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Major Australian newspaper chain goes head-to-head in Brisbane -- with web-only product

Ex-WashingtonPost.com editor and BackFence.com founder Mark Potts has posted to his blog about the decision of Fairfax Digital to enter the Brisbane news market in competition with the existing print daily --  but Fairfax is doing it with a web-only product.

LINK: http://recoveringjournalist.typepad.com/recovering_journalist/2007/03/online_down_und.html

PEJ 2007 report sees need to charge for content

The 2007 annual report of the Project on Excellence in Journalism, "The State of the News Industry" is out on the web today (March 12), and it contains in its the trends summary section an endorsement of the notion of charging for news on the web. It talks about a need for a "consortium."

http://www.stateofthemedia.org/2007/narrative_overview_eight.asp?cat=2&media=1

EXCERPT:

"The evidence is mounting that the news industry must become more aggressive about developing a new economic model. The signs are clearer that advertising works differently online than in older media. Finding out about goods and services on the Web is an activity unto itself, like using the yellow pages, and less a byproduct of getting news, such as seeing a car ad during a newscast. The consequence is that advertisers may not need journalism as they once did, particularly online. Already the predictions of advertising growth on the Web are being scaled back. That has major implications, (which some initiatives such as .Newspaper Next. are beginning to grapple with). Among them, news organizations can broaden what they consider journalistic function to include activities such as online search and citizen media, and perhaps even liken their journalism to anchor stores at a mall, a major reason for coming but not the only one. Perhaps most important, the math suggests they alm!
ost certainly must find a way to get consumers to pay for digital content. The increasingly logical scenario is not to charge the consumer directly. Instead, news providers would charge Internet providers and aggregators licensing fees for content. News organizations may have to create consortiums to make this happen. And those fees would likely add to the bills consumers pay for Internet access. But the notion that the Internet is free is already false. Those who report the news just aren.t sharing in the fees.

Here's a March 12, 2007 Reuters story headlined, "News business needs a new revenue model: study," by Robert MacMillan, which expands on this theme: http://www.reuters.com/article/bondsNews/idUSN1232472420070312

EXCERPT:

"The hope that Internet advertising will someday match what print and television now bring in appears to be vanishing," according to the study, published by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit group affiliated with the Pew Charitable Trusts. News outlets, particularly U.S. newspapers, were able to rely on advertising and subscriptions for years, and have staked high hopes on their online sales eventually eclipsing weaker print revenue.

That may not work out, however, said Tom Rosenstiel, the study's supervisor and the group's director. The amount of online advertising dollars is still rising, "but now there are growing doubts about how much of that will accrue to news," the study said.

--- SNIP ---

Rosenstiel acknowledged that this approach, similar to the cable television model, could result in more expensive Internet access bills. "It's either that or journalism shrinks in America," he said.

Robert Kuttner at CJR on saving newspapers

In a groundbreaking essay -- one of the most literate, comprehensive summaries of the state of American newspaper journalism -- Robert Kuttner attacks the conventional wisdom that says dailies are dying, and envisions a bright future for newspapers as print-digital hybrids. He doesn't see much hope that new ownerships or charging for content will do it as much as patient innovation and advertising revenue.

The end-of-article note reads:

"Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect , a columnist for The Boston Globe , and the author of seven books. His past affiliations include BusinessWeek , The Washington Post , and the late journalism review (More) . His first real job was as I.F. Stone's assistant."

LINK: http://www.cjr.org/issues/2007/2/Kuttner.asp

-------------------------------

EXCERPTS:

"The public is accustomed to getting nearly all of its Web content free, and there is fierce opposition to a cable-TV model in which users would pay different amounts for different levels of content. So neither of the deus ex machina solutions to the newspapers. (somewhat exaggerated) financial plight.different ownership structures, or more favorable revenue sharing with search engines.seems likely. Rather, publishers need to work with what they have, investing in people and technology to get through this transition to the promised land of hybrid print-Web publishing."

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"Today Slate, Salon, Huffington Post, and the rest [online], offer far more comment than news, since talk is cheap and reportage isn't."

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"In their modern classic, "The Elements of Journalism," Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel write that, "In the end, the discipline of verification is what separates journalism from entertainment, propaganda, fiction, or art." Robert Putnam's [book] "Bowling Alone", recounting a half-century's decline of civic engagement (a decline that began long before the Internet), reports that newspaper readers are more likely than nonreaders to participate in politics and local public life. Cities and towns with newspapers have a more transparent civic and public life than those without them.

"In effect, we deputize editors to be our proxies, delegating to them the task of assigning reporters and deciding what news we need to know on a given day and to certify its pertinence and accuracy. We trust them to do a more reliable job than even our own Web-surfing. (As Chico Marx famously put it in Duck Soup, .Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?.) But as readers, we no longer have to make that either/or choice between newspapers and the wild Web. We can have both the authoritative daily newspaper to aggregate and certify, and the infinite medley of the Web -- all of which puts the traditional press under salutary pressure to innovate and to excel."

-------------------------------

"My reporting suggests that many big dailies have turned the corner, though only barely and just in time, that newspapers have started down a financially and journalistically viable path of becoming hybrids, without losing the professional culture that makes them uniquely valuable.

