The Paper of 2018

My perspective is from the weekly/twice-weekly world... I once thought these small town papers could survive b/c web media seemed to be geared to info of state/national/global interest. Now, I see blogs and forums associated with small towns popping up, and some actual attempts at reporting on them as well, and it seems to me these sorts of forums are going to beat small papers to the punch. Granted, the signal-to-noise ratio can be very low and these things are often just anon bitchfests, but they have advantages. Namely, people writing on them are not quaking in fear of offending an advertiser and so truer versions of stories that newspaper cover can emerge (small papers have to be smart about this, but we have to grow our balls back and be willing to mix it up). The downside, apart from wading through the mudslinging, is readers have to decide for themselves what's true. But it's reasonable to expect blog/forum/news amalgamations can establish credibility with readers, too.

The way I see it, small papers have it backwards. Most are using the web as a teaser for the print edition, when they really should be using the print edition as a teaser for the web edition and luring readers to go the other way. First, there's a moral imperative (let's call it) to get away from a such a dirty, resource-intensive product as a newspaper. Driving all these dead trees around, and then driving around picking up the ones that don't get sold and disposing of them is not a 21st century business model.

But I think it's also true that you can do a better product on the web than in print, and that web editions should be supersets of the print editions right now, rather than vice versa. Presently, the paper where I work at as SE pumps a few stories to the web on schedule that's dictated by the print edition. So twice a week, we release a little bit of what we have on website. That means a story, say a gamer or feature, sits for as long as five days before it ever gets out to the world when it could be out almost immediately. In the case of readers that live part of the year out of town (a substantial number in the resort town I work in) it may be over a week before they get that, uh, news.

Also, my photographer shoots hundreds of photos at games. Maybe two ever see the light of day, most of the time just one. And I spend a lot of time fussing with layout for the print edition. On the web, my story can be exactly as long as it needs to be, and I can conceivably publish all the photos (though a photo gallery of, say, a dozen photos would be a sensible way to go). The photos also look better on-screen than on toilet paper. And there's a revenue opportunity there: put more pics on the webs, and I bet you see an increase in orders for prints of those photos, esp when we're talking about prep sports.

I'm in a minority of newsreaders in that I don't think I actually bought a fire-starter edition of any newspaper at all in '07. I look at parts of the on-line edition of more 10 papers a day. So what about all those people who aren't ready to go so on-line? Who cares about them? Increasingly, these are not the people our advertisers are trying to reach anyway.

And as far as the revenue/cost model of on-line, sure, there are some issues to work out (what about the supermarket insert? now it's a downloadable PDF). But on the web you can put a lot of advertising around each story, which can't do in print. You can also make a different pitch to your advertisers: what you're buying in an on-line ad is a door on a very heavily trafficked hallway, and with click-through to the advertiser's website, they can put whatever they want to behind that do.

And print editions are not sold at cost, as noted earlier in this thread. They're basically loss-leaders. Kill those costs and make a better, cheaper to make product. That's our future, imo, I think we need to stick to words rather than moving pictures. TV is an idiot medium and webcasts are more of the same, and we're all in the word business because we believe we can tell our stories more fully and accurately that way, right? (Also, there's the face made for radio question.)

 

I should have added to my treatise two points, which are probably obvious:

1. Subscription numbers are only going to continue to go down.
2. The fixed costs and unit costs of making dead-tree editions is only going to go up.

It's a dead end and who wants to hang around to make newspapers for the last paying subscriber?

 

And another thing...

The medium doesn't matter, or even the business one is in, if you are not paying the people making your product a living wage to do it and giving them adequate tools to work with. We all know editorial departments have been cut beyond the point where there is anything left to cut. If the job is not worth doing, few will do it well for very long before they figure that out.

This is self-defeating on a couple of levels. We're all easily replaceable warm bodies, with a line of saps willing for peanuts desperate to get their foot in the door. So rather than paying us something that will keep us around, we get disgusted and move on and somebody else comes in and the institutional knowledge, especially at small papers, is lost, and the ability of papers to report knowledgeably about local affairs goes down the toilet and readers who are long-time residents end up knowing more about what's going on than the reporters ostensibly informing those readers.

 

Since everything is going to the online or technological age, my guess is that in 2018, you will have no print newspapers but online delivery or being able to get it sent to an IBook, or some other electronical gizmo. Face it, print is not making profits.

The future is in technology not old school press machine.

 

Yet magazines seem to be thriving now. Yes, many are boutique titles, but mags aren't floundering like papers.

 

Um, those 20-30 percent profit margins most papers have isn't coming from their Web sites, which in most cases are lucky to break even at this point.

 

See, that's just it. We see chaos and sadness because it's right in our line of site, but there's plenty of places where words on parchment are surviving; hell, thriving. As mentioned, Japan, where they have all sorts of electric doohickeys and electromatrons. As mentioned, periodicals. Seems like there's plenty of choices at the Barnes & Noble (a surprisingly large amount of British-printed mags, I've noticed). Good number of books, too; I don't see John Grisham or J.K. Rowling throwing their hands up and saying "Nelson's right, print's dead, I'd better write for the internet or pen magical stories about middle school softball."

The business will be a lot better if we can unshackle ourselves from this loser's mentality that tells us, because subs are down and layoffs are up the last four years, we're fucked with a giraffe's neck. Maybe we ARE screwed, but we're not going to get extra credit in this or any other life for being on the first-wave of doomsday prophecy.

 

Print isn't making profits?

No, it's reaching projected profit margins. There's a difference.

I agree with the poster who said we have to stop giving the product away for free on-line. It's common sense, yet newspapers are throwing every single story up on the site--for free--and the publishers and bean counters are then shocked that the projected profit margins aren't met.

Someone else on this thread or another said that the websites need to have the audio and video and blogs and podcasts and chats. All of which I agree with. Make the sites as user friendly as possible. But save the staff generated stories for the newspaper. If Local Team beats Hated Rival in The Big Game, don't slap the story on the site immediately. Post a line: Local Team beats Hated Rival, see full story in tomorrow's Daily Rag.

 

I don't know what industry you guys are in.
Where is the staff coming from? The audio techs? The videographers?
How are we going to bolster a website and a newspaper with less staff? With less resources?

(And for the 100th time, we all know newspapers are making money today. Today isn't the issue. It's five, 10 years from now. If the current erosion of revenue and profit keeps pace or accelerates, there will be very few newspapers. I don't know how many times I have to post this. This myopic vision of "we're still making money" is blinding.)

 

I think the guys and girls over at Bluffton Today actually has a very nice business plan going in regards to print and online. Check the site out at http://www.blufftontoday.com/


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I guess what I'd like to see is a paper with the foresight to say, "While we're still making a hefty profit, let's reinvest some of that money into avenues that will allow us to grow and evolve with the times. Then, when the print well really does dry up, we will be well-equipped to transition into this brave new world of news delivery, whatever it is."

Use the money you have now to hire the video techs and the podcast people and the web gurus, if you think that's the way to go. Then, you have your infrastructure in place for when the financial shit really hits the fan.

Of course, the paper that would actually do this only exists in some kind of fantasy world. The Narnia Daily Chronicle or something.

 

I don't know if you've noticed this, but the financial shit is hitting the fan. The economy is collapsing and there are major U.S. newspaper companies on the canvas.

There are major newspapers who won't live to see 2010, let alone 2018.