The death of news papers
John Battelle has a great post with a few ideas about the death of the print industry and journalism.
Go read it and there are some very true points to it. The big problem I see is that journalists have rarely been truly measured as they can be in the internet times. You can write the best article out there, if you do not have a following and do not have something to say that people want to read, it is hard to get a good readership. Then the question only becomes about the importance of your message and somebody pushing you.
The big problem is that journalists were what sold magazines, or so they thought, and they have really good salaries. Really good salaries in some cases. So the newspapers have a big amount of people writing articles, with huge salaries and nobody in their right mind will tell me that my 17 month old sun will get a subscription of the local newspaper delivered to his home each morning, let alone read it.
You can employ all the consultancies that you want to give you the numbers you want to hear, but the problem is that you will not believe it yourself once you think about your own child. My sun might have a kindle like thingie, but not real print I would say.
There is no clear way out of this yet, especially because I want good journalism (not highly paid people reprinting AP and Reuters), and online newspapers just do not make the same amount of money as print magazines did.
The problem is that you really need to understand the needs of the internet and you need to think about what you really are good at. Standard management stuff really and I don’t buy it that all the big publishers should become investment houses. It will be interesting to follow John in his series of thoughts and I sense a good book coming out of it, probably focussed around conversational marketing.
This will result in painful changes and it will be interesting to see of what becomes of the big publishing houses. I for one know that I want some of them to survive, but mostly for some good solid journalism, not reprinting AP for Google Juice. Let’s see who pulls it off. At least I don’t want to see the death of the news papers.