Maureen Dowd has some intriguing ideas for how to revive the newspaper business in yesterday's column. Taking a look back at the history of print journalism in this country, she notes that newspapers were not exactly holy places - they reeked of alcohol and gambling, and sex in the office was not exactly unknown. Today, in our more enlightened times, we do not tolerate such things. But, Ms. Dowd opines, what if we allowed newspapers to take bets on sporting events? Lots of papers are flirting with money-making enterprises that were traditionally associated with the lesser emotions. The NY Times, our NY Times columnist points out, has a wine club, and Conde Nast has a dating site. Just about every newspaper in the country covers sports. And every one of those newspapers - from the smallest hometown rag in Montana, to the Times itself - has readers who bet on sports.
What she doesn't mention is that there is a whole category of newspapers who advertise much worse things than gambling. "Alternative" weeklies have ads for massage parlors and escorts. That's basically legalized prostitution. Here in LA, they also have ads for marijuana "clinics," where you can go to buy pot if your doctor prescribes it. Of course, it's absurdly easy to find a "doctor" who can prescribe that for you. And some of those newspapers do real investigative journalism. The LA Weekly recently won a Pulitzer. OK, it was for their restaurant columnist, but still, it's a good paper. All we are doing by prohibiting gambling on sports is driving it underground. It happens all the time. Every day. We also drive it offshore, to Websites based in Caribbean islands, where it cannot be taxed by US governments. I'm not advocating for massage parlors and drug clinics. But as long as they are there, and some papers are making money off of them, why don't we let more respectable newspapers engage in businesses in which no one gets hurt?
Showing posts with label Newspapers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Newspapers. Show all posts
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Franken wins!
Al Franken has won the Minnesota Senate election, at long last. The Minnesota Supreme Court has ruled unanimously in his favor, and Norm Coleman has conceded. What a long strange trip it's been. This is the seat formerly held by Paul Wellstone, who died just before the election in 2002.
It still feels bizarre to call Al Franken a Senator, although of course it was odd to call Ronald Reagan President.
On a completely different topic, I linked to Talking Points Memo for this story, partially because I saw it there first, and partially because I wanted to give them props for doing such a great job covering this story lo these many months. I suspect that there are other bloggers who are doing the same. Which is good news for TPM, not such great news for traditional media sites, like nytimes.com. Which is probably why TPM is hiring seven new people, in addition to their regular interns. One less reason to worry about the future of journalism in this country, but one more reason to worry about the future of newspapers.
It still feels bizarre to call Al Franken a Senator, although of course it was odd to call Ronald Reagan President.
On a completely different topic, I linked to Talking Points Memo for this story, partially because I saw it there first, and partially because I wanted to give them props for doing such a great job covering this story lo these many months. I suspect that there are other bloggers who are doing the same. Which is good news for TPM, not such great news for traditional media sites, like nytimes.com. Which is probably why TPM is hiring seven new people, in addition to their regular interns. One less reason to worry about the future of journalism in this country, but one more reason to worry about the future of newspapers.
Monday, June 29, 2009
Mark Sanford and the future of newspapers
I haven't been blogging much over the last couple of weeks because I was working on some other stuff. So now I am going to catch up on some things I missed.
First up is Mark Sanford. The governor of South Carolina went out of town for a few days and, beyond anyone's expectations, came back to become much more famous (and infamous) than he was previously. Then, the next day, two very famous people died, and he was off the public's radar.
I don't want to condemn the man, or even comment on the blatant hypocrisy of a man who runs as a pro-family values candidate and then cheats on his wife. I do find it interesting that the public seems to have a finely nuanced understanding of these scandals. Some people are run out of office forthwith; see Spitzer, Eliot. Some survive, although they are damaged. See Clinton, Bill, and Vitter, David. Americans seem to be able to make fine distinctions based on the facts of the case. Bill Clinton cheated on his wife, but didn't break any laws in the process, and already had a reputation as a womanizer. Most people decided that it was a matter better left to he and Hillary. Spitzer, on the other hand, was a figure of rectitude, quite self-righteous, and broke laws. He didn't just get a blowjob; he crossed state lines and hooked up with a prostitute. The public understood that Spitzer was worse than Clinton.
