Maybe newspapers aren't dead after all
October 26, 2017 10:15 AM   Subscribe

What If the Newspaper Industry Made a Colossal Mistake? "...the circulation of the supposedly dying print product may be in decline, but it still reaches many more readers than the supposedly promising digital product in home markets, and this trend holds across all age groups. For all the expense of building, programming and hosting them, online editions haven't added much in the way of revenue, either."
posted by COD (55 comments total) 18 users marked this as a favorite
 
[W]hile print readership is declining, newspaper readers did not drop print in favor of the same newspaper’s online edition.

[....] Chyi and Tenenboim don’t deny the obvious mass migration of news consumers to the Web, but they note that most readers go to news aggregators, like Yahoo News, Google News, CNN.com, MSN and other non-newspaper sites.
I am pretty sure that the meat of the article suggests that newspapers are, in fact, dying; it's just that digital editions aren't going to save them. That is what the researchers' actual research points toward, as far as the article describes. The one researcher's paraphrased optimism is a personal opinion that was not backed up by any data mentioned in the article aside from a vague mention of how "beloved" newspapers are.
posted by inconstant at 10:31 AM on October 26, 2017 [10 favorites]


Newspapers are trying desperately to stay relevant, but they don't seem to realize the entire reason they began to be irrelevant is when it became patently obvious that they were less interested in truth and more interested in those ad dollars, meaning they won't generally run stories that would interfere with their ad dollars or involve them in being legally harangued.

All the media patting themselves on the back for outing Harvey Weinsten rings hollow to most people, because there's just far too much evidence that those same media organizations killed this story multiple times in the name of money.

Maybe, just maybe, print wouldn't be so dead if people actually felt like they could truly trust the source.

Trust in traditional media is at new lows, and yet the media continues to pat itself on the back about stuff that the media itself helped cause. Like the New York Times lamenting our continuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as though they were not the very cheerleaders of said wars, giving plenty of space for OpEds from people who were nothing but pro-war. You don't get to pat yourself on the back, a decade on, for being willing to question the war after you already helped get it started. You don't get to have people look at you credibly after that.

I still look at the New York Times as one of the most reliable sources I can turn to, but I also have to ignore them completely when it comes to certain subjects, because they are absolutely willing to sell their soul for access and money.

The endless, abject sucking up to advertisers and government as to not lose ad money and/or access has done more to trivialize the dying newspaper industry than people not buying papers.

People stopped buying papers because of this. People started entire online zines and blogs to escape from corporate media. Meta.
posted by deadaluspark at 10:40 AM on October 26, 2017 [51 favorites]


Local versus global rech seems to be something missing from the headlines and lede.
posted by Artw at 10:50 AM on October 26, 2017 [2 favorites]


I wonder if the fake, bot-driven feeding frenzy of online advertising is going to end with a bang or a whimper? Once it becomes inescapably obvious that only machines and 3rd world clickfarmers are primarily clicking on those ads, will the bulk of online content suffer the same fate?
posted by ryanshepard at 10:51 AM on October 26, 2017 [3 favorites]


I actually don't think newspapers are dying because of truth vs. ad dollars. They're dying because nobody under 50 subscribes to a print paper, the money dropped out of the digital ad market, and they've been unable to articulate why anyone should pay for a digital subscription. Which is a shame, since local outlets (and specifically local newspapers) are a crucial part of government accountability and investigative journalism in the USA.

The result has been a vicious cycle: papers lose money, so they lean heavier on wire and put out a less interesting print product, which sucks money away from what they need to do to be effective digitally. People notice the drop in quality, don't pay for a subscription, and the paper makes less money...
posted by Four String Riot at 10:53 AM on October 26, 2017 [24 favorites]


Also, most newsrooms have journalists who have no idea to cater to anyone outside of a local audience.

In 2008 I worked at a small, local television station in Eastern Washington. I was in production, a technical director for the local news. I read on Slashdot about how NASA was testing a new Lunar Rover in Moses Lake, which was about two hours drive from us. I talked about it with reporters, and they all said "Isn't that outside of our coverage area?"

...Outside of our coverage area???

The top story on Wired.com was STILL IMAGES of the rover, and that stayed the top story for almost a week, with hits from ALL OVER THE WORLD.

We had video, but it never made it on our website. The only reason we even had video was because I called NASA myself and arranged it, and brought it to the News Manager after I already had it arranged.

So a lot of this is at least partially because you have a staff trained to focus on local news with no ability to think about how to expand beyond that when appropriate.

EDIT: If I can, I might dig up my old Slashdot post complaining about it.
posted by deadaluspark at 10:53 AM on October 26, 2017 [21 favorites]


I pay good money to have the paper copy of The New Yorker delivered to my mail box, because I know what I'm going to get and I care about it. I do not pay money for any newspaper, digital or paper, but prefer to get my news from NPR, and to find free stories on the web when I'm particularly interested in something. I have the feeling that, a long time ago, paper newspapers used to offer my parents and grandparents what The New Yorker offers me today, but I don't think they offer it any more.
posted by ubiquity at 10:55 AM on October 26, 2017 [7 favorites]


I think The New Yorker being the 2017 version of a newspaper is a good one. It's kinda timely. Offers in depth analysis. It's trustworthy. Accumulates in an unread stack.

