An article in the (London) Times newspaper on Tuesday talked about the extent to which newspapers have been slow to embrace the ‘era of unbundling’. What is unbundling? The author, Jonathan Weber, recalls a remark from Bill Gates in the early 90s. Newspapers, Gates said, bundle together a lot of different stuff, local, national and international news, brand advertising, and classified advertising along various different themes. His point was that there was no logical reason for all these things to be in the same place.
The internet would unbundle the various services provided by papers.
Nowadays, you might still use a newspaper for these things, but you have the choice instead to go to a number of specialist websites to get more of what you’re actually looking for at that moment. You can use something like Bloglines to create your own virtual newspaper — a custom bundle of the writers, topics and news sources you really care about. There’s very little wastage that way, and even less cost to the reader.
Because the technology is there, some of us have been predicting the death of newspapers. Their sales figures have been in decline for 40 years. Ubiquitous internet access and powerful tools for finding and assembling custom information seem the last nail in the coffin.
However, this isn’t what’s actually happening. Wired News reported yesterday that, in fact:
The average number of monthly visitors to U.S. newspaper websites rose by nearly a third in the first half of 2006, a study released on Wednesday said, though print readership at some larger papers fell…
The average number of unique visitors to online newspaper sites in the first half was more than 55.5 million a month, the study said. That compares with 42.2 million a year earlier.…
The Washington Post’s website increased its audience reach among readers aged 25 to 34 by more than 60 percent…
The number of page views at newspaper sites rose by about 52 percent in the first half…
Newspaper readerships aren’t looking so shabby after all. It seems pretty clear that people like and want bundles. While it is technically possible to create your own ‘newspaper’ the majority of people don’t want to do that.
Three possible reasons, dreamed up off the top of my head:
(a) It takes time and effort and little bit of technical confidence to assemble your RSS-aggregated custom paper. Most people, if you recall, only visit half a dozen websites on a regular basis.
(b) People trust newspaper editors to guide them towards what’s important. And they trust mainstream media to deliver the truth to a far greater extent than random internet sites.
© We’re more and more pressured for time. A bundle of the items we feel we ought to know about saves us time. The ‘logical reason’ Gates was searching for, for all those items being bundled together, is that they help us cope with staying informed in an efficient way.
What is happening is that newspapers are losing revenue. Even with larger online viewing figures, the revenues from advertising on their websites is a tiny fraction of what they previously earned from advertising in their print publications. With a very few exceptions, they also don’t get to charge their readers the way they can by selling print editions. The problem isn’t with circulation, it’s with ARPU (average revenue per user). Print readers converting to online readers loses them money.
The endgame of that movement is already evident. Cost-cutting measures are rife: papers closing; papers becoming online only; more and more reliance on syndicated news rather than correspondents; more reliance on unpaid ‘citizen’ contributions; expensive senior journalists made redundant; increasing (cheap) feature content as opposed to (expensive) reporting. The bundle that you really wanted is being forced into extinction.
Elsewhere, Michael Urlocker reports today on advice from the American Press Institute to help reverse this decline. They need to find the non-consumers and seek to convert them. Michael says, “To disrupt themselves, newspapers need to zero in on the attributes that readers and advertisers value and pay for. And they need to cease working on the attributes that readers and advertisers no longer value.”
On broad terms, I agree. But my anxiety is that what a lot of readers and advertisers may really value is a bundle with an independent voice, quality, ethical, honest writing and reporting, and high production standards. These are exactly what are under threat as papers seek to find fresh markets.
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Most of what you observe is right on, although I see things from a slightly different perspective.
re: trusting newspapers to guide me to what’s important.
Only a select few get this trust from me. Namely, the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, The Economist (not a newspaper, but it’s close). The writing is outstanding, the research is strong, the perspective is interesting, and they catch most of what is important that’s going on around me. Others may have pretty good writing, but be a lot less trustworthy — e.g. the NY Times.
Newspapers generally used to be of much higher quality, with even local dailies providing strong, authentic and authoritative coverage most of the time, but that’s not the case anymore. They are all racing to the bottom of the toilet, full of errors and half-baked poorly written stories. Although the really great blogs are the vast minority, something written by an individual with integrity who knows how to string a few words together to amplify meaning, catch an emotion, etc is a joy to read, and the reason that ultimately, bloggers will replace (or at least provide a strong complement) to the regular news.
I think that people over 50 years old still largely have this misplaced trust in the old journalist institutions, while the younger generation (under 30) is far more likely to scan multiple sources and do their own investigation than to trust blindly any newspaper. Those in the middle are why there is still ambiguity about the future of the traditional press.
Although I still look to a few papers for relevant tidbits, increasingly I look online first and scan a small set of a) influential bloggers and b) quality bloggers (not necessarily the same list). I still enjoy reading the big broadsheet with a cup of coffee in the morning however.
re: why visitors to newspaper websites are increasing.
See above. People under 30 scan multiple sources. I believe that many actively choose which to believe based on which agrees with their worldview rather than which has credibility, but that’s another blog discussion. Because people are scanning multiple sources, they will hit more papers, which means more papers get more hits. It doesn’t mean that newspaper readership is rising, or that it is doing well compared with independent blogs, or that it is any more trusted, or that they stay for longer than a few seconds when they are inundated with all the annoying cover-the-text-up advertising that seems so popular these days (I navigate away as soon as I see one of those, refusing to support any site that is so user unfriendly and insulting).
So, the real question is how is the information gleaned there being used and read, and is it credible. Usually, my feeling is that it is less credible than an individual blogger who writes well and does good research. The trick is finding the good ones.
re: assembling your own paper.
