I know I do it, but there’s a mildly annoying habit in writing of ‘naming and claiming’. Something teetering on the precipice of ‘the bleeding obvious’ is headlined and wrapped up and presented as a novelty. I call this habit the Monck Method.
I was reminded of it re-reading Nick Carr’s piece on unbundling content from advertising in newspapers, published a few months ago. Here it is:
Nicholas Carr, The Great Unbundling, April 2008
The nature of a newspaper, both as a medium for information and as a business, changes when it loses its physical form and shifts to the Internet. It gets read in a different way, and it makes money in a different way.
A print newspaper provides an array of content—local stories, national and international reports, news analyses, editorials and opinion columns, photographs, sports scores, stock tables, TV listings, cartoons, and a variety of classified and display advertising—all bundled together into a single product.
People subscribe to the bundle, or buy it at a newsstand, and advertisers pay to catch readers’ eyes as they thumb through the pages. The publisher’s goal is to make the entire package as attractive as possible to a broad set of readers and advertisers. The newspaper as a whole is what matters, and as a product it’s worth more than the sum of its parts.
When a newspaper moves online, the bundle falls apart.
Does it sound freshly minted? Let’s go back a dozen years…
Katherine Fulton, Columbia Journalism Review, March/April 1996
Won’t there always be a market for journalism?
Most reporters and editors think journalism means covering and uncovering news and telling people what they’ve learned. Their calling is to test hunches and hypotheses, gossip and conflicting accounts against the evidence, to organize and analyze and sometimes synthesize information into compelling stories.
What inspires journalists, however, is neither what pays the bills nor necessarily what draws audiences. The reporters’ and editors’ definition doesn’t describe the business of most commercial American journalism, which is selling advertising. And it doesn’t incorporate all the things the average American newspaper and some of its broadcast counterparts provide—commodity information (weather reports, sports statistics, stock tables, television listings), community bulletin boards (calendars, obituaries), community forums (letters to the editor, op-ed pages, call-in shows), entertainment (features, comics, trivia, crossword puzzles, people gossip).
Strip away some of the more profitable or popular items under this current umbrella, and you could strip away the means of paying for serious reporting aimed at mass audiences. One very important thing to understand about the new media world is just how easy such unbundling becomes.
Classified ads, that huge profit center for every newspaper, are particularly vulnerable. Job listings services have been among the first types of ads online, and newspapers have finally formed a CareerPath consortium to compete. It doesn’t take much imagination to see how phone companies, already in the yellow-pages business, could move on-line and take away just enough newspaper classifieds business to seriously threaten the newsroom budget.
Ecclesiastes 1:9. Yes, let’s call it Ecclesiastes Syndrome!
As the Britannica Blog noted, “The Great Unbundling” was a brief excerpt from my book “The Big Switch” (condensed and stripped of the footnotes). As I make clear in the book, the unbundling phenomenon is a near-universal one on the Internet and its implications for newspapers and all sorts of other products and services have been discussed by economists and journalists for years. My own contribution was merely a small act of distillation. That said, when viewed in a broader historical context, unbundling is indeed something new under the sun and deserves continued discussion.