A ‘Darker Narrative’ of Print's Future From Clay Shirky | Hacker News Reader

A ‘Darker Narrative’ of Print's Future From Clay Shirky

mobile.nytimes.com

41 pointsgrey-area27 comments

Does anyone know the history of technology stacks used by NYT to provide comments? Like HN, the comments are often more insightful than the article:

  Transactional revenue

"... Yes, "think of subscribership as membership." But that doesn't mean "in short, get some percentage of the loyal readers of The Times to pay more — some of them a lot more." It means, leveraging the strength of the very real community of loyal readers that the Times has, by building more and more revenue streams from delivering more and more value to members of that community."

  Public debate

"... A good place to begin would be with the comments areas, with the goal to transform them from the current depositories of opinion into well moderated forums for dialogue which instead of producing points of view stimulate learning and advancement. Public intellectuals rather than know-it-alls would be the result. That would be different!"

  Weekly cultural ritual

"... The Sunday edition of The NYT is different. I peruse this all week while giving my electronic devices a break. I'm older and still enjoy the serendipity of discovery. Yet I rarely look at the A-section. It's old news and I've already digested all - more than likely I have digested it prior to your pages being sent to the printing plant."

"Truth be told, I'd be sad about the disappearance of all but the Sunday edition from print, but more to the point: It's infuriating, and confounding, that the Times insists on undermining its Sunday edition, a cultural institution so important and dear to its readers' hearts."

"... every Sunday morning I would buy the $$$Sunday London Times PAPER, spending all the long day reading it because every article in that preposterously-thick paper was delicious-even the sports section."

Their blog comments are far better than their article comments. I think it's more about audience than the technology.

It would be interesting if the non-paying audience contributes higher quality comments :) Or maybe lower-traffic blogs attract less/different posturing than comments on high traffic articles.

Shirky's post in 2009 was one of those great clarion calls. Failure is always an option (and not the kind you learn from and pivot off of).

Noting that newspapers aren't necessary (but journalism is) is great, but the problem is that a lot of (most?) journalism is still done in newspapers... and the way the media is currently breaking up, where companies like the Tribune Company and Gannett are splitting their television holdings from their newspapers means that journalism and newspapers may not be inherently tied together... but when it comes down to it, they are still for all practical intents and purposes tightly coupled.

Web based news orgs like Vox, Fusion, Gawker and Buzzfeed are making some moves towards funding journalism (Buzzfeed in particular has great investigative reporters), but they are way too few in number to replace newspapers as a home for investigative journalism even as the industry stands today in its depleted state.

Here's a question: How much money goes in to hardcore investigative journalism?

That's a hard thing to disentangle, because investigative reporting isn't just done by people with "investigative reporter" in their titles.

If you want a random waypoint Propublica's staff costs for 2011 were around 5mil$ for a small but very investigative focused news org: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/142... (granted they're also not a typical news org).

How much money goes into creating a corporate culture that encourages hardcore investigative journalism?

I recently spoke to a reporter from one of three major newspaper in Israel. I asked her how much investigative journalism they do? She said almost none. The smallest of the 3 papers does a little. The other two do basically none. A little means a lot less than they do of everything else, of course.

So maybe 5% of the combined expenditure for the newspaper industry is probably a generous estimate. It could be <1% I guess.

Most of what journalism does is reporting, commentary, discussion and analysis. Primary, investigative journalism is a relatively small thing.

Your points about companies splitting TV from newspaper, makes me wonder if we'll ever see a periodical journalism outfit grown out of a streaming provider like Netflix or Amazon Prime.

`Netflix premiers Vice News Nightly`

That's an interesting idea, but again, problem is that most journalism isn't done for video right now (not to say that there's none. There is a fair amount, just definitely not anywhere near the majority of either video produced, nor journalism written)

The bigger problem is that classic journalism of the sort that people lament we don't have enough of is a loss leader. Certainly the streaming services would consider doing something like HBO's Last Week Tonight with John Oliver which is a good example of the news-as-entertainment/journalism hybrids that are probably one of the few things about the (sort of) news business that are doing quite well.

You called out Vice News which is already on HBO. I'd argue that HBO and Netflix are rapidly converging towards direct competition in the streaming market.

Yes - they are competing already. HBO Now is out. https://order.hbonow.com/

"2) Do more to cut costs, companywide. (“The most valuable long-term dollar to an organization with declining revenues is a dollar you don’t spend.”)"

This one worries me. I don't have better proposals to save the industry, but we keep redefining coverage to be less direct and less expensive and we all end up paying for this by being further removed from news as it happens.

As a digital-only subscriber, I find NYT's current subscription model bizarre. For the base ($20/mo) tier, I get access to web and iPad but not iPhone (which costs an additional $10). This structure means I use and value the service less, making me more likely to cancel. Feels like a business model that privileges their needs over their customer's experience. And as a result, I opine that it is not likely to meet their expectations. I'd rather see an attempt to broaden the subscription base by aggressively lowering the cost ($7.99) and aggressively expanding the entitlement (sub includes crossword, for example).

We (my partner and I) subscribe to the Sunday only print edition, which gives us digital access. We shouldn't really be considered "print subscribers" in a traditional sense. 90% of the time we scan the magazine and maybe read one article in the paper. Then straight to the recycle. The majority of our consumption, and engagement with ads, happens throughout the week as we share a single digital account. The physical paper is more of a souvenir, or possibly a house decoration, than a means of engaging with the stories in the paper.

