…Diller, Brill, and Murdoch seem be stating a simple fact—we will have to pay them—but this fact is not in fact a fact. Instead, it is a choice, one its proponents often decline to spell out in full, because, spelled out in full, it would read something like this:

“Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use, or else we will have to stop making content in the costly and complex way we have grown accustomed to making it. And we don’t know how to do that.”

-CShirky read the entire post on Shirky’s blog.

Total ad spending in the U.S. fell 12.3% to $125.3 billion in 2009, according to a report from Kantar Media (formerly TNS Media Intelligence).

Internet display advertising was up 7.3%, and free-standing inserts, up 3.0%.

While the economy had an impact in the numbers, clearly, the business model is not working.

Forbes is calling it “Meter Madness At The Times” and goes on to report-

Greg Mitchell, E&P’s former editor, termed the plan “vague.” Content Bridges’ Ken Doctor called it “a big bet.” Social media critic Mathew Ingram, blogger at GigaOm, wrote, “Why is the NYT waiting until 2011? This isn’t exactly rocket science to implement.” Reuters’ media blogger Felix Salmon minced no words, calling it “a sad day for online journalism.”

I confirmed it by doing a Google News search and then reading an article about it from the Free site Paidcontent.org where they also published the entire NYT memo to the staff.

I wish NYTimes.com all best I’m curious to see how this grand experiment (Round 2) works out. Remember Times Select was a failure, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, you can’t charge for general interest news in the internet paradigm.

Found via @ehelm on Twitter

“Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) has introduced S. 673, the so-called “Newspaper Revitalization Act,” that would give outlets tax deals if they were to restructure as 501(c)(3) corporations.” 9/20/2009 -TheHill.com

So if going out of business and/or seeking a bailout from the Federal Government is not the bottom then hey, the Buggy Whip industry hasn’t hit bottom either.  The Buggy Whip makers have seen a stabilization and even increase in sales in the last few years… yep, things are fine.

Bill Wyman is the former arts editor of Salon.com and NPR. This is an in-depth article on the demise of the newspaper industry.  Bill can now be found blogging at Hitsville.org.

As the title of above Reddit thread implies many newspaper news sites spread their longer articles over several pages.  It’s my opinion that they do it to drive up pageviews and advertising impressions, but in the process annoy the hell out of the reader.  While the Newspaper Association of America continues to triumphantly announce record pageviews on newspaper sites, the newspapers themselves are going bankrupt.   Hmmm… It’s time for a new strategy fellas.

My suggestion to these newspaper sites is put the articles on ONE page and increase CPM’s by reducing the total number of advertising spots on their webpages.  In other words, don’t have 12 ad spots on every damn page.   Look at Kottke.org he has ONE ad on that site (via The Deck) and it generates something like $80k year!

In the meantime people are developing workarounds for crappy user experiences by:

1. reading the article in print page view which usually puts the article on one continuous scrolling screen.

2. using the Auto Pager firefox plugin which automatically loads the next page at the bottom of the screen to create one continuous scrolling screen.

3. using ARC 90 Labs Readability tool which eliminates all ads from the screen

4. using Ad Block Plus to eliminate ALL on site advertising

5. using this GreaseMonkey Script make a multi column page

The online experience is totally different then the print reading experience.  Newspapers need to get it in their heads that what works in print does not work online.  Print best serves a Geographic Community.  The web best serves Communities of Interest.  If newspapers are selling “brand awareness” type ads, they won’t sell enough to become economically sustainable.  If they sell ads that result in conversions (sales) then they will realize higher CPM’s.  Newspapers however, must dismantle their behemoth catch all news sites and create community of interest news sites to best position such conversion ads.  The advertiser and newspaper will both benefit.  The current online advertising and user experience strategies cannot go on.

NAA sent me a letter with this month’s Presstime magazine letting me know that this is the last print edition I will be receiving.  They are moving online only.  Truth be told, it was probably the last print edition I would be getting anyway you see I graduated from NYU in January and NAA wants proof that I still qualify for their student rate. I do, but you know what NAA, I’m not wasting my time to send you the appropriate paperwork. 

