Why the Internet isn't friendly to newspapers

For many years, I always thought that newspapers would successfully make the transition from a paper product to the Internet -- though the process would be painful. I'm not so sure anymore. Here's why.

The majority of Internet readers aren't looking for a comprehensive news report that is incredibly expensive to produce. Need evidence? Just look at the top-viewed stories on two different Southern California newspaper sites. At this moment, the top stories on latimes.com are these:



The majority of the stories are commentaries on the news or crime briefs. The top-viewed stories don't reflect the work of 600-plus journalists busting their asses around the world. That's just not valued by Internet readers. Sad, but true. Okay, now take a looked at the Orange County Register's top-viewed stories:



Okay, what do we have? A dog photo contest. The Lakers. A weather story. And a crime story.

Both The Times and Register devote tremendous resources to provide readers with in-depth reporting from around California, Southern California and the world. But do today's readers care? I would argue that they would rather read commentary (the reason why the Huffington Post has been so successful) and celebrity and crime news.

Compounding the problem is the fact that Internet advertising provides only a faction of the income as old-school print advertising revenue. So newspapers have to face two stubborn facts: the majority of readers don't want their in-depth, quality news coverage and (even if they did) advertising revenues won't support that kind of editorial heft.

Now we can argue what this means for our democracy or, more pointedly, to websites and bloggers when their free source of news dries up, but the facts remain. Readers and the business model won't support the expensive journalism newspaper operations produce.

In this case, it's two strikes and newspapers are out.

26 comments:

Sean Tubbs said...

I work for a non-profit called Charlottesville Tomorrow. We produce incredibly dense reports about local government in our community, which spans two jurisdictions that don't always see eye to eye. We're funded by private donors who see there's an information gap. We're in our fourth year of operations, are having an impact on raising the quality of journalism in our area. We're certainly not the most popular, but we are developing a good reputation as a fair arbiter of complex decisions involving our core set of issues - infrastructure.

I'd like to know what you think about our approach, a non-profit approach more akin to what you might see in public television or radio. We have a small staff with a low overhead, and seek not to replace mainstream journalists, but to supplement their coverage by providing access to audio recordings of meetings, the occasional video, and more. We think we can keep going for quite a while, carving out a niche that serves the community while also keeping our families fed and clothed.

Sean Tubbs said...

Oops. That's Charlottesville Tomorrow. Wrong domain suffix!

Anonymous said...

I question your premise.

Why would I read an LA Times article written by a generalist reporter when I can read an article by an expert in that field.

If I want to follow USC Football, I go to wearesc.com. If I want to know about Iraq, there are any number of milblogs, guys like Victor Davis Hanson, etc. who know much more than some reporter sitting in the Green Zone.

Medicine? There are many sites with timely health info that are better than anything the Times can cover.

Papers were fine when they were gatekeepers and there weren't more timely news sources but now? Past their time.

william said...

So, instead of just poking him for sounding like Grandpa Simpson, I’d like to help fix the problem. Here are ten things newspapers could do, right now, to improve the quality of the comments on their sites.
------------------
williamgeorge
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