Wired magazine is 56.2% fullpage ads
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Hey, it has! http://www.suck.com/daily/95/10/06/daily.html
"We studied issue 3.09 (the one with Arnold Schwarzenegger on its cover) and were not surprised to discover that of its 206 pages, 90 were full page ads. (If you include 1/2's, 1/4's, and pull-outs the ratio jumps to a clean 50/50 split.)"
Further analysis of Wired's ad/content ratio was done by the Magazineer in January -- http://magazineer.com/howto/26
Filler was the best webcomic before webcomics were cool.
I would pay for content if:
1. It is personalized to my area of interest. It should be narrow enough to avoid unrelated stuff, wide enough to cover particaulr area compeletely such that I never need to go read another source for the same area. It should be de-duped. I hate dups.
2. All references and facts are properly attributed and cited. The moment I see "scientists found that 30% of..." I cancel my subscription without hesitation.
3. Non-factual pieces (opinions) are from well-known experts. At least there should be a credibility trail behind those people.
4. Content is peer reviewed. If there is a stretch somewhere, I want to know about it.
5. Content is short and to the point. I have short attention span and not much time.
6. Conflicts of interest and biases should be apparent.
For example Hardward Business Review is doing a reasonably god job on 2, 3, 6 and somtimes 5.
HN is pretty good with #1 (except dupes which are pretty bad).
Which is pretty much why I never read the paper or magazines anymore. Every time I pick one up the only thing I can think about is the fact that the articles were only written to sell advertising. Newspapers aren't designed to enlighten you, they're designed to sell dildos and tofu.
So instead of asking "How do you fix the NYT?" I'd ask "How would you kill the NYT?" Notice how much more scope you have for new answers there. If you're trying to fix them, you're implicitly constrained to make something like a newspaper. If you're trying to kill them, all you have to do is make something their advertisers prefer; that could be practically anything.
As a user I may benefit from the efforts of someone whos full-time job is to find good, relevant news, write well and do thoughtful analysis and discussion. Some of the newspapers used to play this role, but their economics is busted. The default assumtion here seems to be that professional journalism will die as well, and I would like to challenge this assumption. If it is to survive, which form would it take? What does it take to make people pay for their news?
There's probably a good mailing list on this topic. It seems like all the most intelligent discussion on the net takes place on secret mailing lists. The problem is that to find out where this discussion is taking place you'd really have to email a bunch of wonkish j-school types.
(And if anyone knows where people are discussing this, send me a note.)
Newspapers, according to my former classmates working at them and people I meet at industry events, seem to still be run by people over 45, who for the most part think they'll be able to sneak out the backdoor just before the whole thing falls apart.
As I said in another thread, I'm here in Chicago trying to figure out how to kill off the local papers. After months wasted spent working on features and design and stuff that doesn't really matter if you don't have a plan, I've started calling up companies that advertise in local neighborhood papers and meeting with them. Met with three on Thursday. I'm making this up as I go along but here's what I more or less was asking:
1. Who are you trying to reach? 2. How are you doing it now? 3. What works well about that approach? 4. What's not working well for you?
Pretty basic stuff, right?
Here's what I'm learning so far:
1. Small neighborhood businesses (think of 37Signals Italian restaurant analogy) are advertising in weekly neighborhood papers like this one: http://www.hpherald.com/
They're paying about $250-300 for a 4 inch square ad that runs in the paper and on the web....which is a static PDF (!) that gets updated once a week. A back of napkin calculation following a look through that paper leads me to believe they're selling 8-12k in ads in it each week.
The businesses tell me this tool is prohibitively expensive and don't like that you can't measure its results.
Now, I asked them what they'd rather have, and they tried to pitch me on some kind of online coupon setup, where people could print off coupons and the businesses pay me each month based on how many coupons they tally up. This seems like a suckers game.
But a few ideas I'm toying with that could be better for them:
1. A daily neighborhood e-mail. They would be paying to reach X inboxes and could measure click-thru's using e-mail tools. Each e-mail would have a short article on something cool in the neighborhood, a la Daily Candy and extensive upcoming event listings (more on that below). Once you get enough of a subscriber base, then you start publishing the content to the web as well to rack in the pageviews and let readers connect.
2. Stepping in as their go-to guy to manage their adwords/CPC campaigns. This would be a lot less fun, but is a direction worth considering. Some of these little restaurants could be well served from getting listed high for certain searches and getting optimized on Google Maps, for example.
Other observation that I'm still trying to make sense of:
The people I'm meeting with say they'd like a place to find neighborhood events.
As a guy who hangs out on Hacker News, I am aware of going.com, eventful.com, upcoming, craigslist and all manner of event sites. Yelp, The Onions new decider.com site, all sorts of people are doing them.
And yet these advertisers had never heard of any of them and the people at the community groups said they wanted a decent online neighborhood calendar.
Which got me thinking that maybe a Garysguide.org-style events site for neighborhood events could play well. Start with just a few neighborhoods with loud identities and own them, get known as the place to go to see what's happening in those hoods. Perhaps this would be the web-half of the daily newsletter.
Anyway, the future of journalism conversation is fascinating. I'd be interested in any suggestions or observations from the peanut gallery on here. As I said, I'm making this up as I go along. A network of cheap, scalable, interesting neighborhood event + news sites seems like something that might be attractive if you can pull in the local eyeballs.
