Talkin’ newspapers and journalism

A couple of articles worth your while regarding the financial troubles  of newspaper industry and what has brought them (in part) to this point:

The Fed shouldn’t save newspapers because they “are not too big to be allowed to fail.” (Newsosaur)

American journalism is in trouble because of “editors and reporters focused more on winning prizes or making television appearances.” (Walter Pincus, Columbia Journalism Review)

The physical attraction of newspapers

Alan Mutter explains why newspapers have it all over Amazon’s recently  released Kindle DX, a larger version of the electronic tablet.

Nothing beats the convenience and portability of a well-organized newspaper.

A newspaper requires no batteries or AC current, can be read anyplace in all-but-blackout conditions, can be folded (unlike a jumbo Kindle) for convenient transport, can be clipped for coupons, can catch canary poop and can be responsibly recycled into cute flower pots (see below) in a way that electronic detritus cannot.

Plus, you can’t smash a bug with Kindle.

Visit the top 10 media blogs

One of my favorite media bloggers, Alan Mutter (aka Newsosaur), lists the 10 blogs he turns to for info about the media biz.

Next time, buy Google

No, this isn’t stock advice. It’s more of a logical extension of Alan Mutter’s criticism of the newspaper industry for failing to do what Google did: understand how to make loads of money on the Web:

The airwaves have been clogged in the last couple of weeks with newspaper people alternatively blaming Google for the industry’s problems or begging Google to come to their aid.

Google isn’t responsible for saving the newspaper industry or journalism. Publishers and editors are. …

… For the record, newspapers actually had a head start over Google. But Google “got” the web. And newspapers didn’t. That’s not Google’s fault. …

… For an excellent example of the sort of opportunities missed by the industry, look no further than this tale of how the Boston Globe blew the chance in 1995 to buy a significant share of Monster.Com for a comparatively modest $1 million.

Or, ask yourself why Dow Jones, the publisher of the Wall Street Journal, never started its own online stock site. Instead, Dow Jones waited until 2004 and spent $520 million to buy MarketWatch, faithfully printing stock listings in the newspaper all the while. …

… None of this is Google’s fault. Blaming Google won’t help.

Imagine if instead of cannibalizing each other and going into severe debt, newspapers had purchased the very technologies that now threaten to put them out of business.

Charge for quality and readers will pay

In his post on how to charge for online content, Newsosaur Alan Mutter admits that asking newsrooms to produce more unique content couldn’t come at a worse time:

Newsroom budgets are being gutted by historic declines in ad sales, aggravated by the need for many companies to generate unreasonably large profits to service the heavy debt they incurred to fund ill-considered and ill-timed acquisitions.

However, as Mutter sees it, the long-term survival of industry depends on additional revenue:

Newsosaur roars at the BuzzMachine

Alan Mutter clearly thought he had Jeff Jarvis right where he wanted him. In a recent post on Reflections of a Newsosaur, Mutter all but accused Jarvis of being a hypocrite.

Jarvis, as you might know, has long advocated for finding ways to monetize online news content apart from directly charging for it. Recently on his BuzzMachine blog, he  ridiculed David Carr’s iTunes for newspapers proposal, stating:

Kachingle is chump change for newspapers

Remember Kachingle, the voluntary payment system Steve Outing touted as an alternative to micropayments, and which I wrote about here? Well, Newsosaur Alan Mutter, who touts a micropayment system, writes that the projected revenues from Kachingle wouldn’t add up to much except at the most popular news sites:

From micropayments to Kachingle

Alan Mutter has a plan to make readers pay for content, Michael Kinsley thinks micropayments are crazy, and Steve Outing says there is another, better way.

Mutter’s solution is a system in which users would pay for premium content by clicking a button that accesses accounts funded by their credit cards:

Newsosaur’s prescriptions for newspapers transitioning to an online model

In his final installment of “Making the Print-Digital Transition,” Newsosaur Alan Mutter offers a list of things the newspaper industry needs to do now if it is to regain financial well-being.

In his previous posts, Mutter looked at why newspapers need their print editions, especially if they want to build an online following of readers and advertisers.

Now, the Newsosaur provides a get-well-soon recipe:

Newspapers aren’t dead, part 2

Ah, much food for thought today. In his ongoing look at the transition from print to digital, Alan Mutter points out that traffic to newspaper sites is derived largely from readers of the print product:

One of the biggest reasons to question the potential for standalone newspaper sites has been identified by Greg Harmon of Belden Interactive, who since 2001 has polled 300,000 newspaper website users in 250 markets across the country.

In his work, Harmon has discovered quite consistently that fully two-thirds of the visitors to newspaper sites say they visited the site because they are readers of the print newspaper.

Jeff Jarvis — BuzzMachine guru, noted “Blog Daddy” and author of What Would Google Do? — thanks Mutter for doing the math, but offers this counterpoint:

Some papers simply cannot afford the cost of print now and so they’d better figure out life post-print or there won’t be any.

Not entirely irreconcilable positions, both with something important to say about the state of media today. Let’s revisit one of Steve Yelvington’s assertions, which inspired this post: