"Let's Screw Up the Entire Internet to Save Newspapers"

Full article here.

I don't get it. Who cares about newspapers anymore? Why are we even considering something so stupid? And who on earth thinks this would actually stop the decline of newspapers? Or even slow it down a little?

I love the first comment on the Gawker website:

"It's like the ship is taking on hundreds of gallons of water a minute and there's an island within sight, but some people may not be able to make the swim and anyway, there could be scary animals on it, so instead everyone has decided to yell at the holes in the hull until they're patched by time-travel magic."

All kinds of weird ideas get thrown around during periods of change. This won't go anywhere.

This'll go the way of the "e-mail tax." We're considering it because in America, there is no idea too stupid to consider. It'll be abandoned because it was thought up by dinosaurs who don't understand the internet and refuse to learn.

Posner had a huge influence on the way lawyers think about property law, and if he wasn't so influential this idea would be considered bizarre. What's crazy about it is that newspapers benefit from linking to pages on which they show advertising. It's like someone arguing that newspapers are being hurt by people giving them too much free advertising.

Some of his suggestions don't even make sense. Paraphrasing has always been acceptable for copyrighted material, and even quoting sections smaller than a certain length. If he's willing to abide by the same rules for the articles he writes (ie. no quoting without permission, etc), then... well I'd still call him an idiot. This will never happen.

Was there this type of rage among the typewriter industry during the word processor / computer transition?

"Hey, we're going to post this on the internet but we hope no one looks at it!"

Clearly written by something who doesn't have a full grasp on what the internet is.

Not to chime in with "this is not news.". But the WGA, book publishers, news corps have been cutting their own throat for longer than the internet. Refusal and inability to get new blood on staff and in content. Inability to integrate with other media. Our paper vs their web page, tv show, etc is counter-productive when you have zero profit margins, and shrinking readers.

If you are a writer, jump off the speeding train, and learn the web, podcasting, self publishing. Helped Scott Kurtz, Jo Co, Scott Johnson.

It's called irony when a blog bashes newspapers as being not important by, wait for it, linking to an article written by a newspaper columnist.

I care about newspapers because they actually write the news. Everyone else just links to it. The problem is people don't like to pay for things on the Internet, so the newspapers have been struggling to figure out a business model that works. The media companies that own them don't like paying for news because it costs lost of money to hire all those question-asking reporters, money the bean counters feel would generate higher profits and ratings if it was spent on some reality / mindless talking head / celebrity / video-of-some-dude-getting-racked-in-the-balls programming.

I like having the Fourth Estate. I like someone who's watching out for all the companies, politicians, and special interest groups who are trying to screw me, my family, and my country. Newspapers do this. Blogs do not.

It's kind of a tragedy of the commons situation. All it takes is one company to pay for writing a news article and everyone else on the web can link to it or copy it for free, driving traffic to their site and most likely increasing their advertising revenues. So the cost is born by the newspaper, but everyone else benefits from it.

I don't know what the answer is, but I'd hate to have (more) newspapers fail. Of course, when that happens, the bloggers won't say anything about it because they won't have an article they can link to and say "See!".

OG_slinger wrote:

I like having the Fourth Estate. I like someone who's watching out for all the companies, politicians, and special interest groups who are trying to screw me, my family, and my country. Newspapers did this. Blogs do not.

I haven't felt like the newpapers were doing anything more than parrot what their corporate owners wanted for awhile.

OG_slinger wrote:

I care about newspapers because they actually write the news. Everyone else just links to it.

No they don't, they themselves pay a fee and link to AP or Reuters -- exactly what they're complaining others are doing to them. This (the papers' complaints, not your comment) is disingenuous at best.

Newspapers could actually compete on a market level, if they decided to. They are well-equipped to do one thing that online news aggregators aren't -- deep, investigative journalism. But they won't do that.

Minarchist wrote:

Newspapers could actually compete on a market level, if they decided to. They are well-equipped to do one thing that online news aggregators aren't -- deep, investigative journalism. But they won't do that.

Bingo. Because of deep budget cuts and the popularity of bloggers with instant news, the days of investigative journalism are almost over. Newspapers feel they have to compete with bloggers in the field that the bloggers are strong at instead of focusing on what the newspapers are strong on. Newspapers can not justify spending the money on a reporter researching a story for a month or more without guarantee of a payoff, but this is the one thing that most bloggers can not do.

