Is Globe & Mail Going Way Of Do-Do Bird?

[maplesyrup]

Newspapers: Charge for E-Content at Your Peril

"I really believe that a bunch of Young Turks in marketing just asked, 'What areas of our site are hit the most and how much do you think we can charge for it?' There wasn't any thought past that."

How, then, are papers supposed to make money, if people can read them on-line for free? Elliott mentioned a little thing called advertising, and cited the Miami Herald (and, more recently, the New York Times) for using ads that display for a few seconds before you get to the article you want. He called this the "page-turner model. It's a little annoying, but at least I can relate to it. The only drawback for a paper is that they've got to have a sales force for it. It takes more money to make revenue."

I feel that's the way the industry has to go anyway. We've all devised schemes to avoid ads in existing media, but what can you do against a timer on a Web ad? You could look away, but you'll probably watch it, especially if it features motion and sound. It seems like that might have more impact than other forms like TV. There's also the idea of proportional ad pricing, as pioneered by Google, which opens up big-exposure possibilities for companies with smaller budgets. Instead of buying a full page of print, they can pay based on how often an ad appears on-line, anything from once every 1,000 article views to full sponsorship.

Here's my assessment. Newspapers are completely within their rights to charge whatever they want, and Bob Elliott agrees. Most likely, enough people will subscribe to underwrite the costs of producing on-line editions, but that's about all they'll be able to grab. The rest of us will just avoid those sites, which will hasten the decline of the papers behind them. Remember, this is only the first plateau in the digital revolution; papers need to stay in the publicity and brand-building promotion mode. Maybe the very biggest of the existing names can make the subscription model work, based on superior quality (it's worth noting that the New York Times has been making more content free, not less), but all the mediocre and crappy newspapers will wither and die if they depend on cheques from the likes of this generation. With an advertising-based free site, they might just survive the transition. And if they persist with the status quo? Some clever Web-log writers will grab all the eyeballs away from traditional papers while the big boys are still trying to squeeze folks for 10 or 20 bucks a month.

I know myself I have stopped reading these pay-per-view papers, but there is so much more out there, so who cares about those idiots?

[August1991]

This is a serious issue.

I suspect that newspapers are facing a steady drop in their circulation. People who used to buy a daily paper, now get content from the Internet. The Internet makes basic reporting of events available as well as a plethora of editorials and opinion pieces. (This forum acts as a trailerpark version... )

What the Internet does not provide is a good editor. Many Internet readers are left with whatever Google News provides. It apparently has a weird algorithm in place of a human editor to choose the position of news links. Unfortunately, there is only one French language version for France. (There are English language versions for the US, Canada, India, UK and Australia.)

Clearly, the newspaper business will be radically different in 20 years. (Conrad Black has said as much and this explains his sale of NP and decision to get out of the business.)

I think the best solution would be to combine an ISP with a newspaper and sell it as a package deal. (Is that why Bell bought the G&M?)

Another solution would be to charge on a per-article-view basis (ie. 2 cents per view) and these charges would be added to the ISP monthly bill.

The third solution is to bundle content with advertising. This solution has the advantage that advertising could be targetted to a specific clientele.

The article linked above is right about one thing, I suspect. Current newspaper managers are confused about the Internet. The downloadable pdf versions I've tried are really clunky. The idea of combining home delivery and Internet subscription strikes me as dumb, particularly when each is priced separately.

In Canada now, the only daily paper with free material on-line is the Toronto Star. In the US, the New York Times is still free. Of course, not all the print content is available on-line.

On the other hand, I still like a printed copy of The Economist in my hand. Their site's search feature is great.

[maplesyrup]

I don't think it is that complicated. No need for additional user fees (the favourite tool of the right, after lower taxes of course) which just ostrasize the poor. The author of the article has it right. Just advertise on the net.

The Georgia Straight does not charge for its circulation - The Globe needs to wake up. In the meantime the circualtion (hits) of the Toronto Star must be skyrocketing. Think of how much money their advertisers on the net can make.

I've basically stopped reading the Globe and Mail unless their articles are free and accessible. And guess what? The universe is continuing to unfold as it should.

[caesar]

Most of the globe is still free. Why should they not charge for their services. Why do you expect everything free? At the present time; I am quite satisfied with the free product they are still giving away free.

[caesar]

This again is NOT a federal or political issue.

[August1991]

If Paul Wells found time to comment on this, then I guess it fairly belongs in Canadian federal politics. The G&M claims to be Canada's national paper.