What I found fascinating about the Sanford story were a couple of minor details about how it was covered. I first noticed it at TPM. The earliest post about it that I can find is from Monday, June 22nd. I remember thinking that it was odd that TPM was paying any attention to it - so the governor of South Carolina is incommunicado, so what? But then it started getting interesting very quickly. So that was a good catch on the part of TPM. I would not have known about it unless TPM caught it, because I have no reason to check in on South Carolina politics unless something very interesting is going on, and TPM found something very interesting very quickly.
What is more interesting is that this had great benefits for The State, South Carolina's major daily. They caught onto the story very early, and the traffic for their Website apparently just boomed. They've got a good timeline.
In the pre-Internet days, this would have been good for The State, but they could not have made that much money off of it, at least not right away. They would have sold more newspapers, but newspaper companies don't make a lot of money off of selling the physical copies of their newspaper; the price of the paper basically covers the cost of producing it. I delivered newspapers when I was a kid, and the paper didn't get the full price of the paper. First, subscriptions are discounted. Second, I took a cut of the price as my pay. So for a twenty-five cent newspaper delivered to someone's door, the paper might get only twelve cents.
Pre-Internet, The State would benefit by generating publicity for itself. It might win an award or two. And it might win over a few more subscribers. But suppose it sells 200,000 daily copies (that's a guess, but it's probably not far off). Management knows that this is a hot story, so they print an extra 20,000 copies, or 10% more, for three days. That extra 60,000 or so copies might slightly raise the average number of papers it sells, which might slightly increase the rates it charges advertisers. But there would not be an immediate, tangible benefit for the paper itself. I doubt they can charge the advertisers more for selling extra copies, although I suppose it's possible.
Today, however, the benefit is clear, immediate, and very tangible. Pre-Internet, The State would not have been able to sell extra papers in, say, New York or Washington, let alone another country, like, say, Argentina. Now, however, they generated a huge amount of traffic around the country, and around the world, almost instantaneously.
The best part for this newspaper is that that extra traffic on their Website generates extra revenue for very little extra cost. The primary cost is bandwidth, which is cheap and getting cheaper. Newspapers have one advantage on the Web, which is that they deliver valuable information primarily in the form of text, which takes up a minimal amount of bandwidth. But their ads are in the form of pictures, text, and video. Presumably they charge dramatically more for a video ad than for a simple picture. So the more bandwidth they use for delivering ads, the more money they make. They can control how much text and pictures they deliver, so they can control the amount of bandwidth they use in terms of content versus ads.
The other costs involved here - i.e., paying the reporters and editors, as well as other overhead - are already taken into account. There are no extra costs involved in covering this particular story. All they have to do is send a reporter to an airport that is fairly close, make a bunch of phone calls, and set up a video camera at the governor's press conference.
This whole episode bodes well for newspapers than can move quickly and cover a story like this. And there will always be stories like this. The State had emails between the governor and his lover. Why? Because someone had forwarded the emails to this particular newspaper. Why? Because if you have information that could potentially be very embarrassing to a political figure, you send it to a newspaper. Why? Because they know how to handle it, and they will give it the broadest possible exposure. The State did not release these emails because they could not be authenticated. Which sounds like they did their job - they checked out the information they had, performed some basic investigative journalism, and then made a responsible editorial decision. Someone also called the paper and gave them a heads up that he had been seen on a flight to Argentina, which is presumably why they had a reporter waiting for him at the airport when he came back.
All of this works to newspapers' strengths - they have reporters ready to move at a moment's notice, they have writers and editors who understand the situation and can provide context quickly. Newspapers have always been highly invested in finding malfeasance and scandal. What's different today is that they can make money off of breaking news much faster than they could before. Which means that they have that much more incentive to break that news themselves.
