Tag Archives: newspapers

China — the new name in trustworthy media

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Having writ­ten a book about trust in the media, I tend to keep track of the end­less trust polling that pours forth. Here’s the latest from TNS.

When it comes to news­pa­pers TNS observed that less than a quarter (23%) of UK respond­ents ‘highly trus­ted’ news­pa­pers. In fact the UK gave the low­est score in this respect with an aver­age of just under two fifths (39%) of respond­ents across all 16 coun­tries highly trust­ing news­pa­pers. The tra­di­tional press seemed to be most trus­ted by respond­ents in Fin­land (69%), Japan (50%), Sweden (49%) and most inter­est­ingly, China (49%).

China? Most interesting!

Yet more thoughts on journalism and democracy

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Newspaper pressesI’ve been pon­der­ing the rela­tion­ship between journ­al­ism and demo­cracy of late, and so too have the aca­demic com­menters gath­er­ing at the blog of Social Sci­ence Research Coun­cil boss, Craig Cal­houn.

Cal­houn asks the ques­tion Sam Zell has already answered — What is the future of news­pa­pers? And when social sci­ent­ists smell blood, they’re mostly rub­bing their hands at the pro­spect of a fresh cada­ver to dis­sect rather than offer­ing sym­pathy or solutions.

There’s not much in the com­ments that reg­u­lar read­ers won’t be overly famil­iar with — foundation-funded journ­al­ism any­one? But bur­ied within them is Michael Schud­son offer­ing his usual top class, ana­lyt­ical two cents: Con­tinue read­ing →

Newspaper cost structure

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Newspapers by istockphotoBeing a TV per­son, I’m curi­ous about the cost struc­ture of print news­pa­per oper­a­tions. Over at the Monday Note, Frédéric Fil­loux writes:

In a typ­ical oper­a­tion, the biggest costs are indus­trial ones: around 25%-35% for paper and print­ing; another 30%-40% for dis­tri­bu­tion; around 18–25% for edit­or­ial; the remain­ing 10–15% are for admin­is­trat­ive and mar­ket­ing expendit­ures. Con­tinue read­ing →

Online audience growth: not a solution to newspapers’ problems?

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There’s an inter­est­ing look at the prob­lems of news­pa­pers online by Robert Ivan at Seek­ing Alpha, focus­ing on the New York Times. I don’t know about the assump­tions — I’ve seen the cost of the NYT’s news­gath­er­ing put at $200m — and I’ve sim­pli­fied it a little, but here it is:

Des­pite the highest read­er­ship of any news­pa­per in the United States, the New York Times only gen­er­ated $330 mil­lion in online advert­ising in 2007. Total oper­at­ing costs for that same year totaled $2.9 billion.

It is widely repor­ted that total news­pa­per oper­at­ing costs would be reduced by 35% if news­pa­pers elim­in­ated their print product [is that assump­tion really right?]. Using the NYT example … costs could be reduced to $1.9 bil­lion. Con­tinue read­ing →

Microsoft to Newspapers: You made information free. For Google.

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UK Association of Online Publishers logoMicrosoft’s top Intel­lec­tual Prop­erty chap, Tom Rubin, had some inter­est­ing points to make at the UK AOP:

Start­ing back in the early 1990s, some lead­ing Inter­net pun­dits espoused the motto “inform­a­tion wants to be free” and implored con­tent own­ers to simply give away their con­tent and mon­et­ize it through sec­ond­ary means – such as con­certs and tee-shirts for musi­cians and, in the case of media, the prom­ise of a strong income stream by adopt­ing a busi­ness model con­sist­ing of free and lib­eral dis­tri­bu­tion plus online advertising.

And that’s exactly what most news­pa­pers did. By the late 1990s, almost all news­pa­pers put their valu­able report­ing and exclus­ive com­ment­ary online and allowed it to pro­lif­er­ate, eas­ily access­ible and free.

They did just as the new model pro­fessed and sold advert­ising to mon­et­ize the increased audi­ence they were attracting.

Well, here we are ten years later bom­barded almost daily by announce­ments of news­pa­per lay­offs and closures.

The evid­ence is in, and I think we can safely say that the “inform­a­tion wants to be free” approach not only does not work, actu­ally it has been a dis­aster for almost all news­pa­pers. Con­tinue read­ing →

What would Jeff do?

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In case you hap­pen to be a journ­al­ist and Jeff Jar­vis still has you think­ing that news­pa­per prob­lems are your fault, take a look at the New York Times from July, 1980 (and if you like catchy head­lines, they don’t come much catch­ier than this):

First U.S. Exper­i­ments in Elec­tronic News­pa­pers Begin in Two Com­munit­ies; 13 News­pa­pers to Be Added The Need for News­pa­pers A Com­mu­nic­a­tions Devel­op­ment Tele­phone, Cable and Air­waves A Warn­ing on Reg­u­la­tion [pay access]. Con­tinue read­ing →