Thoughts?
As for Wired's advertising/editorial ratio, FWIW I just asked my friends working at magazines about it and they say that the ideal ratio is 40% ads and 60% editorial. I'm looking around online for some backup on that front and not finding much to be honest, but that's what they're teaching at j-school on the subject. So Wired's probably hurting if they're over 50% ads.
Here in New Hampshire I'm shocked we still get these weekly advertising booklets of local businesses. They're completely free of content - 100% ads. And yet we get one every week in the mail. Someone has to have a viable business to keep churning those out. Yet, the advertisers have no estimate of ROI and costs would seem to be pretty high to make and distribute.
A good description of http://www.everyblock.com/
Thanks, didn't see that.
One interesting remark he made: the way people consume "news" will likely change in a fundamental way. Traditionally, the unit of news has been the article. This approach worked well for print and has been widely adopted online as well. Perhaps the future of journalism will be the abandonment of the article, focusing instead on a more concise approach that delivers rapid-fire, credible, news.
He's the Django co-creator, gypsy guitar-playing developer of Everyblock.com
His big idea is that reporters have been gathering all this data for years.....and organizing it in the worst, least helpful format ever, the "text blob." What he's doing with Everyblock is the same thing Google's been doing since day 1, converting text blobs into useful, actionable, structured data that you can reassemble into graphs, maps, interactive features, or articles if need be.
He's certainly onto something. My question is whether that's going to completely blot out narrative journalism. My guess is that people who like narrative journalism are going to keep liking it while the many many people who never cared and who just read the headlines anyway will flock to Google News, sites like this and anything else that gives them something "worse" than narrative journalism but "good enough" to attract their eyeballs.
Note: I did not comment on my own comment. For some reason user jaydub deleted his comment as I was responding to it.
Wasn't TV a major shift? And yet they did survive.
http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_2008_election.pdf
The problem would seem to be that we're still in the middle of a generational shift. For instance, I grew up reading newspapers and so I still value the NY Times. It could be another ten or twenty years before they're facing anything like death until the majority of their prime demographics have shifted away to other outlets.
And still there is no great news outlet that truly understands how to use the internet. It is a wide open opportunity.
Except for CNN, no one has really begun to embrace the immediacy of the internet. And even CNN has done a very poor job; it takes them an hour or more to post breaking news on CNN.com sometimes.
What else?
I ask because I genuinely want to know what you think is lacking.
One model I've noticed is Dave Winer.
A while ago he signed up for official "Press accreditation" ~ http://www.google.com.au/search?q=dave+winer+accreditation then drove around attending newsworthy events for the recent US elections. Write-ups, taking photos ~ http://flickr.com/photos/scriptingnews/2796517333/ and occasionally posting stories to unconventional methods (twitter & http://politics.newsjunk.com/ ) and finally traditional outlets ~ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dave-winer/first-video-of-joe-...
So the idea of online writers & thinkers (bloggers) becoming Press accredited, interviewing and recording news stories (twitter, blog, flickr and mp3) and finally to commercial news sources using various technologies is already happening. Totally side stepping the NYT in the process. The only problem is it just doesn't scale yet. And I don't see a recognised "authoritative" outlet.
A personal ad network. That's kind of interesting. So someone would pay to get an ad that runs alongside anything Winer writes across the HuffPo, newsjunk and anywhere else, latching onto his brand explicitly.
"... This approach is really not so different from being a magazine writer. You write for whoever wants your stuff and get paid per peice. The only difference here is that Winer's not getting paid, unless he's running ads that go with his articles across all these outlets. ..."
Stringers?
Winer has written about making money with technology, writing here ~ http://www.scripting.com/davenet/2001/02/13/howToMakeMoneyOn... here ~ http://www.scripting.com/2005/12/12.html#howToMakeMoneyOnThe... and the latest here ~ http://www.podtech.net/home/894/gnomedex-how-to-make-money-o...
"... A personal ad network. That's kind of interesting. So someone would pay to get an ad that runs alongside anything Winer writes across the HuffPo, newsjunk and anywhere else, latching onto his brand explicitly. ..."
Adverts on websites are history ~ http://www.podtech.net/home/894/gnomedex-how-to-make-money-o...
I don't understand the online "magazine" concept - not sure how it translates.
I find wired nice airport/toilet reading.
Well, what point of view would you expect to come out of this? I mean without any further assumptions, what you'd predict is that what comes out is a picture of the world, a perception of the world, that satisfies the needs and the interests and the perceptions of the sellers, the buyers and the product.
Now there are many other factors that press in the same direction. If people try to enter the system who don't have that point of view they're likely to be excluded somewhere along the way. After all, no institution is going to happily design a mechanism to self-destruct. It's not the way institutions function. So they'll work to exclude or marginalize or eliminate dissenting voices or alternative perspectives and so on because they're dysfunctional, they're dysfunctional to the institution itself.
http://www.archive.org/details/NoamChomskyNoamChomskyManufac...
If you had a fixed advertising budget for the year, wouldn't you spend most of it in the November and December issues?
Almost every magazine and newspaper gets really fat at the end of the year.
I'd like to do this with a scalpel to compare the height.
Blogger needs to take some time, to learn proper comma use, and then rethink this sentence.