First up is Mark Sanford. The governor of South Carolina went out of town for a few days and, beyond anyone's expectations, came back to become much more famous (and infamous) than he was previously. Then, the next day, two very famous people died, and he was off the public's radar.
I don't want to condemn the man, or even comment on the blatant hypocrisy of a man who runs as a pro-family values candidate and then cheats on his wife. I do find it interesting that the public seems to have a finely nuanced understanding of these scandals. Some people are run out of office forthwith; see Spitzer, Eliot. Some survive, although they are damaged. See Clinton, Bill, and Vitter, David. Americans seem to be able to make fine distinctions based on the facts of the case. Bill Clinton cheated on his wife, but didn't break any laws in the process, and already had a reputation as a womanizer. Most people decided that it was a matter better left to he and Hillary. Spitzer, on the other hand, was a figure of rectitude, quite self-righteous, and broke laws. He didn't just get a blowjob; he crossed state lines and hooked up with a prostitute. The public understood that Spitzer was worse than Clinton.
What I found fascinating about the Sanford story were a couple of minor details about how it was covered. I first noticed it at TPM. The earliest post about it that I can find is from Monday, June 22nd. I remember thinking that it was odd that TPM was paying any attention to it - so the governor of South Carolina is incommunicado, so what? But then it started getting interesting very quickly. So that was a good catch on the part of TPM. I would not have known about it unless TPM caught it, because I have no reason to check in on South Carolina politics unless something very interesting is going on, and TPM found something very interesting very quickly.
What is more interesting is that this had great benefits for The State, South Carolina's major daily. They caught onto the story very early, and the traffic for their Website apparently just boomed. They've got a good timeline.
In the pre-Internet days, this would have been good for The State, but they could not have made that much money off of it, at least not right away. They would have sold more newspapers, but newspaper companies don't make a lot of money off of selling the physical copies of their newspaper; the price of the paper basically covers the cost of producing it. I delivered newspapers when I was a kid, and the paper didn't get the full price of the paper. First, subscriptions are discounted. Second, I took a cut of the price as my pay. So for a twenty-five cent newspaper delivered to someone's door, the paper might get only twelve cents.
Pre-Internet, The State would benefit by generating publicity for itself. It might win an award or two. And it might win over a few more subscribers. But suppose it sells 200,000 daily copies (that's a guess, but it's probably not far off). Management knows that this is a hot story, so they print an extra 20,000 copies, or 10% more, for three days. That extra 60,000 or so copies might slightly raise the average number of papers it sells, which might slightly increase the rates it charges advertisers. But there would not be an immediate, tangible benefit for the paper itself. I doubt they can charge the advertisers more for selling extra copies, although I suppose it's possible.
Today, however, the benefit is clear, immediate, and very tangible. Pre-Internet, The State would not have been able to sell extra papers in, say, New York or Washington, let alone another country, like, say, Argentina. Now, however, they generated a huge amount of traffic around the country, and around the world, almost instantaneously.
The best part for this newspaper is that that extra traffic on their Website generates extra revenue for very little extra cost. The primary cost is bandwidth, which is cheap and getting cheaper. Newspapers have one advantage on the Web, which is that they deliver valuable information primarily in the form of text, which takes up a minimal amount of bandwidth. But their ads are in the form of pictures, text, and video. Presumably they charge dramatically more for a video ad than for a simple picture. So the more bandwidth they use for delivering ads, the more money they make. They can control how much text and pictures they deliver, so they can control the amount of bandwidth they use in terms of content versus ads.
The other costs involved here - i.e., paying the reporters and editors, as well as other overhead - are already taken into account. There are no extra costs involved in covering this particular story. All they have to do is send a reporter to an airport that is fairly close, make a bunch of phone calls, and set up a video camera at the governor's press conference.
