I think you're right that newspapers which don't adapt will eventually be in big trouble, but I disagree about the order in which things will happen. As long as there's a demand in Pawtucket for local news and no one else providing it, the Pawtucket Times is relatively safe. It's only after someone finds an answer to your question ("What comes next?") that the PT is in real trouble.
It's pretty clear that the old newspaper model is too bloated to keep working for long, and the fact that the newspapers haven't yet figured out what to do with themselves suggests that no single model will replace the entire news industry. Instead, the information that we've come to expect from newspapers will likely come from a variety of sources. Amateur bloggers will be sufficient for some of it, while other stories will always need professional journalism and therefore some kind of a business model. Check out http://spot.us (funded by the Knight Foundation, who also funded EveryBlock) for one example of how that might work out without the bloat of a newspaper.
The fact that we don't currently know what's next means that perhaps the PT is smart not to abandon the only model that's ever made them any money. How much money can they make off their web traffic? Probably not a ton. The future may not even have a spot for organizations that resemble the Pawtucket Times, so why not make some money selling old-fashioned papers while they still can?
davidb
· 7 months ago
Atleast let me buy an online subscription. We can agree with at least doing that, right?
I guess the bigger question is whether or not there is a play for local/hyper-local UGC that has editors. I'm sure someone is doing this to some extent, but execution is everything with this.
Matt Gillooly
· 7 months ago
Sorry, but I have to disagree. Paid subscriptions for online news content have typically failed. The exception is in financial news, because those subscribers have an incentive not to share that content freely. PT could try it, but I suspect they'd still lose money on the project.
I think there's a certain class of news that will be served well by UGC, but since that's precisely the kind of news that an abundance of people are willing to write up for free, I'm extremely skeptical of any play to make money off of it. Aggregation can be handy, but once you throw enough ads up to make money, people will take their UGC elsewhere, and we'll just keep coming back to blogs and RSS feeds. The only money is going to be in news that no one wants to/is able to work on for free.
All Comments
It's pretty clear that the old newspaper model is too bloated to keep working for long, and the fact that the newspapers haven't yet figured out what to do with themselves suggests that no single model will replace the entire news industry. Instead, the information that we've come to expect from newspapers will likely come from a variety of sources. Amateur bloggers will be sufficient for some of it, while other stories will always need professional journalism and therefore some kind of a business model. Check out http://spot.us (funded by the Knight Foundation, who also funded EveryBlock) for one example of how that might work out without the bloat of a newspaper.
The fact that we don't currently know what's next means that perhaps the PT is smart not to abandon the only model that's ever made them any money. How much money can they make off their web traffic? Probably not a ton. The future may not even have a spot for organizations that resemble the Pawtucket Times, so why not make some money selling old-fashioned papers while they still can?
I guess the bigger question is whether or not there is a play for local/hyper-local UGC that has editors. I'm sure someone is doing this to some extent, but execution is everything with this.
I think there's a certain class of news that will be served well by UGC, but since that's precisely the kind of news that an abundance of people are willing to write up for free, I'm extremely skeptical of any play to make money off of it. Aggregation can be handy, but once you throw enough ads up to make money, people will take their UGC elsewhere, and we'll just keep coming back to blogs and RSS feeds. The only money is going to be in news that no one wants to/is able to work on for free.