The impact of technology on the evolution of mass print media

The Boston Globe is only the latest print mass media publication to wrestle with their cost structure—they are currently losing roughly $1,000,000/week—and with every incident, “Whither newspapers?” turns into “Whither journalism?”

The Boston Globe in somewhat happier times.

This confuses many things, including what is created (a news story) with the means and form of delivery (ink on paper tossed on to my porch every morning).

A recent post by Doc Searls discussed different technologies and models that may be developed to support new payment and subscriber models.

My comment, which appears below the post, follows:

Interesting discussion, as always.

Observations from someone who grew up in a two newspaper (a.m. and p.m.) household, has subscribed to the main city paper everywhere he’s lived, and who can’t imagine not opening two papers (the WSJ and now the Globe) every morning:

- It’s helpful to understand whether a comment or conversation is about what we would like to have happen or what we think will likely emerge in the market and be sustained over the intermediate- to long-term.

- Various technology-driven approaches that require a modification of consumer behavior will be suitable for the (relatively) small number of people who who choose to make the change.  Some mass media properties will try them; others won’t.  Whether they survive at all will be based on that competition and the resulting business models that each is able to establish.  There is no reason to believe that all newspapers (really, traditional print mass media organizations) will choose the same model.  And of course some niche print and online efforts will be supported by subscribers.

- Little of the discussion around the fate of print mass media has reflected an understanding of the various value-creating components and the way in which they serve different audiences.

In the case of newspapers, for example, there is less value than ever in the traditional physical, branded collection of journalists, editors, and advertisers.

When a plane lands in the Hudson and you want an an up-close view of what happened, you may find it in someone’s phone camera images posted on CNN.  For a follow-up report on bird strikes and the response of manufacturers, airlines, and the FAA, the authoritative source may very well be someone who writes exclusively about the aviation industry for a niche site/pub.  There is no value added by having, in this case, a Boston Globe reporter trying to cover all of that.  They may, however, get the first interview with Boston-based passengers when they land at Logan, and if they do, the audience for that piece may be much larger than the audience for the Globe.

Aside from the editorial page, for online readers there is less of a connection between hard news sources and a masthead than ever before.  (The NYT, WSJ, and a few other traditional print newspapers are probably also exceptions.)

- Online, one wants to have a curated (by one editor or a crowd or a search utility) list of the news that’s of interest and an easy way to follow particular stories from the “best” source, which may or may not be from the source that broke the story.

The ability to do that online with near-zero costs for the reader exposes the fact that the traditional print media business model has a cost structure that people no longer need to pay for.  And with alternatives that many readers see as hard to distinguish, they see no reason to pay the premium.

- Online advertising is a surprisingly elegant solution for paying for content creation, despite the distaste of some that such a grubby commercial venture as selling things should appear next to articles.  After all, for many media companies that are publicly-held, the goal is to deliver target readers to advertisers.  Compelling content is the way that’s done.  Online advertising provides tremendous precision around this, with the ability to connect reader with advertiser in ways that heretofore weren’t possible

The fact that advertising rates are much lower online than in print is a function of competition among online content creators/publishers.

Print rates will decrease further as the decision makers at traditional print buyers (advertisers and their agencies) continue to be replaced with younger individuals who have no ties (mentally, emotionally, or socially) to the traditional print media advertising infrastructure.

- We will have fewer full-time traditional journalists in the future, just as we have fewer TV repairmen than we used to have.

- And the role of technology in the evolution of the mass print media?  As opposed to innovation on the payment side, broad, lasting impact will likely be in continuing to drive down the cost and increase the quality of the tools journalists (however defined) use to gather and publish news, the ones readers use to sift/sort/track and comment/share/rate, and the ones advertisers and publishers use to match message/offer with individual.