Video game curmudgeon and ephebophile Agnostic has spent the better part of the past couple of weeks furiously jacking off to the news that a group of newspapers will begin charging for access to their online content. He seems to think that this will somehow “sav[e] journalism” – as if journalism was worthy of being saved. The concept that online subscriptions will save the newspaper industry is, to anyone with an idea of how newspapers work, completely and utterly absurd.
The success of Journalism Online (the group leading the effort to push online subscriptions) and its purported mission rests on the ability of subscription fees to cover the costs of running newspapers. Implicit in this is the assumption that newspapers derive the majority of their income from subscriptions to the print edition, and the availability of articles online for free has cut circulation and thus income. This assumption is false, and has been for at least a hundred years. Modern newspapers derive two-thirds of their income from print advertising (source: Exploring Mass Media for a Changing World) – subscription fees are a minor part of their earnings. That’s why it’s possible for dailies like am New York as well as “alternative newspapers” to be completely free of charge. The crisis that newspapers face is not a result of their content being offered online for free, but websites like Craigslist cutting into their advertising dollars. That’s the reason why print journalists and editors hate Craigslist with a passion, and why they always jump to publish hit pieces on the site whenever they can. Journalism Online’s plan to rejuvenate the dead tree news industry isn’t grounded in anything resembling reality.
There are newspapers that have successfully implemented online subscription schemes, and Agnostic names two: the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times. Thing is, as I wrote here, the WSJ, and by extension the FT, can get away with charging for its online content primarily because it targets a specific niche (the business community) and also happens to have a near monopoly on news for that niche. Newspapers such as the New York Times don’t target any specific group and don’t offer anything that can’t be obtained from another source. If the NYT was to disappear tomorrow, there are literally dozens of other sources of news that people could replace it with, from other papers to local TV and radio. In the age of the Internet, the average media outlet is disposable.
Finally, both Agnostic and Journalism Online don’t even take into consideration the rampant growth of online piracy in the past few years. Part of the reason that TimesSelect, the New York Times’ online subscription program, flopped (which, by the way, Agnostic COMPLETELY FAILS TO MENTION in any of his rants) was because most of the subscription-only content was stolen and thrown up on blogs and websites where people could read it for free. Have any of these idiots heard of BitTorrent or LimeWire? The RIAA, MPAA, ESA and other media interest groups have been entirely unable to keep people from illegally downloading music, movies, and games from P2P networks and torrent websites. The anti-P2P groups are retreating on all fronts – file-sharing is now legal in Canada, and the Pirate Party recently won a seat in the European Parliament. What’s going to stop people from ripping worthwhile articles from subscription newspapers and putting them up on the web? Nothing. Trying to fight online piracy is like one person trying to play Whack-a-Mole with one mallet and a trillion moles.
Forcing people to pay for newspaper articles will not save the papers. The Internet has done to the journalists what the Industrial Revolution did to the British textile workers in the early 19th century – made most of them obsolete. Journalists are the Luddites of our time, desperately trying to fight the winds of progress that are sweeping them into the cesspit of history. But like how the Luddites failed to halt the changes that made them irrelevant, all of the posturing from groups like Journalism Online is not going to make things go back to the way they were.
In order to stay afloat, newspapers are going to have to change their entire business models. My suggestions:
- Decentralize. As I commented at Half Sigma’s:
- Get rid of op-ed columnists. This is the age of high-speed broadband and Blogger. When anyone can make their thoughts known on the Internet, there’s no need to pay some blowhard tens, hundreds of thousands of bones a year to produce opinion pieces that no one reads. Think about it: how many newspaper op-ed columnists could you truly live without? The only one I read is Pat Buchanan, whose stuff can be found online on his own website and others like Taki’s Magazine, @TAC, WorldNetDaily, and VDARE.com. The sooner dumbasses like Maureen Dowd get canned and have to find real jobs, the sooner the papers can move on.
- Focus exclusively on local content. Again, in the Internet era, anyone can get national/international headlines from anywhere. Local content is what distinguishes one media outlet from the next. As Whiskey commented here on the decline and fall of the LA Times:
In the age of the Internet, high-speed broadband, and Skype, there’s less of a need to have employees report to a central office every day. Reporters could as easily do their jobs from home, communicating with their bosses over the phone and Internet. With fewer people hanging around the office, less space is needed.
Local news and content was ignored in favor of NYT style coverage of stuff of little to no interest to LA readers: stuff happening in NYC’s social elite, etc.
Chuck characterized the Steveosphere as an “intellectual circle jerk,” which is unfortunately accurate. As much as I love the Steveosphere (hell, I could be considered an outer orbiter in it, as I’ve dabbled in quantblogging from time to time), the sort of half-assed thinking displayed by Agnostic on this issue is all too common amongst its denizens. As Geoffrey Falk raged here:
The combination of ignorance, arrogance and one-dimensional thinking in the B-grade Steveosphere is truly something to behold: People presuming to teach and dis others, without having bothered to properly understand even the basics of the subjects they’re pontificating about.