It offers much of what we used to read newspapers for.
posted by Keith Talent at 11:07 AM on October 26, 2017 [7 favorites]


Up here in Seattle, I see a lot of people linking to, talking about, and reading The Seattle Times; just not paying for it. The reasons are many and varied: it is more "The Suburban Times" because of its perceived bias against Seattle (and a lot of Seattleites' views) and towards the suburbs; the editorial board is unduly slanted, particularly in unsigned editorials, which are perceived as being written by the Blethen family (the owners); it is too expensive; it has too many ads; if the paper's owners wanted more revenue, why do they give away the content online for free; "hyper-local" outfits like the West Seattle Blog, South Seattle Emerald, and Capitol Hill Blog are perceived as better.

The complaints about content seem to be about the editorial stances of the paper, not the actual news content. I don't know if there is a fix for that, short of the Blethens selling the paper and that's something I doubt they will do (I think owning the Times is a point of pride at this point) and, even if they did, a new owner would very likely gut the news desks even further.
posted by fireoyster at 11:11 AM on October 26, 2017 [4 favorites]


"they" decided to liquidate the newspaper industry via mergers, buyouts, and resulting debt issues, long before the internet.
What if the industry should have stuck with its strengths—the print editions where the vast majority of their readers still reside and where the overwhelming majority of advertising and subscription revenue come from—instead of chasing the online chimera?
What if the various business scam artists and corporate raiders that own and run the industry have no interest in running a business but have used their holdings to suck as much liquidity out of their holdings while running endless equity and bond speculations on the ponies markets, and/or speculating on Manhattan real-estate. The only journalists left are people totally confused about who their bosses are or doomed corporate ladder climbers about to get sacked.
posted by I hate nature. at 11:11 AM on October 26, 2017 [14 favorites]


I am led to beleive The Stranger is Seattles only newspaper.
posted by Artw at 11:13 AM on October 26, 2017 [3 favorites]


Artw, I'd be with you there prior to the exodus from The Stranger a couple of years ago. Most of the writers I liked to read there are now at Crosscut, The Urbanist, or have moved on to other jobs that don't include writing about Seattle.
posted by fireoyster at 11:16 AM on October 26, 2017 [1 favorite]


Disclaimer: current employee of The Seattle Times.

The Stranger does a lot of work that I think is great, but they're not paying for the kind of reporters who broke the Mayor Murray allegations open, or went after Swedish for double-booking surgeries, or do long-form environmental reporting, or go out and cover the DAPL protests live for three or four days. They also link to and follow up on a lot of our reporting. If (when?) the Times goes under, it's going to leave a real gap in coverage for this city.

Which is not to say that criticisms of the paper are misplaced--people choose not to give us money for reasons that I think are entirely valid, some of which were mentioned above. Just, you know, it's a mixed bag.
posted by Four String Riot at 11:17 AM on October 26, 2017 [11 favorites]


Four String Riot: They [The Stranger -ed] also link to and follow up on a lot of our reporting.

It's funny, The Stranger is one of the places I was thinking of when I wrote that a lot of people talk about the Times' coverage. I see Times articles linked on Facebook, Reddit (usually with the snark of "can't read the article, hit my free limit and I'm not gonna subscribe to that rag"), Twitter, and e-mailed around my office.

I mean, I get it...people don't like the Blethens. But, damn, there is clearly value there; why not pay for it? I found it very telling that, in all of the recent complaining about Sound Transit, supporters and opponents of Sound Transit both pointed to the Times' coverage to justify their positions.

Hell, I'd pay for a Times subscription just to read Gene Balk and Mike Lindbolm.

(Full disclosure: I pay for a Sunday delivery plus digital subscription to The Seattle Times so I'm tilted towards it remaining in existence.)
posted by fireoyster at 11:26 AM on October 26, 2017


I'm surprised at transit supporters pointing at the times, that's an area where they have very clearly shown their hand.
posted by Artw at 11:29 AM on October 26, 2017 [1 favorite]


Yeah, but they've shown their hand enough that occasionally they're accidentally arguing for the other side. Also, useful to have them tell us what they think and what they think we think and what they think we should think!

I pay for the Seattle Times and paid for the Capitol Hill Blog even through their hiatus because someone ought to go to the city hall meetings and I don't want to.
posted by clew at 11:36 AM on October 26, 2017


Since our "big" local newspaper went mostly-online, we have two unexpected new entries into the "print newspaper" space here. I think they both do pretty decently, at least judging by the huge quantity of print ads they contain. In fact I bet they do much better for themselves, now that the bigger papers are gone.

