms of journalism is an interesting question and one that will impact a staggering number of aspects in our day to day lives. Wasting time on idiotic ideas like this is just like being inside the music industry a decade ago, with the added twist that the morons involved will actually hurt society at large when they fail.
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Their houses will be burned down by angry people the second the attempt to do it.
And how are they going to stop sites from stripping their 'code' from the article before posting it (which I'm sure will be a ridiculously easy task)?
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Shhh!
What? Readership has risen at unprecedented levels for the major dailies. Your local swap meet herald may be dying, but NYT, WaPo, LA Times, and Trib have exploded with eyeballs. The only problem is that readers never paid for anything in the history of newspaper and the companies don't know how to make a mint yet.
No, no, it makes perfect sense. He's saying that he's going to sell the content of his paper to the highest bidder.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
And I guess search engines, too, but really, Google has a contract with them, so... does it really matter? Is there some other search engine I'm not aware of? Oh, like Bing. As in "I just Googled Bing."
Which doesn't contradict what he said.....which doesn't mean that I'm saying what he said is true...which...oh god.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Sure, except make them look like actual news articles! It's brilliant, we'll make millions!
Seriously, that's the only way the Google analogy would work.
Why would anybody pay them for that? That isn't even Google's main source of revenue from what I know.
I'm quite sure the Associated Press don't give a shit about Timmy's Private Blog, nor will they ever press on their stuff being used without permission on such a small scale. The goal of this initiative is the print media. Of which I'd wager 90% of copy is lifted as is from the AP, Reuters and Bloomberg newswires, and then mirrored throughout these media corporations' various online hosts.
I've seen senior editors literally copy and paste an entire ticker report and put it right there on page one. And the AP gets almost nothing out of this practice, despite putting up firm restrictions on how their material can be used that are almost never followed.
They are simply making it much easier for them to track and properly charge these media outlets for using their material. While they are huge, they aren't so huge that they can manually check each and every international, local and regional paper that uses their material. And their ticker subscription fees are vast, and vetted, but I would assume no longer paying the bills. They know they can't charge more for the service, and lord knows they've tried in the past, but they also know that their shit is all over without a dime going back to them. The AP don't give a fuck about a strap to absolve the paper, they want dollar bills yo'.
Yes it is. Are you making a point or just throwing in a non-sequiter?
Unless there are other, better places to advertise than on newspapers and news websites which makes their carpet bombing approach obsolete. And there are!
Things like the internet have pushed the baseline cost of effective ads downward to the point that paying to put them in a newspaper is simply no longer cost efficient. Thus, newspapers are having a very hard time remaining operational regardless of actual readership.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Damn you, office clipboard! Damn you and all who have access to you!
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
The one that never worked? I'm surprised they're not charging ISP's to access their site like so many other web sites that charge for content.
In theory that is the case but in the real world that stopped being how it worked twenty years ago. Back in the good old days, at least in the UK, you had like three newspapers. Total. So the only metric that governed ad revenue for the newspaper was sheer circulation numbers. How many people bought their shit.
Now, there are a million publications, each catering to an increasingly specific demographic. Circulation is no longer considered among ad men the primary rule for paying the newspapers money. It is the readership demographics. For example, even though the Financial Times has a fraction of the circulation of, say, The Sun, certain companies are going to pay more - above what the circulation figures would warrant, to advertise in the FT. Because they know that if one person buys their watch, then their like minded friends will also.
Newspaper ads are more specific than ever before. For example, open the Mirror and you won't see a Omega ad, but open today's Guardian and it's right there, page three. John Fucking Kennedy with it on his wrist.
The problem arises when ad agencies no longer feel the newspapers have enough social importance to warrant this overpaying of ad space. Which is why all their money is going online, where the kids roam. Few young people today read newspapers, therefore the newspapers have less social impact.
It isn't dying in readership it's actually thriving rather well. You're talking about the business model failing to rake in profits, which I addressed on the last line of my post if you had bothered to read it. Do you honestly believe that the nickel it cost to get the paper delivered at home in the 60's paid for overseas bureaus? Because getting every unique visitor to put in a dollar isn't going to put anyone back in the black, even if all other forms of news coverage were somehow banned.
It doesn't pay enough. Ad revenue is what they're doing now, and that doesn't work. Which is why some of them are talking about paywalls.
[citation needed]
The monthly cost for my grandpa to get physical home delivery wouldn't cover the gas it takes to get from the neighbor's driveway let alone everything else that it entails.
Actually, the NYT would be solvent if they hadn't taken on a stupid amount of debt years ago. Leaving aside refinancing that they're in the black, which is probably why their plan is more on the stupid end of the desperation scale, as opposed to the insane.
Because of a drop in ad revenue thanks to better advertising resources made available to Madison Avenue with the advent of the internet. Not because people stopped paying 50 cents a copy. If anything the web has reduced the amount of subsidy that went to printers for an increase in audience levels.