Why is NAA, the NEWSPAPER Association of America, eliminating their print publication and moving online only?  The reason they cite in the letter is “to adapt our organization to the realities of today’s newspaper business”.  I’m calling bullshit on their reasoning.  The real reason I suspect is because NAA is too big a coward to try something innovative and instead is hoping to just hang in there a little longer like everyone else and hope for the best.

According to NAA’s website, here is the association’s purpose:

Today, NAA serves the newspaper industry in strategic efforts to:

. Serve as a catalyst for industry growth
. Identify and disseminate examples of industry innovation
. Provide tools to exchange information and ideas
. Advocate and communicate industry views and interests to the Federal Government and to third-party standards and measurement bodies
. Communicate the vitality of newspaper media to external constituencies including the advertising community, Wall Street and the news media.

Did you read the first and last bullet points?  What an awful message eliminating print sends to NAA’s advertisers, NAA’s members, and to the advertisers who spent roughly 34 Billion dollars in PRINT advertising last year.  We are adapting “to realities of today’s newspaper business”… by getting out of paper and everything that entails.   http://www.naa.org/TrendsandNumbers/Advertising-Expenditures.aspx   This doesn’t sound like adapting to me, it sounds like abandonment and surrender to the whims of whatever may come to newspapers.

Here is what NAA should have done:

Leverage the Newspaper Industry’s greatest asset and that is – the invitation to deliver a print product to people’s homes.     

Figure out how to deliver Presstime to readers using existing distribution channels of member newspapers and 3^rd party distributors like PCF.  

Show newspapers and advertisers how much money NAA is saving by distributing PressTime this way versus the US Post Office.  Show Newspapers and Advertisers how their existing distribution infrastructure can be used to deliver products to homes across the nation.  What kinds of things?  Things like magazines, catalogs, coupons, flyers, samples, and probably many other things an ad or marketing executive would jump at the chance to drop on a subscriber’s doorstep. 

For example, I get the Wall Street Journal delivered to my doorstep 6 days a week. Why aren’t my magazines and fishing catalogs delivered this way or anything else for that matter?    I can imagine a time in the future when I end my print subscription of WSJ but if I were getting other things via this home delivery service, I would continue to welcome my magazines and catalogs on my front step.  It’s a win-win situation.

If NAA thinks that a newsPAPER’s greatest asset is delivering news via websites then they and their members should expect ad revenue to plummet while competition rises everywhere. There is NO WAY to differentiate a newspaper online. 

If NAA thinks newspapers are unique media entities, as the association’s mere presence implies, then NAA must push the newspaper industry’s greatest asset – the invitation to deliver a print product to people’s homes.  This will open new revenue streams to newspapers and offer advertisers new and less expensive ways of advertising.       

RELATED:

Big Job Cuts at NAA — And No Longer Will Print ‘Presstime’ – Editor & Publisher

The fundamental problem of newspapers on the internet – The Krugman Paradox – Metaprinter

Metaprinter Offers a New, Innovative, Digital Newspaper Business Model – Infinite Zoning

News Media Innovation, Convergence and Sustainability – Interview with Don Carli

If you live in an EveryBlock city and have an iPhone you can now have more news access than you ever thought you needed.  The app is available for free at the App Store.

Here’s how Everyblock explains the features of the app:  The EveryBlock iPhone app lets you explore news that’s happened recently in your immediate area.  We publish dozens of different categories of local news, drawing from hundreds of sources. Much of it is updated every single day. Examples of the information we publish:

• Business licenses (new businesses in your neighborhood)
• Crime
• Fire alerts
• Foreclosures
• Local deals / coupons
• Locations in the media (places in your neighborhood that have been mentioned in the news and in blogs)
• Real estate listings
• Restaurant inspection results
• Get recent health inspection reports for restaurants nearby
• See which crimes have been reported on the street you’re walking down
• Find out what places in your neighborhood have been covered in the news
• Get a sense for property values in your area

Google Maps is becoming more and more powerful by the day as users learn how to manipulate the powerful mapping software.  Listing your business for free with Google Maps is a simple no brainer, Must-Do for business owners. That’s free advertising,  sorry newspapers.  And now Google maps are being used with increasing regularity as powerful news visualization tools.  Below is a dynamic Swine Flu map created by a computer scientist from the UK and helped by contributions from 45+ others around the world.  The data used is timely and cited, leaving little to no room to question the accuracy and veracity of the map’s utility.