A friend of mine of mine from high school is an editor for the Detroit Free Press.

The Free Press are the ones who dug up the text messages that proved the mayor commited perjury. There is still investigative journalism out there it is just buried beneath the sheer glut of information we are faced with on a daily basis. It isn't appreciated, can't find a successful business model and unfortunately news papers are going to be going out of business in large markets. I think there will always be a niche for newspapers in smaller markets.

We need newspapers though. Once they go out of business we'll notice the void and hopefully they will come back. I'd be willing to pay more for a local newpaper if it meant having one around.

Newspapers are good for coupons and comic strips, for starting fires in the fireplace or lining a kennel or birdcage. How about wrapping wine glasses when you pack?
Newspapers provide our society with an invaluable resource for cheap! Just try walking out of PETCO with some kennel lining for under 75 cents, I dare ya!

They do have stories, and that's cool and all, but unfortunately you've probably already read them online.

TheArtOfScience wrote:

We need newspapers though. Once they go out of business we'll notice the void and hopefully they will come back. I'd be willing to pay more for a local newpaper if it meant having one around.

I don't think the market will disappear - at least for quite some time. It will, however shrink rapidly. All the newspapers that depended on regurgitating AP stories and creating fluff pieces for their cooking section are going to die off. The real papers, the ones that have a good subscription base and original reporting, will still survive.

If it's one thing the information society will not tolerate, it's me-too content. You gotta have something to show. You gotta produce. It's no longer enough to run stories written by other people without adding at least some value.

Trainwreck wrote:

Bingo. Because of deep budget cuts and the popularity of bloggers with instant news, the days of investigative journalism are almost over.

I actually heard a segment on NPR this morning that basically said the same thing. They talked to a couple of former investigative journalists from the LA Times who had willingly left journalism to pursue other opportunities. The segment in general was about the lack of opportunity for journalists and the ever decreasing budgets for traditional news media. In the end they announced that several major news organizations had just agreed to cooperate on investigative pieces and essentially pool their resources since the days of papers going it alone on these years long investigative pieces are over.

Newspaper sales have been on the decline in this country way before the internet as we know it came into existence. I believe that total newspaper sales in this country peaked in the mid to late 80's... well before the mid to late 90's when internet usage because widespread. Whether it was competition from TV sources, or just the quality of the product declining, the death knell of the newspaper industry was rung awhile ago.

Anyone listen to Dan Carlin? I was looking for some additional podcasts for a long drive on vacation a few weeks ago and came up with his Common Sense. He's also got one called Hardcore History but I haven't had a chance to get into that one yet. Anyway one of the back episodes I was listening to was titled Owning the Story and covers this exact subject. An interesting listen.

They cover this on Twit and Buzz out Loud a lot. The problem is the 1000 year old revenue model that Newspapers and their web presence are trying to operate on. The issue is that, currently, independent bloggers, cartoonists, have a better chance at a wide audience, financial success than they would at a newspaper, in particular anyone under 40. They are the people savvy enough to turn links and RSS into money. And they cut out to needless corporate people taking a cut.

Newspapers have been spiraling downward for over 100 years. The Internet has not changed or hastened it. There were staff cuts, closures in the 20's, the 60's, the 80's.

Teneman wrote:

Anyone listen to Dan Carlin? I was looking for some additional podcasts for a long drive on vacation a few weeks ago and came up with his Common Sense. He's also got one called Hardcore History but I haven't had a chance to get into that one yet. Anyway one of the back episodes I was listening to was titled Owning the Story and covers this exact subject. An interesting listen.

Carlin is excellent. Hardcore History is a GREAT listen.

LobsterMobster wrote:
Teneman wrote:

Anyone listen to Dan Carlin? I was looking for some additional podcasts for a long drive on vacation a few weeks ago and came up with his Common Sense. He's also got one called Hardcore History but I haven't had a chance to get into that one yet. Anyway one of the back episodes I was listening to was titled Owning the Story and covers this exact subject. An interesting listen.

Carlin is excellent. Hardcore History is a GREAT listen.

I've got a bunch of the Hardcore History downloaded too, I just didn't have a chance to listen to them. That 10.5 hour drive wasn't as long as I'd thought.