This is what Wells had to say about this:

I'm told management at at least one prominent Canadian newspaper is intrigued by the preachings of this fellow, who argues that more and more North American papers will be shrinking to tabloid format, as two more British broadsheets have done lately.

I think it's nuts, but there it is. It's true there are serious tabloid-size papers in Europe, and there are any number of superb reporters working at North American tabs, but shrinking from broadsheet to tabloid in the Anglo-Saxon media culture has usually meant shrinking story length and journalistic ambition. Of course, at some point, when ambition shrinks past a certain threshold, it probably makes sense for the paper's format to collapse to fit. No sense pretending you're anything you're not.

How horribly old-fashioned of me to hold these opinions. Sorry about that.

Here's the link to the Garcia piece.

Le Monde is a tabloid (and in serious difficulty now). I think the old Manchester Guardian was a tabloid too. Small magazines are considered serious. Every Canadian city has small free weekly tabloids, often with serious pieces.

But the problem goes well beyond size.

I'm convinced newspapers are going to change radically in the next few years. Young people don't read them as much and the Internet has entirely changed the business. I think it will be worse than radio and cinema when they faced the arrival of television.

[maplesyrup]

I have heard that the National Post, for all intense and purposes, is bankrupct. It is being kept afloat by the Van Sun advertising, etc. Apart from having to fire inappropriate journalists recently there is not much of a market in Canada for what they are pitching. They would have been better off in the US, Israel or Russia.

There is some talk of the Toronto Star expanding into the Vancouver area - they would do well here.

[ticker]

"There is some talk of the Toronto Star expanding into the Vancouver area - they would do well here. "

That makes sense the GTA socialist rag and their buddies in the Vancouver area where salt water brings out the liberals.

[August1991]

When you go down into the basement, and start moving boxes around, you always find old stuff. This forum has old stuff dating back to 2003 or so.

I found this thread and it seems germane. I think the Internet will radically change the newspaper business, and politics too, in the same way that TV changed radio and cinema (and politics) in the 1950s and 1960s.

Quebecor chief executive officer Pierre Karl Péladeau said the model for newspapers needs to change if publications want to attract younger readers.

...

Quebecor also installed a new publisher at the helm of its largest newspaper, the Toronto Sun, which has seen its readership and circulation erode faster than its competitors in recent months.

...

Analysts have suggested the company has found itself at a crossroads where the rapid growth of free daily commuter papers over the past year, including Quebecor's own 24 Hours, has hurt its paid publications.

G & M

It is hard not to compare newspaper publishers confronting the Internet today with Hollywood studios in the early 1950s trying to figure out what to do with television. The 3000 seat cinemas are now a thing of the past.

If Peldeau thinks free newspapers given away at the Metro entrance are a substitute, he's wrong.

[JerrySeinfeld]

Newspapers: Charge for E-Content at Your Peril

"I really believe that a bunch of Young Turks in marketing just asked, 'What areas of our site are hit the most and how much do you think we can charge for it?' There wasn't any thought past that."

How, then, are papers supposed to make money, if people can read them on-line for free? Elliott mentioned a little thing called advertising, and cited the Miami Herald (and, more recently, the New York Times) for using ads that display for a few seconds before you get to the article you want. He called this the "page-turner model. It's a little annoying, but at least I can relate to it. The only drawback for a paper is that they've got to have a sales force for it. It takes more money to make revenue."

I feel that's the way the industry has to go anyway. We've all devised schemes to avoid ads in existing media, but what can you do against a timer on a Web ad? You could look away, but you'll probably watch it, especially if it features motion and sound. It seems like that might have more impact than other forms like TV. There's also the idea of proportional ad pricing, as pioneered by Google, which opens up big-exposure possibilities for companies with smaller budgets. Instead of buying a full page of print, they can pay based on how often an ad appears on-line, anything from once every 1,000 article views to full sponsorship.

Here's my assessment. Newspapers are completely within their rights to charge whatever they want, and Bob Elliott agrees. Most likely, enough people will subscribe to underwrite the costs of producing on-line editions, but that's about all they'll be able to grab. The rest of us will just avoid those sites, which will hasten the decline of the papers behind them. Remember, this is only the first plateau in the digital revolution; papers need to stay in the publicity and brand-building promotion mode. Maybe the very biggest of the existing names can make the subscription model work, based on superior quality (it's worth noting that the New York Times has been making more content free, not less), but all the mediocre and crappy newspapers will wither and die if they depend on cheques from the likes of this generation. With an advertising-based free site, they might just survive the transition. And if they persist with the status quo? Some clever Web-log writers will grab all the eyeballs away from traditional papers while the big boys are still trying to squeeze folks for 10 or 20 bucks a month.

