These are some of the things that have caught my attention lately. It’s a more eclectic mix than just the news business, but then so’s life:
- Google Next Victim Of Creative Destruction? | John Borthwick — “I now see search as fragmenting and Twitter search doing to Google what broadband did to AOL.”
- A New Kindle While Journalism Burns | Forbes.com — Besides books, the Kindle wirelessly updates 31 newspapers, including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, 21 magazines (yes, Forbes, too) and over 1,000 blogs. And while most of these publications are free on the Web, scratching out a living on advertising alone, the Kindle versions have subscription prices ranging from $6 to $15 a month for the newspapers and $1.25 to $3.50 a month for the magazines. Even popular blogs like Boing Boing run $2 a month.
Reading the papers on the Kindle is slower than it should be, with lots left to do on design and layout. So far the publishers seem to be moving Web copy directly to the Kindle rather than designing content for this as a unique device. I tried to go to The New York Times’ op-ed page, and after an initial blank screen received a full-screen picture of David Brooks. Eeek. Satirical blog The Onion jumps straight into stories, with no organization.
- What Would Google Do? | Monday Note — I love Google … and I believe, please note the verb, they’ve made insightful strategic decisions followed by skillful implementation. For example, the founders, Serguei Brin and Larry Page came up with an original idea for search, their page-ranking algorithm. Then, they went for big, powerful VC, even if they could have bootstrapped their business with less capital than Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins could muster. Later, Google worked on their future email service, they stumbled, recognized and energetically embraced the advertising tools that became AdSense and AdWords. All along, unlike less attentive or knowledgeable competitors, they really paid attention to the server infrastructure, built and rebuilt it several times, with the right hires, ending up with the world’s biggest and best server farm, more than one million servers today. Lastly, helped by their experienced, well-connected investors, they acquired adult supervision in the person of Eric Schmidt…
- If Gutenberg had invented the modem | John Robinson — [I]magining journalism as a newsprint phenomenon doesn’t help us move forward. People can get the news how, when and where they want it. Some like it first thing in the morning delivered to their door on newsprint. Some watch video. Some prefer it throughout the day on their smart phone. Some get it as I’m doing now — on the computer. Many of us use all of the above. Like Ken, I am bullish on newspapers. But the point is that solid journalism can, does and must thrive in every system. The sooner we stop thinking that journalism only counts if it is printed on newsprint the better.
- Disruption, low-end solutions, Twitter and Linux | yelvington — Daily print newspapers for years have intentionally ignored vast areas of their own business:
Reporters won’t cover “chicken dinner” news. It doesn’t meet the “threshhold.“
A hunter brings in a picture of the deer he shot over the weekend. Newspaper won’t run it; the quality is too low, and besides, dead Bambi offends somebody on the copy desk.
Ad sales force won’t call on the bars downtown. They’re too little to worry about, and besides, half of them don’t pay their bills.
Garage sale junk ads are a nuisance. It costs more to take the ad on the phone than you get paid. Raise the classified rates until the problem goes away.
So somebody else steps in to meet the need… - Paying for News | Seeking Alpha — Users never paid for journalism; the only service they partially subsidized was that provided by the postman… A few users are now paying for online subscriptions to the likes of the WSJ: that’s a new phenomenon, not an old one, and it’s a business model taken from newsletters and trade publications rather than from newspapers and magazines circa Henry Luce.
The reason that people got excited about the web in the 90s was that they could see that it slashed printing and distribution costs essentially to zero. Ad revenues on their own were always greater than ad revenues plus subscription and newsstand revenues, minus printing and distribution costs. So there was great hope for the industry.
Unfortunately, it turned out that web advertising isn’t remotely as lucrative for publishers as print advertising was. Another reason is that web banner ads just aren’t as effective as print ads. A 3rd reason is there’s so much inventory online that it’s extremely hard to charge premium rates.