This whole episode bodes well for newspapers than can move quickly and cover a story like this. And there will always be stories like this. The State had emails between the governor and his lover. Why? Because someone had forwarded the emails to this particular newspaper. Why? Because if you have information that could potentially be very embarrassing to a political figure, you send it to a newspaper. Why? Because they know how to handle it, and they will give it the broadest possible exposure. The State did not release these emails because they could not be authenticated. Which sounds like they did their job - they checked out the information they had, performed some basic investigative journalism, and then made a responsible editorial decision. Someone also called the paper and gave them a heads up that he had been seen on a flight to Argentina, which is presumably why they had a reporter waiting for him at the airport when he came back.
All of this works to newspapers' strengths - they have reporters ready to move at a moment's notice, they have writers and editors who understand the situation and can provide context quickly. Newspapers have always been highly invested in finding malfeasance and scandal. What's different today is that they can make money off of breaking news much faster than they could before. Which means that they have that much more incentive to break that news themselves.
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Newspapers and the "unique content" problem
Newspapers are in trouble. This we all know. Today, Kos, in his latest post on the topic, looked at how many links to newspapers Daily Kos had over the course of a week. Maureen Dowd interviewed Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google. She's a little nervous about her job.
One problem newspapers face is that they used to (emphasis on the past tense) have a semi-monopoly on news in their geographic area just by virtue of their format. Megan McArdle once pointed out (I think it was Megan) that the NY Times used to know at least two things about their customers. 1, they lived in the NY area. 2, they could afford a daily newspaper. Now the Times reader could be in Bangkok.
Newspapers used to have a huge advantage because they were the only source of news in a particular geographic area that was available almost whenever you wanted it. If you wanted to know if your team won last night, you could listen to the radio, watch TV, talk to someone else, or read the newspaper. Of those sources, newspapers are the only one that is available at any time after you picked it up. Radio and TV broadcast news at a specific time. If you missed any of that day's broadcasts, you were out of luck.
Newspapers also provided a great deal of content for a very cheap price. A newspaper has a lot of content, particularly compared to a radio or TV broadcast. And that content was not available anywhere else. Providing it gave newspapers a sort of monopoly. The only way to avoid that monopolization was for there to be multiple newspapers in a given city.
My grandfather, a small-town lawyer in the Midwest in the 1950's, used to subscribe to the Sunday NY Times. It would arrive on Thursday (even though NY was less than 1,000 miles away) because it took that long for the mail to deliver it. But he still read it, presumably because there was content in there that he couldn't get from any other source (I never talked to him about it, I heard this from my mother).
What newspapers have to do is figure out a way to provide unique content. I subscribe to the LA Times and the Financial Times. The LA Times is convenient (I can read it on the bus into work), but there isn't a lot of unique content. I like some of their columnists, particularly Meghan Daum, but I rarely read the articles on the front page, because I usually already know the story. The LA Times has done a fair amount of innovating in the last few years, but there is still much to do.
But the FT has a nice amount of unique content during the week. At least it's unique for me, because I don't subscribe to another business periodical, like the Wall Street Journal. And it's got global news, which I like.
Where the FT really shines is on the weekend (again, particularly for me), and most newspapers could learn some things about unique content from the FT Weekend. They have columnists that I can't read anywhere else, but who I read religiously. I don't have any particular interest in real estate in London, but I read Secret Agent religiously. I have learned a fair amount about wine from Jancis Robinson. On the back page is Fast Lane, by Tyler Brule, the ultimate jetsetter, and Slow Lane, by Harry Eyres, one of the few people alive who can write about Madonna and Nietzsche at the same time.
The NY Times, of course, has a fair amount of unique content, starting with its columnists. The LA Times has some unique content, like Dan Neil's car column, which is a great read. But it needs better unique content. Which, if you think about it, really should not be a problem. LA is one of the largest metropolitan areas on the planet. There are 88 cities in Los Angeles County. There are multiple mountain ranges in this county. We have a National Forest that has 650,000 acres. This is the world headquarters of the entertainment industry. There are something like 130 institutions of higher education just in LA County. There's no lack of material. Plus, there are several thousand writers who are all on a constant lookout for work.