"Assuming that most dailies survive the transition, my guess is that in twenty-five years they will be mostly digital; that even people like me of the pre-Internet generation will be largely won over by ingenious devices like Times Reader, supplemented by news alerts, rss feeds, and God knows what else. But whether newspapers are print or Web matters far less than whether they maintain their historic calling."
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CONFERENCE: The New(s) England Revolution: April 7 at UMass Lowell launches New England News Forum

Registration is open for the New England News Forum's April 7 inaugural public gathering: "The New(s) England Revolution: From Politics to Courtroom to Classroom." It's a one-day interactive seminar for teachers, journalists, local and political bloggers, community videographers and active citizens exploring how changing media is changing civic engagement. DOWNLOAD PDF FLYER

Financing future non-paper news -- advertising and charging

The February edition of the Columbia Journalism Review has a thoroughly insightful and researched article by Robert Kuttner speculating on a potential bright future for companies which publish newspapers -- as non-paper publishers. These organizations will share news via the web, Kuttner thinks. The article editor notes that Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect, a columnist for The Boston Globe, and the author of seven books. His past affiliations include BusinessWeek, The Washington Post, and the late journalism review (More). His first real job was as I.F. Stone's assistant.

Here's the link to the article: http://www.cjr.org/issues/2007/2/Kuttner.asp

I exchanged the following post with Rick Hood, a website developer in Amherst, Mass., who is a new observer of the news industry.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 4 Mar 2007 17:10:08 -0500 (EST)
From: Bill Densmore
To: Richard Hood Subject:
RE: CJR article

My bet is that advertising revenue alone, because of intense online competition driving down the pricing of it, won't support near as many reporters in a market like Boston as The Globe sustains today with print advertising. On the other hand, the advertising competition means that others will be getting pieces of the pie, too, and so perhaps in the aggregate, there might be as many reporters covering metro Boston as there are now -- just spread among more organizations.

I think some content will ***not*** be free because it will be unique enough, and niche enough, that people will be willing to pay for it. It is a common perception that because on the web most content is free, that most content is free generally. In fact, the free content on the web is a tiny fraction (I would like to see some numbers on this) of the non-fiction content used by business and consumers, and tons of that is not free. It's not on the web ****because**** the people who manufacture the content won't put it there if they can't get paid for it. Or it is on the web, but behind firewalls so you never see it searched or referenced.

This is seen as a big challenge by Google and Yahoo -- they want to search ALL the world's content, but they can't get to the charged stuff.

So what I see emerging is a hybrid model where lots of content will be ad support, and lots of content not now "seen" on the web will become visible, but only after a very simple payment mechanism emerges.

-- bill

On Sun, 4 Mar 2007, Richard Hood wrote:

> Wow, what a great article. Pretty much sums up the whole situation > regarding print vs. web and the effect on large, medium and small > newspapers. >
> I didn't realize that on average publicly traded newspapers are quite > profitable (17.8%), but that stock prices are lagging - sounds like > investors should start buying newspaper stocks. >
> Newspapers (and magazines) still have the most valued asset: good reporters. > It's just a question of how best they can sell the production of those > assets. >
> My opinion is that the newspapers are going to do great online, and that > they can do so even if it's free. Web advertising is exploding (thanks to > Google). As the big newspapers get better and better at online presentation > (including audio and video) people like me are just going to straight there > - we're not going to mess around with a bunch of blogs or other sites - > especially if it's free. However, I think its smart that they are easing > into that - like the NY Times having part of it free, but part of it by > subscription for now. I predict that eventually it will be all free and > advertising revenue will be huge. >
> My guess is that the following makes sense, but that it is going to change > faster than people think, especially this part: "...the revenue loss would > exceed the cost savings.": >
> "Despite the seeming anachronism of paper in a digital age, however, the > economics of the business require newspapers to persist as partly print > media for at least another generation. Some Americans still want to pick up > a daily paper rather than read content on a screen. And as a business > proposition, the average monetary value of a visitor to a newspaper's Web > site is only 20 to 30 percent of a newspaper's print reader; Web ads command > lower rates because of the greater competition among Web sites. So even if a > newspaper shut down its print operation, published only on the Internet, and > somehow managed to keep its entire circulation, the revenue loss would > exceed the cost savings." >
> My other guess is that whether print will go away altogether depends on > advances in reader-device technology more than anything else. I can imagine > a time when $50 (or less) devices are sold that are roughly 8.5" x 11", > broadband WIFI will be everywhere, so to read the paper you just turn on > your device and go there. Whatever "comfort" I lose by having that piece of > paper in my hand is way overshadowed by the extra content (audio, video and > more print) that would be available to look at. And for those who don't have > a device, or forgot it, places like coffee shops could rent these devices > for maybe $1 a pop, which they would do instead of selling papers. ** >
> I would not invest in printing companies. :) >

> Take care, >
> Rick >

> ** I don't understand why this hasn't happened yet. As far as I know, there > no reader-type-devices like this. There are tablet PCs, which are way more > than needed for this, and there are readers like the Sony reader, but that > is just for PDFs, not web pages.