[LINK] Five Key Reasons Why Newspapers Are Failing

Kim Holburn kim.holburn at gmail.com
Tue Aug 18 19:10:54 AEST 2009


On 2009/Aug/16, at 5:01 PM, stephen at melbpc.org.au wrote:

> BRD, Brendan, Paul and Jan note:
>
> http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/08/10/2650990.htm
>
> And, Kim notes, http://www.splicetoday.com/politics-and-media/five- 
> key-
> reasons-why-newspapers-are-failing
>
>
> Perhaps a centralized subscription-collection model in future?

I'm sure the newspapers can try paywalls but I doubt they'd work.   
They have been tried.   They work for specialist publications but only  
as long as there is little competition in the area.  Paywalls lock  
your content out of the web.  Make it difficult to find, not appear in  
search engines or only appear as a teaser.

> "500 Publishers Onboard With Journalism Online"
>
> By Mike Sachoff - Fri, 08/14/2009 - 09:51 www.webpronews.com
>
> Aims to monetize newspaper content

Here's an interesting take.  When I read this I thought of google  
books for some reason.

http://moralpanicsandthecopyrightwars.blogspot.com/2009/08/moral-panics-in-copyright-wars.html

The atomic unit of consumption for existing media is almost always  
disrupted by emerging media. For example, digital music caused  
consumers to think about their purchases as individual songs rather  
than as full albums. Digital and on-demand video has caused people to  
view variable-length clips when it is convenient for them, rather than  
fixed-length programs on a fixed broadcast schedule. Similarly, the  
structure of the Web has caused the atomic unit of consumption for  
news to migrate from the full newspaper to the individual article. As  
with music and video, many people still consume physical newspapers in  
their original full-length format. But with online news, a reader is  
much more likely to arrive at a single article. While these individual  
articles could be accessed from a newspaper's homepage, readers often  
click directly to a particular article via a search engine or another  
Website.

Changing the basic unit of content consumption is a challenge, but  
also an opportunity. Treating the article as the atomic unit of  
consumption online has several powerful consequences. When producing  
an article for online news, the publisher must assume that a reader  
may be viewing this article on its own, independent of the rest of the  
publication. To make an article effective in a standalone setting  
requires providing sufficient context for first-time readers, while  
clearly calling out the latest information for those following a story  
over time. It also requires a different approach to monetization: each  
individual article should be self-sustaining.

These types of changes will require innovation and experimentation in  
how news is delivered online, and how advertising can support it.

-- 
Kim Holburn
IT Network & Security Consultant
Ph: +39 06 855 4294  M: +39 3494957443
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