View 2009 H1N1 Flu Outbreak Map in a larger map

What does this mean for established news media?

• It means that 17million people now have a free source of local news.  Don’t think they will use it?  The app store has recorded over 800Million Downloads!
• It means that in the 6 days since the swine flu map was created it has been viewed over 1,350,000 times.
• It means that influential people like Warren Buffett Wouldn’t Buy a Newspaper At Any Price!

Here is the offending article: The newspaper industry just gave away another free meal, er Twitter: do they have any left? -from scobleizer.com

What isn’t explored in Robert Scoble’s article, or maybe what isn’t understood by the author of that article, is that when a disruptive technology comes along, The Internet, in this case, little to nothing can be done to prevent seismic changes in business practices.  Mark Federman sums this up way better than I can.  Here he is talking about Marshall McLuhan’s famous line “the medium is the message”.

Marshall McLuhan was concerned with the observation that we tend to focus on the obvious. In doing so, we largely miss the structural changes in our affairs that are introduced subtly, or over long periods of time. Whenever we create a new innovation – be it an invention or a new idea – many of its properties are fairly obvious to us. We generally know what it will nominally do, or at least what it is intended to do, and what it might replace. We often know what its advantages and disadvantages might be. But it is also often the case that, after a long period of time and experience with the new innovation, we look backward and realize that there were some effects of which we were entirely unaware at the outset. We sometimes call these effects “unintended consequences,” although “unanticipated consequences” might be a more accurate description. Read The Whole Thing

Scoble’s list of things “newspapers gave away” sure are nice …after the fact but what isn’t discussed is that the mere existence of the internet and ubiquity of connectivity via computers or cell phones has smashed the newspaper business model.  Can you blame Sony for not creating the Ipod?  I guess, but then you would also have to blame horse breeders for not starting Ford Motor Company and who’s the last moron who dug a shitter in someone’s yard?  Why didn’t they invent the flushing toilet?  They all just “gave it away” I guess.

The only thing I agree with is that newspapers should not give up their physical distribution routes so easily.  It is the one thing that can differentiate them from… me or Google News or the Huffington Post.  We don’t have the distribution channels that the Star-Ledger or Washington Post have.  They should be selling that service to readers and advertisers via catalog and sample subscriptions or anything else really.  I am quite certain those newspaper trucks can hold more than just newspapers.

When Clay Shirky wrote about the internet devaluing content in 1995, he was the closest I have ever read about anyone predicting the demise of the newspaper industry.  At one point in that article he writes, “When a product can be profitable on gross revenues of one-half of one cent per use, anyone deriving income from traditional classifieds is doomed in the long run”.

Craigslist, Monster, Ebay, all started after Shirky’s article and all make a killing selling items and services formerly found in newspaper classifieds.  Newspaper didn’t give anything away Scoble, the internet paradigm is merely creating new opportunities where none previously existed.  Just today for example, PNG National Sales Director Eric Cox, covered the Boston Marathon “as Solo Journalist …one camera, one laptop and on-location video streaming live to your computer via broadband”.

Craigslist could probably start a newspaper on their revenues, but every newspaper cannot start their own Craigslist.  The economics don’t work in reverse.

The last time there was such an increase in publishers and publishing was when Gutenberg’s movable type became widespread and The Church lost control of literacy rates and content distribution.  I guess they gave that away too?  No.

Newspapers are not failing because they are giving it all away.  Newspapers are failing because they have lost their virtual monopoly on content distribution.  With that loss comes lower margins and cashflow.  So is journalism dead?  No, but newspapers that require 30% profit margins to stay afloat probably are.  Media outlets that are devoid of these legacy costs and cashflow requirements like blogs and blog networks are making money as are news media outfits that never had costs associated with their distribution model.

The argument that newspaper sites cannot become sustainable without putting up a paywall is a cop-out when there are so many news media sites doing it without a paywall.  Focused sites like baristanet, westseattleblog, boing boing, thebudgetfashionista, Cnet, Techcrunch, NPR, BBC, Politico, etc… there are thousands and all are free to use with multiple revenue streams.

The answer is simple. Unlearn newspapers and learn publishing in the internet paradigm.

UPDATE:

I should have called this article “The Great Unlearning” in honor of Nicholas Carr’s The Great Unbundling.