Thoughts and views on how newspaper can adapt to make decent profits on the world-wide web.
Being a broadcaster, why would I care about all these lectures about how ‘print is dead’? Well for a start, I’m not that naïve.
As broadcasters, we’re giving up our audiences to the outrageous growth of the internet, although not as alarming as the decline in papers, with ITV regional going in 2012 things are pretty bad.
Alternatives
Iplayer, 4od, the itv one e.t.c along with MSN, BBC Online, and google news, show that people don’t need to buy papers anymore and even bloggers are even pulling in a decent crowd.
But as the author of this video lets us know, should we be trusting bloggers instead of professional journalists?
The quality, content and quantity won’t be nearly as good as a professional journalists work, however, they do sometimes have as much or even more knowledge as a journalist (for example BBC’s technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones knows that he isn’t as techy as some bloggers).
But isn’t the point of journalists to tell us what we don’t already know?
For those of us in the minority, who do know more than the basics, then niche bloggers are A way forward - but they shouldn’t be seen as replacements for journalists.
Theres a great intro into niche blogging here (by a blogger).
So how are the newspapers going to get round the ‘free internet journalism’?
Here are some of my ideas as discussed with The Times’ Joanna Geary:
1. Subscriptions, micropayments and 24 payments -
Well most of the newspapers have thought about the subscriptions and 24 hour payments – these seem to be the most reasonable way of getting it to work as discussed by James Harding at the Society of Editors.
But what about micro-payments?
Apps and iTunes have revolutionized the way of paying and getting things fast, I would think this could this work for news, but evidence suggest not.
However, in these troubled times, shouldn’t they be trying everything?
The FT have considered it and so have google.
My example would be; if you (a newpaper) had a front page with all the headlines, but then people would pay say 1-5p a piece of news?
But it could prove quite confusing at the start, and profits would be quite small.
2. Newspapers working together -
Bickering isn’t going to solve anything, so in this drastic time where print is a sinking ship, they should be working together – but it’s a dog eat dog world out there.
What if then they all decided on an initial platform to get them off to a stable start online, an idea that could at least save more redundancies.
The main competitor is of course things like google news and the BBC online news - but unless you top slice BBC to the other journalistic companies, or limit them somehow or get google in on the act with you, it seems an impossible task.
3. Merge Paper and Internet -
It’ll be impossible to make the nationals niche (it defeats the object) – so as a cheat way to keep them safe for now, how about a simple code that would go with the 24-hour subscription discussed earlier?
I.e. when you buy a paper in the morning, stories develop throughout the day, so to make money without buying further stories online you simply type a code which would be put on each paper into the website and you have access to the news all day on that papers website – giving you access to all the devlopments of the days stories.
Confused?
You could always try these ideas I suppose:
(Many thanks to Joanna Geary of the times online)