Why? Because local ad dollars are still looking to go somewhere, and if you are a real estate agent or a car dealer or a furniture store, you don't care about reaching a national audience. You want people who actually live nearby. And the Venn diagram of print newspaper readers vs potential customers, looks good to you. The limitations of print draw that local boundary for you. Whereas the online edition is as likely to draw faraway readers as local ones, and faraway readers are no more useful to an advertiser, than trolls and click farmers are.
posted by elizilla at 11:38 AM on October 26, 2017 [5 favorites]


(Actually, I think fireoyster may have been making a different point: there is a usefully-close-to-objective reporting layer on transit at the Seattle Times, which both sides refer to. There's also a jaw droppingly freebies-for-me editorial stance, which both sides refer to but don't agree about.)
posted by clew at 11:39 AM on October 26, 2017 [1 favorite]


I'm under 50 and have kept meaning to get the Saturday edition of the Toronto Star (for some reason, in Ontario, Saturday papers are the Sunday paper in terms of size and sections) because I like a leisurely read on the weekend over coffee and breakfast. But that hasn't happened yet and my local newspaper was bought out by Postmedia yoinks ago, so it's a handful of local news stories and mostly AP wire stuff from other places. With rapid folding of newspapers plus the FCC news yesterday, everything will end up being horribly homogenized, much like the radio stations.
posted by Kitteh at 11:44 AM on October 26, 2017


With rapid folding of newspapers plus the FCC news yesterday, everything will end up being horribly homogenized, much like the radio stations.

The limitations of print draw that local boundary for you. Whereas the online edition is as likely to draw faraway readers as local ones, and faraway readers are no more useful to an advertiser, than trolls and click farmers are.

I think these two issues feed into each other. While my stations were cutting costs, we had three stations in three major cities, with news for each. By the time I left we had one major station in one major city, and one city with a weekday show, and one city with just one reporter to do cut-ins for local news from that area. Now, the whole of Eastern Washington gets its weekend news out of Spokane. Both of the stations I worked at are now essentially empty. Almost all the advertising on the channels is now focused on Spokane businesses. People from the other two cities watch less and less news on those channels because they don't actually cover local events, and the advertising is useless to them because they're not driving all the way from Yakima to Spokane to go shopping.

How can an online resource ever produce as much ad revenue when you're getting more users from across the world and less actual local users? Doesn't this just feed into, as Kitteh suggests, endless homogenization? An ad for Walmart or Amazon can fly in almost any market, because they penetrate every market. What about mom and pop shops? Not so much. So, the homogenization is further pushed by media companies wanting to focus on ads that are actually successful, which really means they can only accept ads from giant conglomerates that exist countrywide. In other words, homogenized.
posted by deadaluspark at 11:50 AM on October 26, 2017 [2 favorites]


Since our "big" local newspaper went mostly-online, we have two unexpected new entries into the "print newspaper" space here. I think they both do pretty decently, at least judging by the huge quantity of print ads they contain. In fact I bet they do much better for themselves, now that the bigger papers are gone.

The best newspaper I have personally ever read is the Quoddy Tides, which covers the city of Eastport and the surrounding cities in both Washington County, Maine and New Brunswick, Canada. Really solid reporting of local issues, of the kind of that you cannot find even in the national papers that are named after cities like The Boston Globe.

I really think this is probably the future of newspapers. The market for national news is utterly saturated, and if people want to read Reuters and AP wire stories they can just follow Reuters and AP directly on Twitter or Facebook. But nobody's covering the changing DFW regulations on shellfishing other than the local paper.
posted by tobascodagama at 11:51 AM on October 26, 2017 [2 favorites]


Most of the people I know who are vocal about newspapers being "untrustworthy" are also the people who think Donald Trump's Twitter feed is basically an incontrovertible wellspring of truth and justice, so I admit to some skepticism over that point of view just in general. I'd be cautious what dogs you're lying down with, because they have some pretty nasty fleas.

But sure, in the abstract I can get being annoyed that the NYT or WaPo were not more skeptical about the Bush administration's Iraq statements 14 years ago, but it's worth considering the alternatives (or, really, lack thereof) right now. Holding a grudge over an insufficiently critical editorial stance from 2003 might feel good, but it seems like it's going to be a hollow victory when those news outlets are gone, and we just have the various party-affiliated (or nation-state affiliated) propaganda outlets screaming at each other.

What the major newspapers did over a decade ago is a lot less important than what they're doing right now, in the present context. And they seem to be doing a lot of good work. If they disappear as institutions, reconstituting them is going to be very difficult, and sorting out truth from fiction will become even more difficult.

Sometimes the hardest thing to do is not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
posted by Kadin2048 at 11:59 AM on October 26, 2017 [15 favorites]


I subscribe to my local paper mainly because it allow me to read the local news without seeing the comments of my "neighbors" on the same stories on the website. Totally worth $15 a month.
posted by COD at 12:05 PM on October 26, 2017 [4 favorites]


What the major newspapers did over a decade ago is a lot less important than what they're doing right now, in the present context. And they seem to be doing a lot of good work. If they disappear as institutions, reconstituting them is going to be very difficult, and sorting out truth from fiction will become even more difficult.

