What should newspapers have done? | Hacker News Reader

What should newspapers have done?

economist.com

14 pointscwan17 comments

The Economist is a great example for print media to follow. Here is what they do well:

1) Have an opinion, state it clearly and incorporate it into every piece. Articles can be a lot shorter and more informative if you don't have to "show each perspective" (which I think is impossible to do well.)

2) Create content that is so good, people will pay for it. Part of this is hiring insightful writers, part is sending them all over the world where a story is always happening and part is journalistic integrity. An untrustworthy news source is not valuable.

3) Avoid the butter battle. They don't play the tit for tat game with other columnists. The paper would read nearly the same whether they had a million competitors or none. It stands on its own axioms.

4) Understand your market:

http://fora.tv/2007/02/05/Uncommon_Knowledge_John_Micklethwa...

In this interview the editor of the economist talks about how they compete not with other newspapers but with people's time. He says that his customers are busy people with lots of money and they are willing to pay for a concise view on the world.

5) Give people the tools to win debates. Reading the news is really pushups for your next dinner party debate. Hardly anyone acts directly on what's happening in the news other than through conversation.

When I read the Economist cover to cover for 3 years while living in DC, I could go toe to toe w/ anyone in the think tank / foreign policy / political circuit even though I was an engineer / outsider. Not sure it did me any good other than satisfy my curiosity and competitive streak, but it was really fun and worth the money.

Read Unqualified Reservations and you'll be able to knock them out cold. You might end up in padded room though.

What the newspapers should have done is not take out so much debt. The one tiny inconvenient fact in the whole whinefest which is the newspaper industry today is that those runaway news paper costs everyone complains about are mostly due to debt service and not to "quality journalism." The debt was used to: (i) acquisitions and/or (ii) pay the owners nice dividends.

See there used to be a business model where newspapers would simply make acquisitions until there is a single paper in each city and then hike up ad prices and make a lot of money. This does not work anymore, because with the internet you can never entirely capture an advertising market. So now the papers are stuck with the enourmous debt of acquisitions and without the monopoly profits they were expecting.

Big f-ing deal. They made an incorrect business decision and now they are suffering the consequences. I don't know why I should be worried about that.

If somebody is worried about journalism, someone should start a news website with none/little debt and they should be able to make enough money for quality journalism and a tidy profit. Advertising online is valuable and one can get good money for ads on sites people really like to read. One may argue that this is already happening today.

So it seems as though the railroad metaphor in the Economist blog was apt: once the railroads/newspapers could no longer use finance in order to establish monopolies and then extract monopoly rents from their customers, it was good old competition that did them in.

There was a good article on a New Republic blog examining how Politico has managed to grow and make a profit, even in print, while traditional newspapers have continued to wither: http://www.tnr.com/article/the-scoop-factory?id=82d8d496-d40...

Not sure about that metaphor. I don't know much about the railroad's pricing but it seems to me what did them in was that the government decided to subsidize their competitor. The government poured trillions of dollars into highways and there just wasn't much the railroads could do. The railroad is actually more efficient than the road so it is a very bad metaphor for a paper newspaper. Of course that did not matter once the government started making roads and offering them for free to all car owners.

There's still a demand for newspapers, it's just shrinking. As a country we're myopically focused on growth, but isn't there a place for businesses which are shrinking too? What's wrong with saying "the newspapers should reduce their size in an orderly way, in sync with declining demand"? Shouldn't it be possible to manage a shrinking business in such a way that it continues to generate profits until demand vanishes entirely?

I have trouble following the article, since it appears based on the premise that rail is dead, which it very much is not, especially for freight.

What am I missing?

Rail has lost its dominance, and has experienced a decline in profitability.

It obviously hasn't been dominant for passenger traffic for quite some time, but, for freight, it's still a major player.

How much of a decline in profitability? How does that compare to other transportation modes?

One thing they should have done: Built out their online sales staff and online ad programs 5 years ago, while educating/working with customers (mostly local businesses) about the benefits of online programs.

This article begins with a false analogy in its comparison of the plights of railroads and newspapers. Newspapers are not in the "newsprint" business, as suggested here, but rather in the journalism business. The mechanism for distribution of the information is not especially relevant, nor does it impact the newspaper companies' core competencies as much as any of the sources of this article suggest.

I don't really think it's as much of a stretch to imagine newspaper companies expanding into other media as it is to imagine railroads expanding into airborne freight. The problem is that strictly online providers were able to provide comparable information in a more convenient medium years before anyone in newspapers saw the light.

Of course, that doesn't mean it's too late to embrace online as the medium of choice for journalism companies.

Relatedly, Clay Shirky had an interesting article distinguishing between newspapers and journalism saying, "Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism."

http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking...

Local newspapers won't make any more money by generating better journalism. They are already read by the vast majority of their target audiences. Newspapers are in the business of selling as many ads for as much money as possible, using journalism to attract an audience. The audience isn't the problem. The ads are.

A railroad company could have moved into the trucking or air freight business. But newspapers had no chance to move into the "world wide web" business. There was nothing they could do to match the information distribution capability of social networking, online communities or news aggregators.

Times have changed, and I'm not sure that there was anything that newspapers should have done differently. I don't like the idea of a CEO saying "Well, it looks like our market is shrinking so I'd better start organizing an orderly failure"...but I don't know what I would do in a similar situation. At this point you would have to be truly visionary/insane to move very far away from your core business.

Not relied too much on income from advertising?

That, and invented a time machine in order to go back in time and kill Craig Newmark's parents before he was conceived.

they should have evolved before, or with, the curve. They're about 5 years late to the online game.

They've lost too much ground and don't have enough $$ to evolve now.

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