So here's a new buzzword that will hopefully enter the zeitgest: "unique content." It's not hard to understand. Once upon a time, all newspapers provided it, just by virtue of being what they were. That is no longer the case.
Oh, and that unique content has to be in interesting formats, it can't just be text. The LA Times is doing more interesting things with photo essays, but I still don't think they're doing enough with video, particularly since some of the best cinematographers in the world (and many aspiring camerapeople) live and work here.
One problem newspapers face is that they used to (emphasis on the past tense) have a semi-monopoly on news in their geographic area just by virtue of their format. Megan McArdle once pointed out (I think it was Megan) that the NY Times used to know at least two things about their customers. 1, they lived in the NY area. 2, they could afford a daily newspaper. Now the Times reader could be in Bangkok.
Newspapers used to have a huge advantage because they were the only source of news in a particular geographic area that was available almost whenever you wanted it. If you wanted to know if your team won last night, you could listen to the radio, watch TV, talk to someone else, or read the newspaper. Of those sources, newspapers are the only one that is available at any time after you picked it up. Radio and TV broadcast news at a specific time. If you missed any of that day's broadcasts, you were out of luck.
Newspapers also provided a great deal of content for a very cheap price. A newspaper has a lot of content, particularly compared to a radio or TV broadcast. And that content was not available anywhere else. Providing it gave newspapers a sort of monopoly. The only way to avoid that monopolization was for there to be multiple newspapers in a given city.
My grandfather, a small-town lawyer in the Midwest in the 1950's, used to subscribe to the Sunday NY Times. It would arrive on Thursday (even though NY was less than 1,000 miles away) because it took that long for the mail to deliver it. But he still read it, presumably because there was content in there that he couldn't get from any other source (I never talked to him about it, I heard this from my mother).
What newspapers have to do is figure out a way to provide unique content. I subscribe to the LA Times and the Financial Times. The LA Times is convenient (I can read it on the bus into work), but there isn't a lot of unique content. I like some of their columnists, particularly Meghan Daum, but I rarely read the articles on the front page, because I usually already know the story. The LA Times has done a fair amount of innovating in the last few years, but there is still much to do.
But the FT has a nice amount of unique content during the week. At least it's unique for me, because I don't subscribe to another business periodical, like the Wall Street Journal. And it's got global news, which I like.
Where the FT really shines is on the weekend (again, particularly for me), and most newspapers could learn some things about unique content from the FT Weekend. They have columnists that I can't read anywhere else, but who I read religiously. I don't have any particular interest in real estate in London, but I read Secret Agent religiously. I have learned a fair amount about wine from Jancis Robinson. On the back page is Fast Lane, by Tyler Brule, the ultimate jetsetter, and Slow Lane, by Harry Eyres, one of the few people alive who can write about Madonna and Nietzsche at the same time.
The NY Times, of course, has a fair amount of unique content, starting with its columnists. The LA Times has some unique content, like Dan Neil's car column, which is a great read. But it needs better unique content. Which, if you think about it, really should not be a problem. LA is one of the largest metropolitan areas on the planet. There are 88 cities in Los Angeles County. There are multiple mountain ranges in this county. We have a National Forest that has 650,000 acres. This is the world headquarters of the entertainment industry. There are something like 130 institutions of higher education just in LA County. There's no lack of material. Plus, there are several thousand writers who are all on a constant lookout for work.
So here's a new buzzword that will hopefully enter the zeitgest: "unique content." It's not hard to understand. Once upon a time, all newspapers provided it, just by virtue of being what they were. That is no longer the case.
Oh, and that unique content has to be in interesting formats, it can't just be text. The LA Times is doing more interesting things with photo essays, but I still don't think they're doing enough with video, particularly since some of the best cinematographers in the world (and many aspiring camerapeople) live and work here.
