Tag Archives: newspapers

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 →

The return of content (subscription not included)

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FT logoAbout twenty years ago, I went to a farewell din­ner for a young man who was leav­ing the UK to head for Korea. As a news action junkie, I was baffled. The Soviet Empire was in crisis. The Middle East in tur­moil. And this guy was going to Seoul for the Fin­an­cial Times?

Still, gnaw­ing away was the sus­pi­cion that maybe he knew some­thing the rest of us didn’t. That linger­ing sus­pi­cion from twenty years ago was prob­ably right.

John Rid­ding is now the FT’s CEO and here’s his take on what ‘mar­ket melt­down’ has done for the paper brand (as told to Robert Mac­Mil­lan at Reu­ters):

“What [the crisis] is doing for our read­er­ship and audi­ence is pretty remark­able. I think it really under­lines this idea that at a time of tur­moil, people really do need trus­ted guides, and are pre­pared to pay.”

Con­tinue read­ing →

Newspaper revenues: the end of the golden age

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The ever-readable Robert Picard has the best piece (sub­scrip­tion) in the new edi­tion of Journ­al­ism Stud­ies. The abstract lays it on the line:

The author finds that the rela­tion­ship between GDP and expendit­ures is weak­en­ing, that growth is not keep­ing pace with infla­tion, and that there is greater volat­il­ity in advert­ising than seen in the past. The author con­cludes that trends indic­ate the advert­ising expendit­ures will plat­eau and decline in the future, deny­ing news­pa­pers rev­enue growth that is crit­ic­ally needed for sustainability.

Con­tinue read­ing →