Also by Clay Shirky, and very much worth reading:

Healthcare.gov and the Gulf Between Planning and Reality

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6770039

I'm waiting for the killer e-ink devices. I love my reader and am anticipating it's evolution will eventually make it a staple for most adult millennials. Once that thing is crystal clear, fast, cheap (and perhaps can be folded in half), I find it hard to believe it won't rejuvenate the newspaper market.

better e-ink devices won't fix the problem that the internet has completely changed the advertising market and how brands reach consumers.

It's hard to see what newspapers could do to get the same returns per unit sold or page viewed as they have historically. And that means a couple possible things: readers bear more of the cost, advertisements get more intrusive (or crazier), or newspapers find some other way to make money.

Personally, I would love to pay more for magazines and newspapers without any advertising whatsoever. Advertising always seems to have some influence on what is reported. A newspaper or magazine will be very reluctant to say anything very negative about the companies/industries that advertise with them, because they might lose those ads then.

Then there's the problem of ads influencing me directly, causing me to spend more money on other things, than I otherwise would.

I guess advertising in general, can cause reporters to have an attitude of "if you have a problem, buy a product to solve said problem" rather than "if you have a problem, here's some knowledge to solve said problem".

So overall, I would probably save a significant amount of money by paying more for advertising-free media. But most people don't seem to understand this.

I wonder if there is any data on the fixed costs of newspaper production - digital or not? That is how much do they spend getting words to the bifurcation point - where the words could go to a printing press or to a web server?

That seems to me to be the important part. The words and knowledge of the NYT is the important bit - whether I read them on paper or screen seems less important.

And if they cannot afford to produce good words for a subscription only clientele, perhaps they need to find ways to monetise "influence". Pay us and we will keep influencing politicans on your behalf - essentially expand lobbying out past the proprietors.

I've seen some back of the envelope numbers [1] but not good data. It does seem pretty clear though that, in contrast to eBooks, printing is a pretty substantial part of the overall costs. I've heard it said that, as a rough rule of thumb, subscriptions plus single-copy purchases historically covered the physical printing and circulation of the paper while advertising covered everything else (plus profit).

The problem is that you can't just move ad revenue from print to digital.

[1] A few years ago and Business Insider but FWIW http://www.businessinsider.com/2009/1/printing-the-nyt-costs...

One idea is to monetize stories submitted by PR firms [1] and clearly label the stories as such. At the same time, keep or increase the quality of such articles to make it worth the reader's while.

To capture more of the value, the newspaper industry should also create a PR platform (comparable to AdWords) that allows firms to directly and efficiently pitch their products and their social/business impact to the editors. (Cutting out the middleman) It of course should remain at the editor's discretion whether and in what form to print the stories.

Increase in transparency (that the story originated from a PR pitch) and monetization opportunity (to pay for investigative reporting) should benefit both the reader and the newspapers.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

It's called native advertising and it's somewhat controversial. The problem is that, even if it's labeled, it erodes the wall between advertising and editorial. Many magazines have had "special advertising sections" forever, but the more you blend in native advertising, the more readers are likely to confuse your editorial with an advertiser's pitch.

Of course, especially in some areas, PR narratives do drive the choice of story (as suggested in your link) a lot of the time. But it's still a slippery slope to rent out column inches for content that purports to be a form of editorial.

Well, the idea is to make sure the article quality be on par with other editorials. This should include critical commentary and comparison of the product or company in question to its competitors. This would be something quite different from those special advertising sections, which almost always feature only its positive aspects.

Since newspapers already publish these articles anyway (without labeling the PR source), the slippery slope is already in action. Although I do agree that money could make things worse for some papers, market mechanisms and transparency could help balance things out.

This interview with Tyler Brule of the very successful Monocle Magazine, is relevant and worth a read as he's been a booster of print. He draws the same conclusion as point #3, that the iPad wasn't going to be a saviour, and I think he would lean to #4 (subscription as membership) as being the best path forward. At least that seems to be the direction Monocle has moved in.

http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/03/how-tyler-brule-has-extende...

These points stuck out from the interview:

  Print-on-demand news

"..Monocle newsstand near London’s Paddington Station. The kiosk will offer a curated selection of magazines and newspapers as well as global newspapers printed on-demand. Customers will be able to register online, request a printing of newspapers ranging from Norway’s Aftenbladet to The Australian, and then come to the newsstand to pick it up ... “It’s important for us to, I think, remind the market that — is it really a crisis of print, or is it a crisis of print distribution?"

  Trend chasing

"..We don’t have an issue of some digital guru or a friend or an investor or a board member who says, Why aren’t you slapping that little bird on the bottom of every webpage and every printed page? ... we don’t have that influence surrounding our brand, that we have to follow the dictates of a big parent corporation, and that’s been the great thing from the very start."

  The companies they keep

"..the power of adjacency, of being in with a core print product group beside an ad for Cadillac, beside an ad for Cathay Pacific ... Here [his BlackBerry again] I can go and buy space in like-minded editorial, but I’m never going to be surrounded. I’m never going to have that pure adjacency right next to another brand in the same way that I would in print ... Brands want to have good adjacencies the same way that companies will wait forever to get space between 57th and Madison and 5th — because they want to be in the right company. I think that’s still very hard here."

In my opinion media companies should primarily cash on loyalty, rather than readership. Special editions with unique content, merchandise, and above all, events. Events add a ton of value to attendees and is very lucrative opportunity. Doesn't matter if we talk about industry conferences or TedTalk-like type of event. Attendees get a ton of value out of it and are willing to pay a lot for it. Same goes for sponsors.

It works out great for industry-based media. I don't see why it wouldn't work for mass media organizations.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com