> I dont think the newspapers are the bad guy here.

It's not about good or bad guys here, it's about a business model being deprecated by technology. And part of the web's technology is that the user agent decides of everything. Including not displaying ads if it doesn't want to. Or reformatting layout. Or even displaying nothing at all and only voicing the text.

Welcome to the future, your business model is dead or dying, you might or might not survive but your model can not and will not. Unless you manage to stop the march of progress.

You don't pay for the news when you buy physical newspaper, you buy for distribution. Newspapers get money from advertisers, online or offline. The problem with online is that many are used to get commodity news for free. Anyway, ads suck (mostly). Newspapers who care first about advertisers (at the expense of readers) suck too and deserve do die, IMHO.

This +lots.

http://marcreeves.blogspot.com/2010/06/speaking-truth-to-pow... (excellent post I stumbled across the other day.)

The Google analysis is pretty good, even if their proposed solutions are between weak and non-existing.

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/05/google-p...

Basically, the problem is that newspapers make most of their money on ads from "bundled" content, e.g. lifestyle, cars, sport, and almost no money on hard news.

But today people go to specialized web sites for all the economically lucrative content, leaving only the hard news for the newspaper. And the newspapers can't really get people to pay for it, because most news stories are a commodity (it is the same story everywhere).

I would uninstall my ad blocking extensions if, and this is a big if, advertisers wouldn't abuse their privilege for me to see their ad. How do they abuse it? By authoring blinking and moving ads that are unbelievably annoying. Everyone once in a while I disable AdBlock, only to flee back to turn it on within a few hours. I'm sorry, but WTF are they smoking?

I use Opera's content-blocking function, which allows me to nuke just a specific ad, or a specific part of a page. If something truly incenses me, I kill it. I think this is how ad blocking should work in general, given that most ads are benign.

Newspapers are dying because they are staffed to heavily, not because people don't pay.

Now look at smaller publications such as Gawker, hyper local news. They are doing just fine.

Wired sold almost as many iPad versions (75.000 at 5USD a pop) as they did paper version since they launched it. Thats excluding advertising.

Clearly there is a market for news. It's just not going to be of the NYT kind.

Your comment makes it sound like gawker is some kind of lightweight, nimble organization that provides all the hard news that say the NYT or the Washington Post do but at a fraction of the cost. Gawker is a tabloid. While there are some entertaining stories it in no way replaces a more serious news organization.

I don't mean to be overly critical. I just think that society needs the kind of information that the large papers provide. They definitely are having trouble coming up with a new viable business model, but it doesn't seem prudent to dismiss them by holding up gawker as a model to emulate.

That was not intentional.

My point is simply that there are plenty of room for news it's just that the news organizations most probably need to focus much more as they can't maintain the overhead of covering more and more at the pace news are moving today.

It's not a natural law that newspapers have to cover both local, domestic and international news. This did make sense when the news industry was very different, but insisting that reality somehow seem to conform to their needs is in my opinion absurd (I am not saying you said that)

In my opinion news are fundamentally gossip, until it's verified, written up and if it's found important analyzed further.

The access to the actual news (plane went down in Hudson) is almost ever present which means that you don't have to staff up around the world just to be sure to catch what is going on.

There are so many areas that newspapers still seem to insist on keeping that it makes it impossible for them to get lean enough to make proper profit. And let's not forget that so many much smaller news sites are eating into their profit.

I like you enjoy well written articles, geopolitics and in depth analysis, but we are not the norm.

To most people what is going on around the corner is more important than what's going on in Iraq or Philadelphia.

That doesn't mean there isn't room for serious journalism. Just that it has to change it's scope.

Just my five cents of course.

Yeah, good journalism costs money.

To have a staff of correspondents reporting around the world isn't cheap. But I think it's worth it.

I think in order for newspapers to survive, people have to learn that they need to pay. Advertising alone isn't going to pay the bills.

I personally think that charging people money for things on the internet isn't such a crazy idea. ;-)

I don't think it's good journalism that cost money but the infrastructure to maintain so many journalists being situated around the world. The question is if this is really necessary. My guess is more and more, no it isn't

Obviously you don't really need a journalist for every newspaper being situated in different parts of the world. I understand why they do it, but the problem is that they are often forced to compete with local citizens with cellphones, twitter, citizen journalism etc.

Most people don't really read news for the good journalism, they read it for the value of reading news.

How well this news is being written is in my mind secondary from that point of view.

But obviously it's not so simple. I just don't buy the argument about good journalism.

I agree that twitter and citizen journalism have shown themselves to be quite capable of disseminating information and news.

It's still not quite the same as reading a well written, unbiased, in-depth analysis of a story in The Economist or The New York Times (or even Al Jazeera).

Sure, there's a large market for "news-tainment". But I think there's also a market for high quality journalism.

I'm also tipping that people are more likely to pay (and pay more) for the latter too.

I too love well written articles. But it is unlikely a big enough market to entertain that many newspapers.

I do however have quibbles with the idea of unbiased journalism.

Personally I prefer highly opinionated pieces, but that's another discussion :)

I think you would be surprised. :-)

You're right about unbiased news though. It's a myth.

You really need to make up your own mind and read various sources to get some balance. I'm pretty sure all news has some inherent bias.

Opinion is fine, but don't try to make out like it's real news. Techcrunch is a major offender here.

This is a distressingly common sentiment these days. I can't think of any good reason to prefer opinionated screeds to well-balanced factual analysis. Very often it boils down to "I don't have confidence in news stories to have a 100% optimal distribution and analysis of the facts, so I've decided it's not even worth pursuing the truth."

Opinionated does not mean that it's not balanced or factual.

Everything is at the end of the day interpretation. I would rather know what peoples stance are whether I agree or disagree than to read something that is stated as the truth.

Something opinionated is by definition not balanced (in the sense of giving everything an equal shake) or factual. "Fact" and "opinion" are antonyms. And I can't imagine what it would look like for an article to be opinionated but not explicitly favor any particular view over another.

Are we using different definitions here or do you genuinely believe somebody arguing that Steve Jobs is a worthless sonovabitch is being evenhanded?

We are perhaps using different definitions.

"I think in order for newspapers to survive, people have to learn that they need to pay."

The Wall Street Journal and the Economist successfully taught their readers this lesson.

How many news organizations have good journalists though? I can count the ones I like on my fingers and some of them are mostly just bloggers as well. The market can support a few organizations doing international stuff, most of the rest just need reprint permissions.

The field is moving to much more federated-ness very quickly. People will not pay. Newspapers will not survive. Sorry.

"Big newspapers" are not getting the returns from online advertising because they are lazy. The days of 'fire and forget' advertising where you stick a few banners and google ads on a what the money roll in are gone.

You need to find ways to bring your advertiser's products to the attention of your readers in a way that is both useful and interesting.

They will just have to move to putting the ads into the article copy.

I worked with Kontera they do that. Still haven't made my mind up whether that's a good approach or if it pisses me off. It's still to spammy IMHO