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Detroit newspapers in trouble
The Detroit Free Press and Detroit News have announced that they are cutting back on home delivery; they will only be delivering on Thursday, Friday, and Sunday. How this is going to work is something of a mystery to me. Are they going to have part-time carriers? That's going to be a little weird. I have some nostalgia for both papers, although more so for the Free Press. I delivered both papers for years when I was in junior high and high school. So did my siblings. I prefered the Free Press; it was more liberal (it had Doonesbury), and it seemed like a better paper.
At least it was back then. When I go home to visit my parents, I'm saddened by what I see. The Free Press is a shell of what it used to be. At least that's the way it looks to me.
As we are debating whether or not to save the Big Three, it occurs to me that it might be better for Detroit if one of these papers bites the dust. Los Angeles has one daily newspaper, and it's still a good paper.
Ted Turner realized years ago that newspapers consume a great deal of energy, as they are produced and delivered. That's one reason he started CNN; it's a much more efficient way of delivering the news. Or at least parts of the news.
The problem of efficiency is one that newspapers just can't seem to get a handle on. In many respects, newspapers are horrendously inefficient. I read a story a while ago about a guy who advertised for a clerk for his laundromat business in San Francisco. He put an ad in the paper; he got 4 responses. He put an ad on craigslist. He got 400 responses. Guess which one he uses now.
Consider the energy/resources used in both of those. Let's assume that the guy runs an ad in a SF paper with a circulation of 400,000, and he runs it for a week. That ad will be printed 2.8 million times. If he gets 4 responses, that's one response for every 700,000 times it's printed. That's a huge amount of paper. But if he posts it online, no one has to actually print out the ad at all.
The online ad is orders of magnitude more efficient in terms of energy and resource use. It's also vastly more efficient in terms of being relevant to the person looking for it. It's much easier to find a classified ad on craigslist than it is in a newspaper. It's also easier to reply; just clink on the link.
On the other hand, a newspaper delivers lots and lots of ads, and, in some respects, it's easier to read than something online. I read most of the LA Times every morning. It's easy to scan several articles on each page and decide what you're interested in. And there are pictures to help you figure out what happened. Kobe's excited! Lakers must have won.
So newspapers are inefficient, but lucrative. As of right now, Websites are efficient, but not very lucrative. Megan McArdle makes a good point:
The upside of this is that newspapers have a couple of advantages on the Web. First, because articles are mostly composed of text, their bandwidth and server costs are lower than, for example, YouTube or Comedy Central. Second, they have massive archives. The NYTimes was a leader in this respect. Putting all of those old articles online is a huge expense, but once it's done, it's done and paid for. I don't understand why every newspaper in the country has not followed in their footsteps. Every decent newspaper in the country has decades of content that no one else has. Once all those articles are online, it's a matter of programming and management ingenuity to figure out how to slice and dice it all to find value in it. Third, as the costs of technology go down, newspapers will be able to realize, one assumes, ever-greater cost savings. Fourth, as high-bandwidth connections proliferate, more and more people will be able to watch high-value video ads.
It's not a pleasant experience watching proud old companies face possible extinction. I'm cautiously optimistic about the future of newspapers. I'm not that impressed so far with current management, but I am also a firm believer in the old saying that nothing so concentrates the mind as the prospect of a hanging in a fortnight. Like the Big Three, newspapers are burdened with legacy costs. Even if GM shuts down a plant, they're still paying the mortgage on it. Same with newspapers. They still have large printing facilities that have to be paid for. There is still a large demand for printing for things besides newspapers. Hopefully they will be able to figure out how to make money with their idle printers. But it's time to start experimenting and rethinking how the business is going to work.
At least it was back then. When I go home to visit my parents, I'm saddened by what I see. The Free Press is a shell of what it used to be. At least that's the way it looks to me.
