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Say it: You can’t stop a moving train with complaints about the movement of said train
Published on 25/03/07
by Zac Echola
InfoWorld mag folds print edition!
These are the news items of the weekend in my feed reader. Over and over again these three stories came up. Theres a subsection of bloggers that get some kind of sick pleasure out of the death of print. They sit on death watch and rarely come up with solutions. It’s highly annoying to read on a Sunday afternoon.
Still, I’m left feeling that these three memes share a common talking point. How does a print product make money online, while slowing the decline in readership of said print product?
At the beginning of this year, Scott Karp made the prediction that a major newspaper would fold its print product and go strictly online. A bold statement, sure, but he makes an apt point.
Newspapers are struggling in multiple areas of their business. Craigslist and eBay have left many classifieds sections in shambles. Why read the source, when you can get the spin from your favorite pajama media personality? Display advertising dollars are moving towards away from the shotgun approach and are targeting ads with pinpoint accuracy on the Web.
While this all may be bad news for newspapers, this certainly isn’t bad news for news business.
InfoWorld has some tough competition with TechCrunch and GigaOM, but the magazine won’t have the kind of trouble with the move to online that a small weekly newspaper would. Its market is with people who probably already read TechCrunch and GigaOM and who would relish the idea of pulling in their InfoWorld news to their favorite newsreader.
If anything, the move will make more money for InfoWorld, since serving up Web pages offers so much more bang for buck than printing a magazine page.
People who read newspapers, really, really like newspapers. Which is why this shouldn’t be happening (via Tim O’reilly):
Apparently, Phil Bronstein, the editor-in-chief, told staff in a recent “emergency meeting” that the news business “is broken, and no one knows how to fix it.” (”And if any other paper says they do, they’re lying.”) Reportedly, the paper plans to announce more layoffs before the year is out.
Such gloom and doom is unnecessary. Newspapers have hardly become irrelevant. TV news doesn’t have the manpower to go out hunting for hard news, so they swipe it from the papers. Bloggers, god bless them, have yet to show they can do much original reporting (techmeme exists for this very reason!). David Lazurus is right. Most bloggers just comment on work done by others. 90% of the time the link trail leads to original reporting from a newspaper.
So instead of bitching about this and complaining about newspapers being irrelevant, old newspaper fogies need to figure out how to harness the blogosphere.
The answer, I’m afraid, is not to make people pay for content with a short life span like news. Especially once that content is purchased by one or two people, it can be “commented” on by bloggers giving the gist of the ideas therein. Here’s a great explanation if you don’t get what I’m talking about.
If newspapers want to make it online, they should do what they do best: gather information for readers. It’s not the content people don’t want. It’s the delivery mechanism. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Build a better mousetrap instead of complaining about the inefficiencies of the one you already have.
The end. Or is it?
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Tags: business of news, roundup