Prompted by the following conversation on Twitter this morning...
2020science: Rumours of a Large-screen Kindle - a lifeline for print media? http://bit.ly/XzRGb Mixed feelings on this!
Me: Newspaper publishers clinging on to the wrong vision of their future. Display size is not the issue.
Me: Newspaper publishers clinging on to the wrong vision of their future. Display size is not the issue.
2020science: Agree, but would love your take on what the issues are Re: the future of "print" media
(OK, deep breath...)Me: The key issues:
- Broken business model.
- Glacial pace of adoption of web opportunities.
- Denial.
When the news depended on having to cut down trees, stamp ink on them and truck them around the country, only a few could play. The lucky few thrived on monopoly pricing.
Now that cost of distribution is zero, everyone can play, and the world's attention will increasingly be divided into millions of much smaller slices. There is zero chance that the massive work-forces of journalists, editors and photographers paid for to date by commercial organizations can be maintained. Online audiences of the big brands can certainly be large... larger than they ever were in print, and larger than much of their online competition... but nonetheless not nearly as dominant as they were in the old world. Therefore they cannot be monetized to anything like the same degree. A bigger screen with fancy layouts won't help. The size of newspapers was driven by economics of printing, not by inherent reader desire for giant pages.
To have a chance at surviving the big newspapers (and TV news channels) will have to:
a) slash costs, including editorial numbers.
b) do a far better job of using the amazing tools available online, such as crowd-sourcing and curation (vs creation). This means recognizing the incredible asset that their reader-bases represent and taking them seriously. Hello? It's the participation age.
Honestly, the biggest problem for a lot of media companies is that their DNA is still "We're the experts at this. Why would we accept content from our, shudder, readers?!" Instead they should be using whatever remains of their brand value to start making heroes of their more talented readers, who will be all too willing to work for nothing but the glory of publication/visibility. They'll be amazed at what this could bring them.
So instead of, a national newspaper with, say, 600 journalists + 3m readers, you may end up with maybe 100 super-insightful news curators, columnists and analysts, aided by 10,000 citizen journalists/contributors/posters/commenters (and the new package will quite possibly reach 50m+ readers). It's a painful prospect for many... but I suspect the only hope for survival. (And the resultant editorial package might just end up being richer, more detailed, more varied, more inclusive, and... dare one say it? ...better!)
"But who will pay for foreign news bureaus, quality news gathering, etc.?"
Well:
1) Today there's massive duplication
2) Some of the role can be taken up and possibly improved by carefully filtered citizen journalism... though the models for that not yet proven.
3) More importantly, in the long run I suspect basic news reporting will be regarded as a fundamental infrastructure of a democratic society and treated the same way as roads, water and electricity. It'll be publicly funded and/or subsidized by visionary non-profit foundations. The dear old BBC is not a bad model.
Indeed stripping away the commercial overload may end up being a fantastic public good. You can make a powerful case that the commercial media we have are inadvertently guilty of fundamentally misrepresenting the world. (I argued this here.) We could lose a lot in the coming years of inevitable media job-losses and restructurings... but we could also figure out a much better way.