A suggestion, guys: if you want to be taken seriously, GET YOUR FUCKING RESEARCH RIGHT. And Agnostic, I like your blog and everything, but you should really stick to what you know -Â swooping teenage girls.
PROGRAMMING NOTE: My promised Byron piece will be up sometime tomorrow.
{ 13 comments… read them below or add one }
Ferdinand,
Excellent piece! We gotta talk. Holla at me if you’re interested.
O
Your posting is really accurate. They’re not going to succeed by desperately trying to load their online versions of their newspapers up with bizarre pop-up ads and junk that’s meant to “punish” people for not buying the print newspaper. It’s crazy the way a lot of these organizations respond to fundamental problems. When the prices are going up on subscriptions, you know that’s a terrible and unsustainable sign. It should tell people there’s a deep and fundamental problem whenever the prices are going up, consistently, on a good or service that’s available to masses of people. I’m not well-versed in economic theory, but I don’t have to be to see sinking ships when I look at many newspapers. I wonder if they could improve things by offering some kind of different content, as you were talking about in the discussion of decentralization? They could make some attempt to provide people with interesting content. I don’t know. Covering every area of the news in a superficial way, these days, is sort of like trying to supply people with picogram quantities of 15 different medications, amalgamated into a single “loser polypill,” and knowing that the dosage of each individual drug is going to be ineffective.
Re: media’s jacked-up business model:
The problem for them is that they are trying to get someone to pay for what people can largely get for free in the era of blogs. People are happy to create, to report, to analyze for gratis. They don’t need a profit motive to do that. And there is also the “piracy” angle that you mention, a loaded term created by media companies to protect their government-granted oligopoly. The battle over IP is little more than an attempt to protect their ability to control what the people see, hear, and read. Knowledge belongs to God. These guys need to realize that technology means they can no longer restrict access to or shape the knowledge that is out there.
You mention the op-ed page. The content in the rest of most papers is barely beyond naked opinion-making anyway. Skewed and selective reporting, while not blatant shilling for the causes you agree with and denigration of the causes you disagree with, is a big reason for the decline of most papers and large media companies.
I see most traditional media going away, and our news will come from aggregators like Drudge, the difference being is that the news will be published for free (or near-free) by bloggers.
It’s another case of old media being slow to adapt to the new realities of digital media, I think. The music industry was dragged into the era of digital media kicking and screaming. It looks like the same is happening with newspapers. Resistance rather than acceptance of the new reality and adaptation.
Non-mainstream media are coming to play a huge role, especially among those under, say, 50. News media need to adapt to this, or they will perish.
Yeah, Agnostic has been caught with his pants down on his posts before. He has a group of pet theories that he rides over and over and over again. Hey, a lot of the best science is done by trying to come up with ways to disprove your own cherished theories and seeing what happens with the data.
LMAO, so now these huge Jewish corporate news groups want us to PAY for their propaganda? Yea, I really want to subsidize more articles female-sympathizing and hero-worshipping Black thugs, while bashing White & Asian beta males!
LMAO – eff that!
I can’t believe you would rip Maureen Dowd and other NYT columnists like that. It’s not “news” until Paul Krugman and Thomas Freidman have put their stamp of approval by commenting on it. I would get a second job to pay for their insightful analysis.
/
I’ll take you up on that. You want to talk here or privately? My email is on the About page.
Ferdinand,
Get at me: 215.971.5346. You can text me rite quick. Anyone else wanna holla, feel free.
O
Damn OB. Your phone might ring off the hook. Hope GNP Apes doesn’t see that.
PS start a blog. Love your insights.
GQ,
Nah, Apeman’s gotta learn how to dial first. That’s why he’s…an Apeman.;)
Thanks for the kudos. I’m waiting for the right astro 2 come down the pike, then its on. Saturn will be moving into Libra very soon; when it does, that’s when I’ll strike.
O
The journalists of today, along the RIAA and their wretched ilk, are like medieval scribes, whose entire existence was copying by hand ancient manuscripts and no of no other way to do things, bitch and moan after Johannes Gutenberg unveiled a little gadget called the printing press.
P-ter is the best poster on GNXP. Agnostic is kind of a moron. Sometimes there are good contributions by others. All in all the site has its moments but has gone downhill since Godless Capitalist left and the HBD content was reduced.
The issue that you identify, Ferdinand, is part of a larger issue. There are three institutions which produce a massive oversupply of product in the internet age. Those three institutions are news organizations, K-12 schools, and universities.
The news organizations are exposed to market forces and will be the first to take the hit. Charging will not save them, as a correction is overdue. We simply do not need that many redundant journalists reporting the same stories in the same languages.
In the not too distant future the educational bubble will pop and internet provision of education will become more and more respectable. The credentialing issue will need to be solved one way or another, but the financial incentives are overwhelming.
Regarding K-12 schools, they will be the last to go, but nothing is learned or taught in those places. Easily replaced with software.
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