It really depends on the newspaper. Our local newspaper (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel) is owned by Gannett and has cut much of its reporting down to the bare minimum. Since Paul Ryan is somewhat local, the newspaper has decided its role is to be his cheerleader.

I used to subscribe in my late twenties, but stopped when the paper decided that filling the editorial pages with the latest from Right Wing Think Tanks was the way to make friends an influence people.
posted by drezdn at 12:07 PM on October 26, 2017 [3 favorites]


Kadin2048, I want SO MUCH to agree with this sentiment, but the media collectively deciding to STOP ragging on Trump for 30 seconds and to even call him "Presidential" because he bombed Syria, showed that fuck-nothing has changed in that department.

That is what is happening right now. They are willing to nail this guys ass to the wall for everything but being a warmonger.

Sometimes the hardest thing to do is not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Is that why the New York Times has put forth such a concerted effort to try to make calls for censorship of social media? Isn't that, in your own words, allowing perfect to be the enemy of good? To demand perfection, and without it, censorship?

It screams to me dead media desperately trying to keep control of the message.

Anyway, as for "what's happening right now" places like the New York Times are digging their own fucking graves in attempts to stay relevant, instead of putting their money where their mouth is and pursuing real, in-depth journalism that isn't going to get paid off.

Also, as a reminded, the Harvey Weinstein thing is incredibly recent and relevant. I have every right to continue thinking that these groups cower and capitulate when it comes to people with big bags of cash breathing down their necks. I can very, very easily point out that this is the nature of a business who is reliant on advertising to keep running, as they can only do so much to anger advertisers before they start losing money. That story was killed multiple times, by the New York Times, no less, almost ten years ago.

The problem it wasn't a one time thing, but something that keeps happening.

Paint it as a mistake from the past if you want, but the culture has yet to change. They still are hopelessly pro-war and hopelessly unwilling to fight anyone with enough money to make them quiver.

We have politicians making laws about online advertising in respect to Russia, but the real fucking elephant in the room, paid political speech online masquerading as real individuals speaking their own political ideals, isn't even on the table to fucking deal with.
posted by deadaluspark at 12:10 PM on October 26, 2017 [7 favorites]


My local Gannett paper, which I haven't subscribed to in decades, recently fired almost all of its (older) well-regarded journalists and replaced some of them with unknowns. Most of the paper is just day-old USA Today stories and local coverage is better handled by the local television stations so it's become unclear why it exists at all.
posted by tommasz at 12:15 PM on October 26, 2017 [3 favorites]


Newspaper ownership is mostly in the fake news trump support post truth generation isn't it? We should be suprised thy do anything close to reporting at all.
posted by Artw at 12:27 PM on October 26, 2017 [1 favorite]


Once it becomes inescapably obvious that only machines and 3rd world clickfarmers are primarily clicking on those ads,

This is so completely not true. I run a program for a non-profit that does online ads. It's the most cost-effective ways for us to bring on new members/donors. I mean, maybe bots are clicking (why though?), but the sheer ROI on these ads, especially Facebook, is really strong. And I know from talking to colleagues at other orgs that this is true for many non-profits.

I bet it's true for small businesses as well. Most small businesses and non-profits are not going to be able to run large ads in a big paper like the NY Times or the Miami Herald. It's just not going to get enough of a return to be effective. But a single online ads is incredibly cheap to run, so you can test a lot of different ads to see what works well, get results immediately, and spend your limited ad budget on what you can see is actually working. Online ads are actually a boon for us. And the beauty of it, is once they stop being a boon, we'll know right away and can stop running them.
posted by lunasol at 12:33 PM on October 26, 2017 [3 favorites]


I don't know if this is why the newspapers are dying, but I know I'd be more inclined to give the Grauniad my money if it dropped all of the clapped out Corbyn bashers, transphobes and War on Iraq apologists it has for pundits.
posted by MartinWisse at 12:34 PM on October 26, 2017 [3 favorites]


Newspapers, like every other publishing industry that relies on paper, are having the same problems as all the others: How do we convince people to pay for (1) content and (2) a physical object, when (1) is available free online and (2) is considered a nuisance clutter factor?

The issue isn't even "can we provide quality news with the money we get from subscriptions and ads?" because he content available free online includes Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr posts. Newspapers never had to face the question of, "how do we persuade people that 'news' is useful and interesting content?" and their business plans don't have a method for that.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 12:34 PM on October 26, 2017


The comparison to the New Yorker is an interesting one, because you know what the New Yorker is? It's a dang magazine. If people get their news from free, up-to-the-minute timely news aggregators and social media (and also, notably, from television, which is weirdly missing from this analysis), they don't care about longform, edited, journalistic news. No one reads the New Yorker to find out what is happening in the world. They read it to gain a deeper understanding of issues, to look at beautiful photographs, to read opinion pieces that help them form or articulate their own tag. In fact, they read it to tune out of the 24 hour news cycle.