From the few episodes of Common Sense that I've listened to, he really does seem to come at things from an objective standpoint, taking all sides of the partisan issues to task. Does that hold true throughout most of his stuff or did I just get lucky with the episodes I hit? If he's really as objective and common-sensical as he seemed from what I've heard, I've found a long time contender for my podcast list.

Teneman wrote:

Does that hold true throughout most of his stuff or did I just get lucky with the episodes I hit? If he's really as objective and common-sensical as he seemed from what I've heard, I've found a long time contender for my podcast list.

He seems to go a bit easier on the left than on the right, but that may just be that the right has given him more to complain about. He does seem genuinely non-partisan, if not slightly libertarian.

There are a few points where he becomes a bit dejected, even depressed, since the conclusion he comes to time and time again is that to fix the problem we need to gut the system, and that's never going to happen.

KingGorilla wrote:

They cover this on Twit and Buzz out Loud a lot. The problem is the 1000 year old revenue model that Newspapers and their web presence are trying to operate on. The issue is that, currently, independent bloggers, cartoonists, have a better chance at a wide audience, financial success than they would at a newspaper, in particular anyone under 40. They are the people savvy enough to turn links and RSS into money. And they cut out to needless corporate people taking a cut.

The 1,000 year old revenue model newspapers rely on is the same damn model that every web site and blog (and radio and TV show) relies on--eyeballs (or ears). More eyeballs you have, the more you can charge advertisers to reach said eyeballs.

Newspapers got hammered by the loss of classified ad revenue. Craig's List and the like took a big ass bit out of their revenue stream that wasn't replaced by on-line ads. And the early attempts to make their sites subscription based didn't work either.

So that leaves newspapers struggling to figure out how to survive. They need to figure out that they're in the business of providing news, not delivering that news via printed broadsheet. Once they figure that people will be willing to pay for the news, but not a big stack of paper that piles up every week, they'll be able to make some money again. Though I'm not sure they'll ever be what they were before. I doubt the future newpaper will have enough money to hire a reporter just to cover city councill meetings, to really serve as a watchdog on the system.

OG_slinger wrote:

I doubt the future newpaper will have enough money to hire a reporter just to cover city councill meetings, to really serve as a watchdog on the system.

I'd say the opposite think actually, I think that's exactly what they will be doing. The news niche that isn't covered well by the aggregators and the bloggers is local news. If the papers stopped spending so much time reprinting the same AP/Reuters stories that everyone else is carrying, and started providing some news I can't already get at every other site on the 'net, I'd be a lot more interested.

I currently only get the paper delivered on Sunday, and that's mostly for the comics and the flyers. If they started a more detailed local coverage I'd be a lot more likely to resubscribe for weekly delivery too.

Teneman wrote:
OG_slinger wrote:

I doubt the future newpaper will have enough money to hire a reporter just to cover city councill meetings, to really serve as a watchdog on the system.

I'd say the opposite think actually, I think that's exactly what they will be doing. The news niche that isn't covered well by the aggregators and the bloggers is local news. If the papers stopped spending so much time reprinting the same AP/Reuters stories that everyone else is carrying, and started providing some news I can't already get at every other site on the 'net, I'd be a lot more interested.

I currently only get the paper delivered on Sunday, and that's mostly for the comics and the flyers. If they started a more detailed local coverage I'd be a lot more likely to resubscribe for weekly delivery too.

The LA Times is not going to hire dozens of reporters to cover all the cities in Los Angeles County and surrounding areas. My city, Long Beach, lost it's newspaper recently. It's not dead, but its operations in the city were shut down and a ton of reporters were let go. As such, we really don't have any direct coverage of Long Beach politics anymore. And the LA Times certainly didn't hire a reporter to cover my metro area.

I know the LA Times has experimented with creating localized editions, like for Orange County, but I don't know how succesfull that's been.

Not all web sites rely on just ads. In fact the more successful ones don't at all. Most successful web comics rely much more on art sales and merchandise for example. The issue is that the most stable business is having a product to leverage. And something easily duplicated is not a business model. And you missed a huge part of what I said. That model cannot support the overhead of most publishers. A small group will make more money per person off of those ads because of less overhead to leases, administrative staff.