As we are debating whether or not to save the Big Three, it occurs to me that it might be better for Detroit if one of these papers bites the dust. Los Angeles has one daily newspaper, and it's still a good paper.
Ted Turner realized years ago that newspapers consume a great deal of energy, as they are produced and delivered. That's one reason he started CNN; it's a much more efficient way of delivering the news. Or at least parts of the news.
The problem of efficiency is one that newspapers just can't seem to get a handle on. In many respects, newspapers are horrendously inefficient. I read a story a while ago about a guy who advertised for a clerk for his laundromat business in San Francisco. He put an ad in the paper; he got 4 responses. He put an ad on craigslist. He got 400 responses. Guess which one he uses now.
Consider the energy/resources used in both of those. Let's assume that the guy runs an ad in a SF paper with a circulation of 400,000, and he runs it for a week. That ad will be printed 2.8 million times. If he gets 4 responses, that's one response for every 700,000 times it's printed. That's a huge amount of paper. But if he posts it online, no one has to actually print out the ad at all.
The online ad is orders of magnitude more efficient in terms of energy and resource use. It's also vastly more efficient in terms of being relevant to the person looking for it. It's much easier to find a classified ad on craigslist than it is in a newspaper. It's also easier to reply; just clink on the link.
On the other hand, a newspaper delivers lots and lots of ads, and, in some respects, it's easier to read than something online. I read most of the LA Times every morning. It's easy to scan several articles on each page and decide what you're interested in. And there are pictures to help you figure out what happened. Kobe's excited! Lakers must have won.
So newspapers are inefficient, but lucrative. As of right now, Websites are efficient, but not very lucrative. Megan McArdle makes a good point:
[I]t takes a while to figure out how to make advertising work in a new medium. The original television ads were simply transplanted radio ads, and they were dreadful--just as the original radio ads consisted of someone reading a print ad, which didn't work very well. We may just be waiting for our advertising revolutionary who can show us how to make webvertising work.Web advertising is, of course, constantly improving. With, unfortunately, a few false starts. One of the best things about Webvertising is that there is a huge range of ads, from one-line text ads on Google to 30-second commercials on comedycentral.com. Unfortunately, that range isn't always taken advantage of. I can think of a few Web ads I have seen far too many times. That cute but serious Indian woman in a white shirt in the SAP ad? Boring. Seen her more times than I care to remember. Several weeks ago, I spent some time doing a lot of trading one day on HSX. I kept seeing the exact same ad, for Soul Men. By the time I was halfway through my trading, I was thoroughly sick of the ad. The fact that I remember my disgust is an indication of just how ineffective the repetition was. There has to be technology available for varying the ads sent to a specific computer.
The upside of this is that newspapers have a couple of advantages on the Web. First, because articles are mostly composed of text, their bandwidth and server costs are lower than, for example, YouTube or Comedy Central. Second, they have massive archives. The NYTimes was a leader in this respect. Putting all of those old articles online is a huge expense, but once it's done, it's done and paid for. I don't understand why every newspaper in the country has not followed in their footsteps. Every decent newspaper in the country has decades of content that no one else has. Once all those articles are online, it's a matter of programming and management ingenuity to figure out how to slice and dice it all to find value in it. Third, as the costs of technology go down, newspapers will be able to realize, one assumes, ever-greater cost savings. Fourth, as high-bandwidth connections proliferate, more and more people will be able to watch high-value video ads.
It's not a pleasant experience watching proud old companies face possible extinction. I'm cautiously optimistic about the future of newspapers. I'm not that impressed so far with current management, but I am also a firm believer in the old saying that nothing so concentrates the mind as the prospect of a hanging in a fortnight. Like the Big Three, newspapers are burdened with legacy costs. Even if GM shuts down a plant, they're still paying the mortgage on it. Same with newspapers. They still have large printing facilities that have to be paid for. There is still a large demand for printing for things besides newspapers. Hopefully they will be able to figure out how to make money with their idle printers. But it's time to start experimenting and rethinking how the business is going to work.
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