Also, from a purely stylistic/UX standpoint, magazines are easy and comfortable to hold and read, while newspapers still continue to be printed on enormous sheets of newsprint that gets ink all over your hands and whacks people in the face on public transit.
posted by capricorn at 12:38 PM on October 26, 2017 [5 favorites]


An ad for Walmart or Amazon can fly in almost any market, because they penetrate every market. What about mom and pop shops

But isn’t the entire structure of online advertising, these days, designed to collect and track so much of my personal information and behaviour that they can target hyper-local interesting ads at me? Clearly it doesn’t work - I see two or three ads a year on the entire internet for something actually relevant to me. It really makes me wonder why they go to the effort of all that privacy invasion if they’re just going to show me ads for Audis and investment products.
posted by Jimbob at 12:51 PM on October 26, 2017 [2 favorites]


Kind of? And yet in practice local news is mostly just garbage inventory ads that are close to malware.
posted by Artw at 12:54 PM on October 26, 2017 [2 favorites]


while newspapers still continue to be printed on enormous sheets of newsprint that gets ink all over your hands and whacks people in the face on public transit.

YES THIS. My personal ranking of best mediums for readability is: well designed book >>>>> well-designed magazine >> e-reader >>> poorly designed book/magazine >>> phone >>> computer >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> newspapers. They're uncomfortable to hold, are like half my height, have a tendency to fall apart, often come bundled with trash you didn't want, have tiny print, the articles are broken up into segments you have to search for like the world's most tedious game of hide and seek... I could go on. I love print; I can't stand newspapers and I'm utterly astonished anyone can now that there are other options.
posted by perplexion at 12:55 PM on October 26, 2017 [5 favorites]


This is an interesting idea. I read a variety of long form in-depth news analysis pieces from old media newspapers, old media magazines and new media outlets. I have for years. I have not read a daily paper nor exposed myself to television news in 10 years maybe? And since Morning Edition and All Things Considered did such a poor job with the election last year, I don't listen to the radio anymore either.

What I've found is: I have no trouble hearing about breaking news without trying and I have so little interest in "news". But deeper understanding of the issues? A long view of a story that developed over months or years? An analysis of an event, now that there's hindsight? I'd pay for that from a media outlet. Everything else is noise.
posted by crush at 1:15 PM on October 26, 2017 [4 favorites]


After 20 years of digital news consumption and creation (I've worked for WP, NYT and Huffpost) I'm finding it nearly impossible to use these platforms to stay informed. This past new year's I gave up "digital workflows and distribution" and, well, news is the one thing that has worked a lot better. I read magazines, The NYRB, the London Review and the LA Times, and, well -- I'm much better informed than I have ever been and, guess what? When you have print in your house to read you don't impulsively look at your phone to fill the gaps. Also, I've been asking my 14yo daughter to read an article out loud to me every day, which has also been very positive.

Right now reading on article on Huffpost (my indicator of where we're headed) presents you with a tiny news hole, an autoplaying video (that is often not directly related to the article) with an unstoppable 30 sec preroll ad, all of which loads too slowly and then a jerkily scrolling column of text surrounded by taboulla recirculation spam. What the literal F…
posted by n9 at 1:22 PM on October 26, 2017 [8 favorites]


That's all very well and good, but what happens when breaking news doesn't break because there's no one out there investigating it? Look at the Miami Herald's recent series on the "schools" that receive public scholarship funding in Florida. The fact is, those stories require the commitment of long-term investigative resources that basically no one else brings to the table.
posted by praemunire at 1:30 PM on October 26, 2017 [10 favorites]


> Right now reading on article on Huffpost (my indicator of where we're headed) presents you with a tiny news hole, an autoplaying video (that is often not directly related to the article) with an unstoppable 30 sec preroll ad, all of which loads too slowly and then a jerkily scrolling column of text surrounded by taboulla recirculation spam. What the literal F…

This is true on my local newspaper sites too, on desktop or mobile. Usually I'll be about five paragraphs down, the screen will lock up, in a few seconds an ad will appear and when I dismiss it the page will have scrolled back to the top. If the article is long, like an investigative piece or photo essay, there are often so many Javascript-intensive ads that it's impossible to scroll down without almost locking up my browser.

Old school print had annoying ads too, especially the magazines with scented perfume inserts or those little subscription cards that fall out and land in some filthy public place where you don't want to pick them up but feel bad about just leaving them. And I'm always shocked by how annoying and scammy a lot of ads on mainstream networks like CNN, Fox News and ESPN are. And yeah, page jumps are annoying, especially in publications with lots of ads and infrequent page numbers.

But before online news, publishers would never have tolerated ads that make it impossible to view the actual content. If an advertiser had said, we want to squirt perfume out of the magazine after it's been open for 30 seconds, or we want you to add a page jump to this article every paragraph and fill the rest of the page with ads, nobody would have gone for that.
posted by smelendez at 1:35 PM on October 26, 2017 [3 favorites]


smelendez: If an advertiser had said, we want to squirt perfume out of the magazine after it's been open for 30 seconds, or we want you to add a page jump to this article every paragraph and fill the rest of the page with ads, nobody would have gone for that.