You are absolutely right on this one. Finding a set of sources that you trust and that covers the spaces you are interested in is really hard. On the other hand, I think you are participating in a beta of one of the tools that will make that much more feasible, namely goodblogs.
I think of goodblogs as a way for a cooperative editorial community to assemble itself along subject lines, special interest lines, quality lines, even along commercial product lines. If each goodblogs widget represented such an editorial interest or a “brand identity” and was moderated for quality, point of view, style, or whatever, then I might potentially have a library of hundreds or even thousands of alternative widgets to pick from.
If I have one or two bloggers that I trust then I might check out which goodblogs communities they belong to as a way of sifting through the possibilities quickly, as well as with traditional search and categorization tools. Then, I would use a tool like Netvibes, which is incredibly simple, open and clean, to assemble pages of goodblogs widgets. Think of each tabbed page representing a section of a traditional newspaper.
So, the next step in this evolution is to have template Netvibes tabs that contain a collection of goodblogs widgets that are starting points for assembling a complete online paper. Goodblogs satisfies my need to insert some randomness and expose me to things I might not otherwise see, but it also then allows me to choose based on community characteristics for quality, and my particular interests (e.g. technology, or raising a family, or chess talk) rather than a preassembled (hard-coded) collection of newspaper items of which I ignore 70% of the content.
If traditional papers make their content easily accessible as Netvibes building blocks, then they get to play in this universe. If not, they die a long slow death over the next 20 years. Unfortunately, this is extremely disruptive for them, and upsets traditional revenue models, but in a way, it may put more of the revenue into the hands of the content providers, rather than in the hands of the organizational shell which used to be necessary but no longer is.
re: implications of all this.
There is still plenty of need for what newspapers used to do, just no need for the way they do it. They are slow, inefficient, not timely compared with the instantaneous nature of the web and most of all costly. Like horse and buggy — there is obviously still a need to get from A to B, but how much of a market is there today for buggy whips?
So, the real question is how to create a business model out of this that pays adequately and that conforms to what the consumer wants, and what organization is necessary to support that. It is absolutely clear that it is the organizational and revenue models of traditional papers that are antiquated, and that these two, and the associated declining revenues, are what is responsible for the decline in quality and the vicious downward cycle. Lower quality, less value, fewer readers, repeat.
Thank you for such a thoughtful set of comments, Paul. Quite a bit more thoughtful than my original post!
“Because people are scanning multiple sources, they will hit more papers, which means more papers get more hits”
Thinking about this, a 30% year-on-year rise in page impressions for newspaper sites is exactly in line with current broadband adoption figures. However, the idea that people are abandoning newspapers to take up social media seems to be not true, unless they’re just consuming more of everything.
“On the other hand, I think you are participating in a beta of one of the tools that will make that much more feasible, namely goodblogs.”
I’m very much enjoying the goodblogs model — it’s enormously simple, yet seems to provide a lot more opportunity for finding new ideas through serendipity than a lot of other devices such as my RSS feeds.
“the real question is how to create a business model out of this that pays ”
Yes, exactly. There’s clearly a demand for quality that outstrips what the free press can provide, but isn’t tasty enough for the traditional media companies, if their tales of woe are to be believed.
re: consuming more of everything.
I think “sipping” more of everything is more accurate. I don’t believe that people read whole stories often any more. I know that unless something catches my attention, I will quickly skim, and then move on. I definitely see more sources, but read many fewer.
re: goodblogs.
It’s how I found you. I’m not sure if I ever would have otherwise, although I did see your comment on Urlocker’s blog. And, I did enjoy reading your stuff. Obviously in beta, the editorial control (moderating of who gets in) is not as varied or refined as what I describe above, but when it gets there, I think they will be formidable.
I don’t really buy the “bundle” theory for actually reading a newspaper. My own habits are that I only read certain sections in the newspaper. So, even though the paper is “bundled,” I do not read the whole thing. In fact, there are sections that I have no interest in whatsoever.
In terms of immediacy, I agree. If an article does not provide more in-depth knowledge and/or analysis, then I scan over it quickly.
Some newspapers are better than others in terms of their analyses. For instance, USA Today, is one that I can scan the headlines, but I know I won’t get much beyond what “he says” and what “she says.”
The New York Times and the BBC, however, provide me with articles that I can “sink my teeth” in.
Advertising? You have me on that one. I really don’t read a lot of advertising whether it is in the print media or online. However, it is harder to miss online.
Just one person’s observation.
Thanks for joining in, Bob. The papers are still a bundle, whether you read all the sections or not. By having a multi-purpose bundle they can try to satisfy a larger range of people than a single strand would. That, to me, is what makes them able to deliver audiences in the millions and remain in business as dailies.
I agree that they are bundles as newspapers, but my point is that they are not bundles for readers. Most readers tend to read only a few sections. As the price of these newspapers or their inconvenience increases then readers will move on. After all, they are not reading the whole newspaper.
What I am seeing this that the cost of compiling these multipurpose shibboleths is becoming unwieldy. Their downfall is to be all for all readers.
That is why USA Today can do so well. The articles are short, thus they can cover more ground. Also, their format lends itself well as an online newspaper.
Consolidation of newspapers will allow the really good ones to last another 50 years. But, the smaller outfits will definitely die out. One good thing, however, is there will always be a demand for good reporters. The desire for “content†or information will always be there.
I think I agree on your first point, Bob, and I think that’s what Gates was saying.
However, I’m very concerned that good reporting will be the first casualty of the inevitable cost-cutting that the current crisis will bring. I already see it at the BBC which has started using American networks’ footage to ‘report’ on US issues.