[...] about Andrew Sullivan as of October 27, 2009 Dispite Circulation Numbers, Neither the Sky Nor the Republic is Falling – blogs.law.harvard.edu 10/26/2009 It has been all of about 15 minutes since we last heard [...]
“…that says more about advertisers than it does about the demand for newspaper content.”
No one I know of writing about the difficulties of newspapers suggests that the problem is a lack of demand, so this observation feels true but irrelevant. Newspapers, in their current form, cannot survive a transition to the web, even if advertisers willingness to pay quintuples, and not only is that scenario unlikely, the current trend is in the other direction.
You ask why the large online audience isn’t the headline — it isn’t the headline because the fate of newspapers as going concerns is not tied to the size of the online audience. If business were a popularity contest, all would be well with newspapers, but it isn’t, so it isn’t.
Thanks very much for your comment, Clay. I agree, by and large, with your writing on this topic. However, I guess I am far more optimistic than you about the potential of multiple new revenue streams to sustain a different, but still very important newspaper industry (as someone who pays for the paper version of both the Times and the Globe, I don’t want to lose the hard copy versions, but I see opportunities to sustain them because of, not despite, the Web.) That said, I’m more concerned about quality journalism than the format it comes in. While I understand that you are right, advertisers are not willing to pay as much for online ads now as they are for print ads, I have a hard time understanding how advertising has ever been about anything BUT attracting a lot of eyeballs to an ad (a popularity contest as you put it), and expect that the price of an online ad will increase in the future at the top news sites. I also wonder if the fact that all the data that advertisers can collect on click throughs, etc. doesn’t hurt newspapers. There is no ‘click through’ for a paper advertisement, and yet advertisers for years have been happy to infer that people saw an add in the NY Times without much hard evidence that that particular ad led to an increase in sales. For those that want to sell things to the coveted young, well-educated (and in the future wealthier) demographic group, they are going to be reached through sites like he NY Times.
As Steve Coll has suggested, there are also a number of mixed non-profit business models for newspapers that could work, but I think people like Charlie Sennott have also started to show that online for-profit models can also give us quality international news, for those that are married to the idea that newspapers have to generate a profit (I for one, am not).
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October 27th, 2009 at 12:01 pm
[...] about Andrew Sullivan as of October 27, 2009 Dispite Circulation Numbers, Neither the Sky Nor the Republic is Falling – blogs.law.harvard.edu 10/26/2009 It has been all of about 15 minutes since we last heard [...]
October 31st, 2009 at 8:45 am
“…that says more about advertisers than it does about the demand for newspaper content.”
No one I know of writing about the difficulties of newspapers suggests that the problem is a lack of demand, so this observation feels true but irrelevant. Newspapers, in their current form, cannot survive a transition to the web, even if advertisers willingness to pay quintuples, and not only is that scenario unlikely, the current trend is in the other direction.
You ask why the large online audience isn’t the headline — it isn’t the headline because the fate of newspapers as going concerns is not tied to the size of the online audience. If business were a popularity contest, all would be well with newspapers, but it isn’t, so it isn’t.
November 2nd, 2009 at 11:37 am
Thanks very much for your comment, Clay. I agree, by and large, with your writing on this topic. However, I guess I am far more optimistic than you about the potential of multiple new revenue streams to sustain a different, but still very important newspaper industry (as someone who pays for the paper version of both the Times and the Globe, I don’t want to lose the hard copy versions, but I see opportunities to sustain them because of, not despite, the Web.) That said, I’m more concerned about quality journalism than the format it comes in. While I understand that you are right, advertisers are not willing to pay as much for online ads now as they are for print ads, I have a hard time understanding how advertising has ever been about anything BUT attracting a lot of eyeballs to an ad (a popularity contest as you put it), and expect that the price of an online ad will increase in the future at the top news sites. I also wonder if the fact that all the data that advertisers can collect on click throughs, etc. doesn’t hurt newspapers. There is no ‘click through’ for a paper advertisement, and yet advertisers for years have been happy to infer that people saw an add in the NY Times without much hard evidence that that particular ad led to an increase in sales. For those that want to sell things to the coveted young, well-educated (and in the future wealthier) demographic group, they are going to be reached through sites like he NY Times.
As Steve Coll has suggested, there are also a number of mixed non-profit business models for newspapers that could work, but I think people like Charlie Sennott have also started to show that online for-profit models can also give us quality international news, for those that are married to the idea that newspapers have to generate a profit (I for one, am not).