I know myself I have stopped reading these pay-per-view papers, but there is so much more out there, so who cares about those idiots?

The Globe is a rag.

My motto for record labels/newspapers/publishers who can't adjust to the new reality of the internet?

SIYANARA!!

Advertising, not paid access, is the wave of the future.

When it comes to e-commerce, you gotta copy the folks who jumped on that bandwagon years before Canada did: when in doubt, follow what the Americans are doing. They embraced and leveraged off the internet far before Canadian companies knew what was going on.

[Riverwind]

Advertising, not paid access, is the wave of the future.

Satellite radio is the exception that proves you wrong. People are sick of advertising and will pay to avoid it if you can offer something they want.

[JerrySeinfeld]

Advertising, not paid access, is the wave of the future.

Satellite radio is the exception that proves you wrong. People are sick of advertising and will pay to avoid it if you can offer something they want.

ha! sattellite radio will always be a fringe element and will never take over mainstream radio.

[Riverwind]

ha! sattellite radio will always be a fringe element and will never take over mainstream radio.

Not unless they figure out a way to provide local traffic reports. If that happens - bye/bye advertising driven radio.

[JerrySeinfeld]

ha! sattellite radio will always be a fringe element and will never take over mainstream radio.

Not unless they figure out a way to provide local traffic reports. If that happens - bye/bye advertising driven radio.

...or local sports content.....or local news ....

with IPODs etc...who wants to pay $12 per month to listen to someone else's programmed music in their car?

I love sports/talk radio. but i get it for free now

the only way sat-radio wll get traction is through the auto manufacturers.

again, there IS a market, but its not gonna take over from traditional radio

[Riverwind]

again, there IS a market, but its not gonna take over from traditional radio

I agree with that but the same logic applies to newspapers - there will always be a market for subscription based news but it may not be the same market that used to be.

[August1991]

ha! sattellite radio will always be a fringe element and will never take over mainstream radio.

Why do I feel that quote is worth conserving for future ridicule?

It's along the lines of:

Radio has no future. Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible. X-rays will prove to be a hoax.

William Thomson, Lord Kelvin

The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?"

David Sarnoff's associates in response to his urgings for investment in the radio in the 1920s.

(Link)

Seinfeld is hubris incarnate, no Kelvin, but a learned imitator of the superficial likes of Kelvin.

This thread's topic concerns the survival of the Globe & Mail. Young people don't buy newspapers. The Internet is a new technology that changes the way people communicate, reducing the transaction costs in their dealings. Only a fool would ignore this. Radio? Well, what happens when wireless Internet access meets personal podcast web sites?

Nevertheless, I still think that genetics and biochemistry will be the major technological changes in this 1980-2060 generation (as opposed to the power, electrical changes during the 1850-1930 generation).

[August1991]

Hugh Hewitt weighs in (in an on-line newspaper no less):

Newspapers are dying. This isn't an ideological statement or a heartfelt wish, just a simple observation. Horse-drawn carriages yielded to cars, and steamships and ocean liners yielded to airplanes. Consumers prefer efficiency, and the market cannot be denied.

...

American newspapers are not unlike American car companies: Market dominance made them lazy and uninterested in their customer base, and a lot of that base slowly melted away, even before the new media arrived. When blogs and talk radio and cable arrived and offered a choice to news consumers long disgusted with biased product, remaining center-right readers began to bolt.

And nonideological readers, too, began to drift away. Internet news and opinion providers are by and large free.

...

Advertisers are figuring this out: There are much more efficient ways of connecting with audiences than ads in newspapers that, even when delivered on driveways, go largely if not completely unread.

Plhiladelphia Inquirer

I was thinking about what a newspaper used to provide:

1. Fact gathering

2. Fact checking

3. Editing

4. Opinion/Analysis

Ordinary Internet users now provide far better fact checking and opinion analysis than any newspaper could. Even if the average news junkie spends only six months of their life providing free content on the Internet before moving on to other things, there will always be new people discovering political forums such as this one. Some people will do it for free as a lark for a short while but that adds up to a constant, ongoing debate.

[i have to say that I havce always been surprised by the small number of posters on this forum, and others in Canada. In a country of 30 million, there are probably no more than one thousand active posters in English and French at any given moment. Posters come and go but I think there will be a slow trend upwards.]

OTOH, ordinary journalists are still involved in basic fact gathering. (Although I wouldn't be surprised if the next major US political scandal will take place on the Internet. For example, I wonder what Watergate would have been like if the Internet had been around.)

