The Internet Changes Everything (Part Whatever)
Net to newspapers: Drop dead (BusinessWeek Online)
Newspapers are cockroaches. No matter what is introduced into the media ecosystem, the oldest of the Big Media survives. Despite decades of doomsayers, newspapers prospered through radio, through TV and cable, through video games, through the Internet....
Not so fast. Suddenly, even sober Wall Street analysts think something new is afoot.
What looms now "is different from all other threats," says Lauren Rich Fine (no relation), a Merrill Lynch & Co. (MER ) analyst who has covered the industry since the 1980s. Consumers are shifting decisively to online information, says Fine, especially the young, and are no longer yoked to the local newspaper. "Ads are following the eyeballs to where they make transactional decisions." Fine recently forecast that newspapers' profit margins are set to enter a long period of decline.
The new and troubling reality for newspapers is that even if they excel as purveyors of information to appreciative audiences, they still face tough business terrain. "They can try to be the destination where you go online and [can] be really successful with citizen journalism and blogs," says Fine. But such innovations are "not going to pay a lot of bills."
RWN's Mark Steyn Interview #2 (John Hawkins, Right Wing News) (via Brothers Judd)
John Hawkins: You seem to be widely acknowledged as the best conservative columnist in the business. Just as one proof of that, twice now I've polled right-of-center bloggers on their favorite columnist and twice now (here & here) you've won by a huge margin. So why is it, in your opinion, that your columns are not very widely syndicated in American newspapers?
Mark Steyn: Well, there are two answers to that: the first is that it's true US newspapers are not exactly beating my door down. The second is that, when they do beat my door down, my loyal retainer sets the dogs on them and peppers their retreating posteriors with buckshot. I'll explain that second part first. I appear in newspapers in a lot of different countries, and the sad fact is that, mainly as a consequence of local newspaper monopolies, US syndication fees represent some of the lowest publication rates in the world - that's to say, to take one recent example, you'd earn more from a single reprint in a Fijian newspaper than one certain prominent US statewide daily was proposing to pay for my column for an entire year. The US syndication business is the publishing equivalent of vaudeville, and I don't particularly see why it's in my interests to fill up Gannett’s newspapers for free. If I'm going to give it away, I'd rather folks had to come to the website to see it, where there's a chance they'll hang around long enough to buy a book. So I've no interest in US syndication as a business model. We make exceptions for certain newspapers whose op-ed editors are genuinely eager to carry the column. But I have no great ambitions within US journalism.
But, to go back to your first point, the reason they're not exactly beating the door down is because I'm not a good fit for American monopoly dailies. In London, the most competitive newspaper market in the world, papers thrive by encouraging distinctive controversial voices. In America, the average Gannett or other monodaily prefers a tone of self-regarding dullness. As my friend John O'Sullivan put it, "They neither offend nor delight" - as a matter of policy. Yes, they're broadly “liberal,” but not in a lively virtuoso engaging way, only in a dreary J-school way. I think they're missing the point here. They don't realize that they do have competitors now, in new media. In 1978, having driven your print competitors out of business, you could afford to be a dull city newspaper. I don't believe you can now.
The fact that American newspapers won't pay squat for syndicated conservative writing of the quality produced by Mark Steyn BUT pay what must be large salaries (and benefits) for the likes of Cragg Hines, Clay Robison, Rick Casey, Tim Fleck, James Howard Gibbons, and Andrea Georgsson -- not a conservative or even an especially compelling writer among them -- to opine regularly for their print and online products is likely a better explanation of the decline of interest in those products than simply the BusinessWeek formulation that the internet is to blame.
Yes, the internet is partly to blame. Conservative opinion writing -- whether from syndicated columnists or from bloggers -- is widely available, and the best of the genre easily blows away the self-important ramblings of some local editorialists "editorial pages in their ideal state." It's a little silly to blame the internet because it eliminates a local daily newspaper's monopoly on the opinion game and blows open the market, thereby exposing the weaknesses of the local monopoly daily. The weaknesses were there all along. The part of Steyn's answer that I've bolded nails it.
News people concerned about the bottom line need to think about technology AND content. That's especially true locally.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 07/03/05 15:03 | Media Matters | Technorati
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