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Kalpa's  Instablog

Financial Blogger at Financial News Express out of Boulder, Colorado (http://financialnewsexpress.blogspot.com/). Background in science and medicine. Self studied in economic crisis issues of our time.
My blog:
Financial News Express
  • On Blogging and the Rapidly Changing News Industry


    Newspapers failing as the Internet is gaining. . .
    The subject of the changing face of how people choose to obtain news these days should intrigue and worry us all if we're paying attention. Newspapers are struggling, laying off workers, shrinking size, consolidating, losing ad revenue, and filing for bankruptcy. As a consequence, overall quantity and quality is declining.

    Growth of information, however, is exploding to the point of information overload and competion for everyone's time that nobody has. Blogs, newspaper websites, and an unprecedented availability of categorized information from all over the world now proliferates on the web.

    I never have understood why newspapers are offering their articles for free on the internet. It is obvious that that would hurt their revenues, especially by spoiling the next generation who eats, lives, and breathes the internet and has hardly touched a hard copy paper in their lives.

    This week, the FT had an article titled News groups open new online front which said:
    The Fair Syndication Consortium, a group of more than 1,500 newspaper publishers, said a month-long study of how news spread across the internet found that the average American newspaper story was being copied 4.4 times in full or in part by unauthorised websites. The study of 101,000 articles published by 157 newspapers found that more than 75,000 sites reused 112,000 almost exact copies without authorisation, and a further 520,000 articles in part. The problem was most serious for large national publishers, with 15 unathorised reuses on average.... Bloggers, often the primary target of publishers’ anger about how their stories are disseminated online, accounted for less than 10 per cent of the unauthorised reuse....Mr Pitkow predicted that the first two quarters of 2010 would see “action” from ad networks.
    As a blogger, I struggle with my role in this, and was happy to see that bloggers are only 10% of the problem. There is the "fair use" policy. If a blogger uses small excerpts of articles, they should help drive traffic to the newspaper sites. 

    Also, this week, came this article:
    Three local newspapers have begun charging their customers for reading news content online. The experiment, designed to determine how people feel about paying for online news content, will be monitored closely. Newspapers are under increasing pressure to find additional revenue as more people go online for their news content. Johnston Press, which is conducting the experiment, has seen its operating profits drop by nearly half.
    I hate most forms of advertising and am noticing more and more aggressive pop up and in-your-face ads appearing on website after website to the point of becoming quite annoying. If this trend continues, ads could end up ruining good sites and driving frustrated readers away, asTV has. Recently, I spent some time on the guardian.co.uk site and thought it had constrained advertising very tastefully. Can't we value tastefulness when it comes to advertising here in America, too?

    If all advertising were held to tolerable limits, and the playing field were kept level, wouldn't its effect be the same? Why do Americans always push advertising to be bigger and more obnoxious than the last ad to the point of being intolerable? The obnoxious ad will more likely have me boycott the product than buy it. An eco-minded population doesn't appreciate having to pay for a Sunday newspaper and automatically dump 2/3 of it (the advertisements) into the recycling bin. Some things just don't make sense.

    Bloggers access will become more challenging. . .
    Bloggers who search news continuously really appreciate being able to get access to nearly all articles via the Google search engine. I don't expect that to last forever, and now, Google Restricts Free Reading on Pay News Sites, is a recent news item. Personally, I'd hope for a solution of a few cent fee if an entire article is read. This could be done, for example, using a page format such as Marketwatch now uses.

    We pay for hard copies of three newspapers at our house, so why wouldn't we pay for online news? A number of months ago, AP announced that it was getting tough on the subject of copyright infringement. Yet, this linked article is reassuring to bloggers like myself. "It's not aimed at people who use part of stories periodically," Seagrave told Information Week. "It's aimed at being affirmative about how we allow our content to be used." (They are using software and codes to track their headlines.)

    A window into the future. . .
    And for a possible vision of how this plays out in the future, this op-ed article, How Google Can Help Newspapers, was in the WSJ:
    "It's the year 2015. The compact device in my hand delivers me the world, one news story at a time. I flip through my favorite papers and magazines, the images as crisp as in print, without a maddening wait for each page to load. Even better, the device knows who I am, what I like, and what I have already read. So while I get all the news and comment, I also see stories tailored for my interests. I zip through a health story in The Wall Street Journal and a piece about Iraq from Egypt's Al Gomhuria, translated automatically from Arabic to English. I tap my finger on the screen, telling the computer brains underneath it got this suggestion right. Some of these stories are part of a monthly subscription package. Some, where the free preview sucks me in, cost a few pennies billed to my account. Others are available at no charge, paid for by advertising...."
    It seems like the successful and popular Seeking Alpha model of free lance writers contributing to a specialized news category site could be a model for the future. Imagine more sites run similarly with different specialty topics. Syndication methods and pay incentives for contributing journalists would be the next steps.

    In Conclusion . . .
    All in all, this is a rapidly changing world and nothing is more important than quality reporting to maintain the health of a democracy. If we get that second dip down in our fragile economy, we would also approach a potentially dangerous time period of growing populism. This is a result of our government's morally hazardous responses and inadequacies to the financial crisis. It scares me to have a correspondingly timed demise of our newspapers, in a perfect storm, so to speak.

    I'll be the first to admit that bloggers rely upon good news sources to operate. And, so far, I'm not making any money doing this, is anyone else? That's the underlying internet news problem.





    Disclosure: Disclosure: No stocks or etfs owned.
    Dec 04 02:31 pm | Link | Comment!
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