As I understand it, local newspapers were in the position to turn their nose up at bothersome ad ideas because classifieds were a cash cow. My information may be out of date, but what I heard was that it was Ebay, Craigslist and Kijiji who killed high-quality local reporting.
posted by clawsoon at 1:41 PM on October 26, 2017 [4 favorites]


@clawsoon I think that's right. Plus media consolidation means that the people making the decisions about what types of ads to accept aren't even in the same media market. They're never going to see those ads.
posted by smelendez at 1:43 PM on October 26, 2017


Most ads are paid out by click through rates and run by giant aggregators, right? Couldn’t local papers start selling ad space on their web sites directly to local advertisers, instead? You know, like they still do for the paper version.

Hey car local dealer, for $500 we’ll put your ad image up on every third story we post this week. Just send your image over. We’ll host it on our own server so ad-blockers won’t block it. No JS, just an image and a link. Here’s a list of the articles where your ad appears. Here’s a link to our analytics showing the page views.
posted by Eddie Mars at 2:05 PM on October 26, 2017 [1 favorite]


The problem is that the entire concept of advertising, pre-ability to track, was based on nebulous or low metrics.

Now that's it possible to track things to micro scale, we're discovering that X number of hits may or may not do a lot. Add in classifieds becoming essentially free and suddenly advertisers want more, for less.

Information may want to be free, but food, clothing and shelter isn't.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 2:09 PM on October 26, 2017 [2 favorites]


Another huge problem is that, by and large, advertisers don't buy advertising space from publishers. There are entities who in the old days used to buy up lots of ad space and then sell them on to advertisers, using bulk buying to cut down the cost to them and bunging a premium on before selling on to companies. Now, they run advertising networks which serve ads across platforms, and sell campaigns to advertisers. They promise metrics and data to advertisers which looks really good - after all, the agencies are seeing data from lots of platforms, which the individual platforms are not - and can package this up to disguise its junk status. Most notably, because agencies can always magic up traffic and data, they have zero interest in, and zero contact with, editorial content creation.

The reason you get those close-to-malware crap ads on a zillion smaller sites is that they just can't sell that space any other way; that shit is delivering stuff to advertisers in ways the publishers can't compete with. Those horrible in-your-face advertising tropes that ruin your reading experience online? They're either the ad networks once again selling stuff to advertisers that advertisers love but are completely decoupled from what the reader wants - there is no path from the reader or the publisher to the advertisers that isn't polluted by the agencies - or they are big publishers desperately trying to play the same game to compete. The entire game of the agencies is to take as much money away from publishers as possible, so they can make as much money themselves from the advertisers as possible. The results are shit, but come with so much magic pretty data that blame for failure can be infinitely dispersed.

An example I've given before, but which bears repeating: one ad agency mediated an expensive, targetted campaign for an advertiser in a specialist business title with the promise of reaching a certain number of qualified readers; this is how specialist publications make their money, by and large. The agency saw who the qualified readers were, because they were handling the data; they put together a portfolio of when those same readers were also seeing much, much cheaper non-specialist advertising elsewhere on the Web, and then went back to the advertiser saying 'We can deliver the same results as that really expensive specialist site for, oh, half the price' - while their costs were a tenth as much.

And, temporarily, they were right. The fact that depriving specialist publications of their revenue stream would kill those publications didn't matter to them, even though this meant that the source of the reader data would go away and they'd have to find new tricks to play. The readers who actually used the specialist pubs would find the content they wanted went away, and advertising would get shittier and shittier, but so what?

So if you're wondering why your online experience is so bad while lots of old publications that produced decent content which hasn't been replaced are gasping for life, this is one reason, and a very big one. And I can absolutely assure you that while not every publisher saw online coming or wanted anything to do with it, many did - and did so well before the rest of the world. Even in the early to mid-80s, I can point you to various experiments by big publishers to reach the tiny number of consumers online; in the 90s, there were some huge projects for Internet-delivered content before the web got established, both within publishers and elsewhere. (A canny international publisher I know spent tens of millions of dollars on its custom platform, smelled Tim Berners-Lee's coffee and decided to can it just before launch; it still made a small profit on the project by selling it wholesale to a telco. Telcos are genuinely stupid.)

Lots of very smart people in a lot of very good publishers saw this coming a long time ago, recognised it as an existential threat and spent decades trying to think their way out of it. There are plenty of counter-examples, but please don't think it's a case of "Newspapers. Duh!".
posted by Devonian at 2:42 PM on October 26, 2017 [11 favorites]


Newspapers didn't decline because they failed to hold print readers of their local or national news or move them over to their paid online products.

They had an iron grip on all classified ads, and lost that entirely to online. They were the exclusive venue for a few kinds of highly trafficked reference and amusement content -- box scores and standings, comic strips, the daily crossword, movie listings -- that was a lucrative venue for advertising, and the internet took that away very quickly. Also, less talked about but very important is that the internet's rise was coincidental with the triumph of the big box over the traditional department stores -- the former bought daily display advertising in huge amounts, the latter only weekly inserts (or nothing).
posted by MattD at 2:43 PM on October 26, 2017 [7 favorites]


This is who owns my local daily newspaper, along with a lot of others.
The most commonly cited culprit for the decline of America’s newspapers is the Internet and the assumption that no one needs to pay for news anymore. But simple capitalist greed is also to blame. Since 2004, speculators have bought and sucked dry an estimated 679 hometown newspapers that reached a combined audience of 12.8 million people.