Where the Internet seriously fails is in editing. A good newspaper amounts to a good editor - someone who knows what to exclude. It is hard to sift through all the nonsense on the Internet and this will only become more difficult. For young people, it is particularly difficult because they lack the critical skills to know what to ignore and what deserves attention.

The Internet as a source of information is still a work in progress and IMO, newspapers still survive because of an older generation, uncomfortable with computers. The Internet also confuses advertisers.

[Biblio Bibuli]

X-rays will prove to be a hoax.

BINGO!

By the time those Grim Reapers see anything you're three quarters dead.

A Cat Scan is the ONLY way to go!

[Michael Hardner]

ha! sattellite radio will always be a fringe element and will never take over mainstream radio.

Not unless they figure out a way to provide local traffic reports. If that happens - bye/bye advertising driven radio.

...or local sports content.....or local news ....

with IPODs etc...who wants to pay $12 per month to listen to someone else's programmed music in their car?

I love sports/talk radio. but i get it for free now

the only way sat-radio wll get traction is through the auto manufacturers.

again, there IS a market, but its not gonna take over from traditional radio

Obviously, somebody hasn't tried Satellite Radio.

We've had Sirius since Christmas and we can't listen to conventional radio anymore. They have traffic on the US channels, but I don't think it's on the CDN ones yet.

As for local sports - ??? Do you really want the MapleLeaf baseball scores ?

National news/sports, niche content.... politics and music, music, music.... it's well worth 50 cents a day !

[Riverwind]

As for local sports - ??? Do you really want the MapleLeaf baseball scores ?

Depends. Only if they are better an hitting balls than getting pucks in the net

[Freshinit]

News Paper sales have definately declined as far as their capital distribution is concerned. However, it is a business revolutionized with the help of computer programing. Many citizens spanning the G7 nations have created new potential through reality simulation.

Newspapers are more or less present thoughts summed up through common words. at first, newspapers were a primitive fashioned form of communicating a human being's thoughts and emotions. Now, methods in which to undertsand a concept, involve complex symbolism through numbers, graphs, visual representations and statistics.

The article we've just read markets our present standard for more efficient communication. If a group of skilled minds can prominently display our human spirit through material subjects then what obstruction does the view of a romantic have to complain about?

[August1991]

News Paper sales have definately declined as far as their capital distribution is concerned. However, it is a business revolutionized with the help of computer programing. Many citizens spanning the G7 nations have created new potential through reality simulation.

Reality simulation?

Sorry, if I were a print publisher, I'd quit the business. It's crazy to print hundreds of thousands (millions?) of widesheet papers everyday and then send these papers thousands of kilometers on trucks. It's simpler (and cheaper) to put all this on a computer screen. That's obvious.

Conrad Black was smart to quit the business. Paul Wells and Andrew Cohen are hedging their bets. The Toronto Star is a horse seller in 1910.

In Montreal, there are still water fountains for horses. But they're decorative.

[Michael Hardner]

In Montreal, there are still water fountains for horses. But they're decorative.

You've hit it, Auguste.

Will newspapers disappear entirely or will they become 'decorative' ?

There's sometimes a misconception that a new technology will entirely replace an older one because it's more efficient, but it doesn't always happen.

I remember when digital watches showed up, there was a general consensus that the old-style watches would fall into history's dustbin. The charm of newspapers might keep them around for awhile, even if the form is slightly different.

[shoop]

Completely agreed. Given the option I still prefer to read a paper copy of a newspapwer. Although I find myself reading more and more stuff online as time goes by....

In Montreal, there are still water fountains for horses. But they're I remember when digital watches showed up, there was a general consensus that the old-style watches would fall into history's dustbin. The charm of newspapers might keep them around for awhile, even if the form is slightly different.

[August1991]

This is old but I just found it. It's still timely:

Rupert Murdoch urged newspaper editors Wednesday to embrace the Internet, saying print news executives have "sat by and watched" as a new generation of digital consumers has turned away from newspapers.

The chief executive of News Corp. (NWS) cited a recent report commissioned by the Carnegie Corporation, a philanthropic foundation, showing 44 percent of 18-to-34-year-olds say they use Web sites at least once a day for news.

News Corp. is the parent company of the Fox News Channel, which operates FOXNews.com.

Murdoch said newspapers must overhaul how they gather and deliver news to collect the readers and advertising revenue shifting to the Web.

"The trends are against us. Unless we awaken to these changes which are quite different than those five or six years ago, we will, as an industry, be relegated to the status of also-rans," Murdoch told the annual meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors (search).

"We've been slow to react. We've sat by and watched," he said.

Fox News