FullMetalPhotographer

Bad News for the News Industry

The need for speed, lack of personal, and lack of journalism skills has damaged the credibility of news organizations.

(1) The need for speed, has down a lot of damage not because how fast the info goes up but how little it is checked. We are now talking information going up in a constant flow information with poor follow through and fact checking. There used to be a technological barriers but those barriers have collapsed. So information is not edited as throughly as it should be and is not fact check. There is also poor follow through on developing stories. Instead we the next hot piece of information is thrown up. Also news organizations do not like to admit to mistakes. So if they make a mistake on the news cycle they are slow to correct it.

(2) Lack of personal, TV and printed Newsrooms have shrunk. Most newsrooms have 1/3 the size of personal that they did in the 80's. You have less editors, and less reporters in the field. Reporters are spread thin on beats so they have a harder time developing reliable sources. There are less editors to look over copy to check facts and even grammar.
I recently saw a Lee Paper in Hanford, CA fire their only Hispanic reporter, who good speak, read and write spanish in community with a 53% hispanic population.

(3) Lack of journalism skills, This goes back a lot to lack of personal. When you cut staff with early retirement, fire experienced reporters in order to have cheaper less experienced reporters, the quality of coverage will go down. If you look at the amount of years of experience it has decline drastically. This isn't rocket science.

To any corporation that owns media they do not understand journalism. They view journalists as nothing but a cost. A corporation views journalism only as a advertising delivery system. So the quality of the journalism is not an economic concern.

Newspaper Self-Cannibalization Datapoint of the Day

Trying to strengthen one's circulation by having a sally port of subscription on the website, does not work. That has been proved over and over with the LA Times and the Mercury News. I suspect the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette is generating content that their readership needs and wants.

At this point trying to protect a paper's circulation by limiting what content is online reminds me a lot of the WWII Japanese soldiers found years after war on a Pacific island, who thought the war was still on.

Newspapers need to realize that they are not in the paper selling business but in the information delivery business. They need to embrace the web and integrate into the paper. If it is done right it should have a synergistic effect and boast the web and paper product.

The only way an online subscription will work is if AP, Reuters, Fox, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, BBC and all the other news sources went subscription. I don't see that happening soon. By putting more video, and interactive media that you can attach commercials and advertisements too will you begin to change the market pyridine and increase value in the web and printed product.

Newspaper Ad Sales Go from Terrible to Terrifying

Without a doubt one part is the economy hitting the wall at warp speed. I do thing there are other factors causing this rapid decline. Consumer confidence, by this I mean the advertisers. Almost everyone on the street knows how bad of shape newspapers are. It is a lot like GM and Chrysler. Do you want to invest in ad campaign when the paper may be gone tomorrow?
One of the interesting side effects of the web was it showed a dirty little secret in newspaper ads effectiveness. The web ads of newspapers were not that effective on their sites. So the question is how effective are they in the paper. The realization was they are not that effective in print either.

Saving Newspapers: Put Humpty Dumpty Back Together

I worked in the newspaper industry for over 15 years. 3 of those years was a webmaster for eight papers. I can say from working at Pulitzer then Lee that they had a very poor grasp of the internet and what it meant to the News. This issue started at the top and went down.
The thing to remember here is the internet was not the source of the newspaper industry problems it just exacerbated it. The issues Newspapers really started when they went from family owned to publicly own.
The major issues hitting papers now is not the internet but the credit crunch. The greatest hope for newspapers is the net. It can also be suicide if they decide to continue fighting it.

Saving Newspapers: Put Humpty Dumpty Back Together

What's true for the group is also true for the individual. It's simple: overspecialize, and you breed in weakness. It's slow death.
-(Major Motoko Kusanagi) Ghost In The Shell

Humpty Dumpty not only fell down but was turned into an omelet and was served up.
Newspapers have been living in fantasy since the 90's. Numbers were declining before then. By 2001 Newspaper invested heavily in the internet or I should say the bubble. As far as Google goes the Genie has left the bottle. To be blunt Google and Yahoo are not the issue here. Newspapers retro economic model and news distribution model is the problem. I hate to say it but a pay per story model will not work because there are so many other sources. Even if you put a gag on AP. You still have Reuters, CNN, FOX and many more willing to fill those shoes.
Newspapers need to think differently. They need to realize they are not in the printing business but in the information business. Gather and delivering information. They need to lose the the Deadline mentality and think of a constant flow of information. They need to look at partnerships such as Amazon and Apple for news distribution. If they do not adapt then they will join the dinosaur as a marker in history.

Jarvis vs. Mutter: What Newspapers Are Worth

Let me be blunt for second. Newspapers are like dinosaurs after the meteor hits. The worst part of this was they saw this coming for years and did nothing to adapt to the conditions. To be blunt Newspapers forgot what their key business was. They were an information delivery system. Not just ink and paper. If want a perfect example of this look at Lee Enterprise and their web blunders.
Paid content will not work unless you have extreme specialty news that. The Wall Street Journal is very specialized nitch publication. Right now there are only a few examples of successful subscription services. Music, movies and adult entertainment are the only ones working.
The only way I see papers to have a very slight chance for paid content would be for Reuters and AP to have only paid content available on the web. We all that is not going to happen.
My personal guess is most large corporate papers are going the way of the dinosaurs. What will survive is small privately owned papers. Most likely you will see small weeklies and three days a week with strong local immediately updated web content.
Best hope papers right now is devices like the Kindle and iPhone to bring news content to the public. But my best bet for that to make any impact is 5 years.

Can Newspapers Learn Anything from Casinos?

I worked in the newspaper industry for about 15 years as photojournalist and webmaster. I have to laugh when I hear people blame the web for newspaper's problems. The facts do not support that conclusion. Newspapers are flourishing in other countries and circulation has been declining way before the web.
I have to agree with the Vegas analogy. The biggest issue for papers is not how to compete with the web but how to embrace the new media. There needs to be a serious rethinking advertisement revenue and circulation. Newspapers are following the same economic model for 50 years. There has been no change in the way do or think about doing business. I think will look back at this time as a Mass Extinction period in newspaper history because they failed to adapt. If you want an example of what not to do is look at Lee Enterprises (LEE). They are the poster child of poorly run Newspapers.

Too Late for Newspapers to Turn the Tide?

About two years ago I was the webmaster for 8 (now 4) papers in Central California. I told the Publisher, that I was putting video online and gave him a target date. I was ignored. Then I did it on the target date. I was shooting local video and putting it online. A month later I was told to pull the video because we had no policy and ad people did not want the extra work of selling commercials. I now work for a Business publication in the Central valley in which 75% of the feature stories we do is with video.