Unlike large corporate owners in the past, the stated goal of the investment firms is not to keep struggling newspapers alive; it is to siphon off the assets and profits, then dispose of what little remains. Under this strategy, America’s newsrooms shriveled from 46,700 full-time journalists in 2009 to 32,900 in 2015—a loss of roughly one journalist out of every three. The American Society of Newspaper Editors stopped trying to estimate the number of working journalists in 2016 because “layoffs, buyouts, and restructuring are a norm.”
I'll admit to ragequitting my subscription to that paper when they printed this poorly-argued endorsement, and I'm not sure how much my subscribing again would help its beleaguered workers. Circ figures don't seem to have a lot to do with the looters' plans.

There are other newspapers in my area, including the local business weekly (I subscribe to that, and it's the same price for print-and-online and online-only, so might as well get the print too), a free weekly that does some good work and appears to be entirely bankrolled by pot ads, and a free monthly that's incapable of separating news and opinion (their opinions are terrible). I miss having a reliable daily paper, though.

Of the 10 largest newspaper owners in the country, six are now investment firms. This is not okay.
posted by asperity at 2:46 PM on October 26, 2017 [6 favorites]


The most commonly cited culprit for the decline of America’s newspapers is the Internet and the assumption that no one needs to pay for news anymore. But simple capitalist greed is also to blame.

I can't remember the specifics, but years ago I remember reading about newspapers being closed because they were only making single digit profits. Not actually losing money, just not a high enough rate for investors.

I'm really not the anti-Capitalist I sometimes seem, but this, and half the problems we talk about here, are really about unregulated markets. The biggest bully wins. I think free market Capitalism will always lead to shit, and no one has figured out how to make things actually work without some market system, and highly regulated Capitalism works better than most any system so far. It's just the one that no one can get excited about, and is never cool.

'The perfect is the enemy of the good' is also a theme here. There has never, and never will be, a perfect news source. But we're going to let the good ones die and have Facebook rumors take over.
posted by bongo_x at 3:29 PM on October 26, 2017 [5 favorites]


Shafer's argument reminds me of Andrew Potter's comments on the Canadian newspaper industry and the Globe and Mail's business strategy: Reality starts to bite at the Globe and Mail.
It seems clear now that the Globe’s strategy is going to be largely based on paid content; that is, it is going to try to get subscribers to pay for news, New York Times-style. This contrasts with the Postmedia 2.0 strategy and the Star’s tablet strategy, which were both about selling an audience on different technological platforms. It is also distinct from what appears to be the current strategy at Maclean’s, which seems to be about raw page views.

These strategies are different in important ways. Most crucially, while the Postmedia, Star, and Maclean’s strategies were neutral with respect to quality, the Globe’s strategy hinges on monetizing quality journalism.

It’s worth stating that again: The digital revenue strategies at the major legacy print news outlets in Canada do not hinge on producing and selling quality journalism. The Globe and Mail is (probably) unique in betting its future on asking readers to pay for quality.
Our current subscriptions:
  • Globe and Mail (Saturday print edition and online)
  • Economist (print)
  • Atlantic (print)
  • New York Review of Books (online)
Plus:
  • New York Times (online)
  • Washington Post (online)
  • Guardian (online)
We don't actually read these last three regularly (although I like having access to Paul Krugman's columns in the NYT). It's more like a way to financially support the newspaper industry.
posted by russilwvong at 4:12 PM on October 26, 2017 [3 favorites]


Become the Media
posted by ambulocetus at 7:11 PM on October 26, 2017


Like some others here, I'm a Seattle Times subscriber. I grew up with the Times (and looked down my nose at the typo-riddled Post-Intelligencer). We used to have a daily subscription; now we just subscribe to the Sunday paper and digital, but for some reason they still drop off the daily, despite telling both the circulation office and the carrier we no longer pay for a daily subscription. My wife reads the physical paper; I visit the website, read it via the iOS app, and get the daily newsletter.

Not all the stuff in the Times is good, but so far they are keeping up their excellent investigative work, and I think they're trying hard to do specialized coverage of education and transportation. As a former journalist myself, I would hate to see print journalism die, even though I fear it will.

Journalism isn't a simple profession to learn. When I went to journalism school (WSU, class of 1978), we took extensive classes in how state and local governments work, how taxation works, etc. It was almost expected that journalism majors were poli sci minors. We had to be photographers as well, as many of us had our first job on weeklies in one-horse wheat towns where we did all the writing and the publisher sold the ads.

For the most part, journalists do their work because they're passionate about helping people understand the world around them. It's hard for a loner with a blog to make the money and provide the coverage of a real news organization. I hope we can find an answer to how we get the news before the last newspaper turns off its presses.
posted by lhauser at 7:17 PM on October 26, 2017 [6 favorites]


I just signed up for a Seattle Time subscription last week. Their Ed board is consistently awful, but their journalists do good work and we'd be worse off as a region without the paper around, on the whole.