KingGorilla wrote:

Not all web sites rely on just ads. In fact the more successful ones don't at all. Most successful web comics rely much more on art sales and merchandise for example. The issue is that the most stable business is having a product to leverage. And something easily duplicated is not a business model. And you missed a huge part of what I said. That model cannot support the overhead of most publishers. A small group will make more money per person off of those ads because of less overhead to leases, administrative staff.

Newspapers *do* have a product they leverage. It's called the news. It's unique piece of intellectual property just like software, a movie, a song, or a video game.

Bloggers can't easily duplicate investigative journalism since it costs money to do actual journalism. Reports have shown that a single piece of investigative journalism can involve nearly a dozen staff members, take months to pull together, and cost the newspaper well over $50,000 to produce. Investigating the 2000 election cost one newspaper nearly $1 million.

Blogs don't have anywhere near those resources and could only produce that level of compelling content if they did exactly the opposite what you said makes them successful: they'd have add reporters and staff and increase their overhead. And before you talk about the Drudge Report or other online-only sources breaking news, consider that just one issue of the NYT's has vastly more information and actual news than they've published since they went live.

So rather than actually spend the money and do the work themselves, blogs basically steal the IP of newspapers and use it to generate advertising revenue for their own site. Yes, they provide a link to the original source, but all you have to do is read the comments on a blog to realize that very few people read the actual article, thus denying newspapers the eyeballs they can use to get more money from advertisers.

I'm sure if I mirrored Hulu and set up a competiting web site that used someone elses IP to generate money for me I'd get more than a few cease-and-desist letters from law firms. They'd probably have my servers ripped out and melted down into slag.

Is giving newspapers a period of exclusivity the right approach? I don't know. Perhaps blogs need to license the content for a small fee, much like the newpapers pay for articles from the wire services. As long as the blogs are generating cash for someone, some of that cash has to make its way to the people who paid to create the content in the first place. If not, blogs are getting a free ride at best and outright stealing from newspapers at worst.

Newspapers *do* have a product they leverage. It's called the news. It's unique piece of intellectual property just like software, a movie, a song, or a video game.

That's the thing though. "the news" is not IP. it's the news.

the article in the OP wrote:

You can copyright a news story, but you can't copyright the news. "The news" just means "things that happen in the world."

You can copyright a bunch of stuff, but not the fact that Joe the Plumber gave a speech at a place. Joe the Plumber can copyright his speech, but the reporter can't copyright the fact that joe the Plumber gave a speech.

Which is why one thing people are talking about is tiering the news. One tier would be the "news", the other would be investigative journalism, in-depth analysis, etc. that isn't "Joe the Plumber gave a speech".

Investigative journalism is most definitely IP. It is unique content that would not have seen the light of day unless someone had paid to create it.

LobsterMobster wrote:
Teneman wrote:

Anyone listen to Dan Carlin? I was looking for some additional podcasts for a long drive on vacation a few weeks ago and came up with his Common Sense. He's also got one called Hardcore History but I haven't had a chance to get into that one yet. Anyway one of the back episodes I was listening to was titled Owning the Story and covers this exact subject. An interesting listen.

Carlin is excellent. Hardcore History is a GREAT listen.

He talks about the Eastern Front in the latest podcast. A commendable effort to discuss the aspect of WWII too few in US know (or care to know) about.

The problem for newspapers today is that the old model of being an aggregator of news stories with a daily edition containing "all the news that's fit to print" no longer works. The traditional model is readers paying $1 to read 4-5 stories while leafing through big pages of ads. They may skip stories they aren't interested in, but they still see the ads on the page.

The internet allows readers, or sites like Drudge/Yahoo/Google News, to act as their own aggregators of stories by clicking only on those links that interest them. The newspapers don't get the benefit of the "skipped story, but saw ad" effect. Now people pick and choose among thousands of new stories available on the web. and the only ads they see are those on the page they view. Newspapers are now only useful as a sources of news stories, and as a result there's a lot of redundancy in the industry. Do we really need 1,200 of the same story on Sarah Palin's resignation? No.

There is always going to be someone reporting the news and writing news stories, but the business will change drastically as more people turn to the internet method of finding the stories that interest them. We're in the early stages of a news revolution. If you can generate compelling investigative reports you will get hot linked by bloggers and news sites, and you will get eyeballs on your pages (and ads- meaning money). Won't you won't be able to do is sell 50 pages of advertisements in a single edition or make money through subscriptions like the old system.