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Huh, ain't that something ... Should newspapers abandon digital?

Discussion in 'Journalism topics only' started by JayFarrar, Oct 14, 2015.

  1. Frank_Ridgeway

    Frank_Ridgeway Well-Known Member

    Most articles like this miss one essential point: The nature of retail has changed to the extent that advertising revenue will continue to decrease. At one of my former newspapers, the publisher told us more than 100 of our regular advertisers had either gone under or merged with existing advertisers. Not coming back. Nothing coming to replace them. Fuck if I have the answer. I do think it's stupid for smaller companies to waste money gambling on finding online solutions, but they try because they are afraid not to. Let the big fish waste their money and if someone finds an answer, copy it. Meanwhile, if you have to cut, cut the rookies instead of veteran folks who actually can produce a product that appeals to the current demographic. You know, I was young once, on a staff of mostly young people, and we simply didn't have the cultural references in touch with our readers. This difference is in those days, older readers had no other choice but to buy a product produced by and for 20-somethings.
     
    Doc Holliday likes this.
  2. Riptide

    Riptide Well-Known Member

    Just wait until we lose all the national inserts. Isn't that next?
     
  3. MNgremlin

    MNgremlin Active Member

    I haven't read the article in full, but I think these are two different things. It's one thing to ask a writer to write something on a website instead of in a newspaper. It's another thing to make a writer look into a camera in the corner of the newsroom and talk about what he/she is writing, and still capture an audience the same way. The same could be said about radio hosts asked to keep a blog. Some radio guys simply aren't meant to be writers, and they shouldn't be required to be one as part of their job, either.

    I started out in college in TV. However, that wasn't the place for me because I have a tendency to babble and stumble over my words. If I'm writing and need to change something, I can just press delete. If I'm recording a video, I can either leave my babbling on the video or start all over. Since video is only being used in the industry as a visual supplement to writing, many writers will leave it as is because they don't have enough time to keep redoing it until it's perfect. That leaves an unfinished feel to the product, not to mention it was probably recorded with mediocre-quality iPhone video (at best) because the paper obviously doesn't have a budget for video equipment.

    I don't mind the tweeting as a supplement to what goes in the paper or online. But I don't see the point in futile attempts at adding videos to newspaper websites, unless it's only press conferences or interviews. Beyond that, there's no point. It's a waste of time to produce a subpar product.
     
    Last edited: Oct 15, 2015
  4. Bradley Guire

    Bradley Guire Well-Known Member

    My paper's managment wants more video, but doesn't want to provide the resources or training to reporters. We have one "multimedia editor" who's more of a chief photographer, who can only do so many. The result is we make amateurish videos and expect the general public to watch. We post to YouTube to have ads, but the clicks aren't there. They look bad. I can do basic editing in iMovie, but it takes me 3 hours to make a 90-second video. Do the clicks and the ad revenue make up for the time the company spent for me to shoot and edit? No idea, but I guess not. So I just shoot and upload about 4 or 5 clips of some kid scoring a touchdown or sinking a 3-pointer. It's all I can do.

    Well, I tried a podcast that was based in a guest interview, but small college and prep sports is just too much a niche to warrant tons of downloads.

    I'll just stuck to storytelling via written word.
     
    SFIND likes this.
  5. Dick Whitman

    Dick Whitman Well-Known Member

    I've suggested before that newspapers should shut down their Web sites, and I still think they probably should.

    That said, it's not a magic bullet. You can't compete with free, and people will almost always choose free. I think people allocate a certain amount of their day to consuming information, and the first filter for them is, "Is it free?" If that means you get national news instead of local, so be it. If that means you get the AP gamer instead of the locally written gamer, so be it. There's enough free content available to people that they can fill up their information-consuming time free of charge. They are more than willing to sacrifice getting the precise information they would have consumed, all things being equal.
     
    FileNotFound likes this.
  6. BTExpress

    BTExpress Well-Known Member

    Why do universities hire consulting firms to help them search for a new coach?
     
  7. Michael_ Gee

    Michael_ Gee Well-Known Member

    Same reason in both cases. Ass-covering.
     
    Doc Holliday likes this.
  8. doctorquant

    doctorquant Well-Known Member

    What a choice sentence from the UofT professor:

     
    Hokie_pokie likes this.
  9. Doc Holliday

    Doc Holliday Well-Known Member

    Come on, you know the answer to that.

    Exactly.
     
  10. lantaur

    lantaur Well-Known Member

    People should really read the article as it pretty much discounts that theory laid out. In fact, here's the last graf:

    As poor as the industry has been at finding its footing in the digital age, it’s hard to imagine how newspaper companies can survive over the long term if they put their primary focus on print.
     
    FileNotFound likes this.
  11. SoloFlyer

    SoloFlyer Well-Known Member

    In some cases, it's already happening.

    Why should major national retailers pay for a weekly insert when they can offer the ad online at almost no cost?
     
  12. JayFarrar

    JayFarrar Well-Known Member

    JC Penney dropped inserts and their sales tanked.

    They put inserts back in and their sales went back up.

    That's just one anecdotal example, but the current belief that print ads work and online ads don't certainly helps newspapers and lots of places have similar examples and stories.

    My takeaway from the article was that publishing should focus on its print edition as it has all the things that go with being a legacy product and view the online operation as a way of supporting print and not the main focus of what you do and how you do it.
     
    Doc Holliday likes this.
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