As terrible as they are, I'd worry about the Blethens selling. That seems like a good way to end up with the paper owned by an investment firm on the other side of the country with little incentive to continue properly supporting the news side.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 2:41 AM on October 27, 2017 [1 favorite]


I think this is a weird discussion to have without pointing out that a huge swath of the people who might be interested in newspaper subscriptions— people, say, 45 and under— are wildly underemployed and underpaid.

It’s this thing where writers like this choose to pretend that people make these decisions made on preferences and worldview, rather than cost. People who still have to scramble to pay their cell phone bills despite multiple advanced degrees and allegedly full time work are not going to make the decision about subscriptions based on preference, but on “can I afford this monthly fee”.

I would love to support journalism. However, I live with a roommate because I cannot afford even a studio apartment in the city where I am employed full-time. I am tired of pretending that my spending choices (why don’t you travel more? why don’t you eat out more? why don’t you go to more concerts? why don’t you redecorate? why haven’t you seen this recent movie?) are based on what I want instead of what my limits are.

I know a lot of nerds who love print, and would happily subscribe to all kinds of print journalism if their spending wasn’t already trimmed down to the bone.
posted by a fiendish thingy at 7:01 AM on October 27, 2017 [8 favorites]


I think this is a weird discussion to have without pointing out that a huge swath of the people who might be interested in newspaper subscriptions— people, say, 45 and under— are wildly underemployed and underpaid.

Economic inequality is less extreme in Canada compared to the US, and yet the Canadian newspaper industry is facing exactly the same problems. I think this particular issue is driven primarily by technological change rather than inequality.
posted by russilwvong at 11:57 AM on October 27, 2017 [2 favorites]


Another article on newspaper business models, from the Economist: How leading American newspapers got people to pay for news.
At regional papers, unlike the national ones, prospects for [ads and subscriptions] are limited by the size of the metropolitan market. Savings from printing fewer copies are small—printing and distribution costs are mostly fixed—so they must either cut staff or find other ways to make money. This may include staging trade fairs, offering memberships with perks, even e-commerce partnerships. Such sidelines help to ward off staff cuts; to be a community hub, newspapers must also cover communities effectively. They may forgo costly (and wasteful) foreign and national bureaus. But to attract local readers, they must provide relevant coverage of city halls, courthouses, police precincts or schools.

Take the Star Tribune in Minneapolis, a privately owned newspaper which has managed to keep the newsroom humming along. Almost annually Mike Klingensmith, the publisher, and a few of his senior executives meet with their counterparts at the Dallas Morning News, Boston Globe and one or two other independently owned newspapers. They sign non-disclosure agreements and then share ideas about how to make money. In the past year Mr Klingensmith has adopted three of them, adding several million dollars in revenue: organising an advertiser fair to attract new clients; putting on a consumer travel show; and starting a glossy quarterly print magazine.

The Star Tribune now sells digital subscriptions (nearly 50,000) and adverts; delivers a thick Sunday paper full of features (which accounts for 54% of print ad revenue); and is expanding the Saturday print edition. It conducts in-depth investigations that wins awards, including the Pulitzer Prize in 2013, and makes podcasts and daily videos. Several reporters cover city hall. In the past year an additional one was dispatched to Washington. Mr Klingensmith and Rene Sanchez, the editor, believe quality is key; nearly 20% of the budget goes to the newsroom, which has kept a headcount of 245 for seven years.
posted by russilwvong at 2:29 PM on October 27, 2017 [5 favorites]


russilvwong: Economic inequality is less extreme in Canada compared to the US, and yet the Canadian newspaper industry is facing exactly the same problems. I think this particular issue is driven primarily by technological change rather than inequality.

I think your Economist link hints at an additional factor: These issues were also driven by financial and legal changes in Canada. We used to have rules against media consolidation, but the wave of deregulation and "job creators know best" that swept the developed world washed over the Canadian media landscape, too. Postmedia was able to borrow massive amounts of money and use it to gobble up local papers. The money they borrowed allowed them to pay local newspaper owners more than the local papers were worth, so most local owners took the cash. Newspaper consolidation was a debt-fueled asset bubble, and, like most debt-fueled asset bubbles, it didn't work out in the end.

It's possible that there are good, solid businesses to be had in running a newsroom in a mid-sized market, as in the case of the Star Tribune. But we won't find out if that's the case in most of Canada - perhaps the Winnipeg Free Press aside - until the horrid grinding Postmedia debt mess flops its way to a conclusion. Who knows how long that'll take? I wouldn't be surprised if it takes as long as it took to rediscover that railways could be viable businesses.
posted by clawsoon at 7:01 PM on October 27, 2017 [2 favorites]


The only print newpaper in my city is the Murdock-owned Courier Mail. They don't even pretend to be an impartial source of news and will never see a penny of my money.
posted by markr at 7:31 PM on October 27, 2017


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