Guardian UK: Not fit to print (It's been a truly awful year for American newspapers)

[marmar]

Not fit to print
Newspapers should drop the idea that readers should pay for content and start producing journalism that's actually valuable


John McQuaid
guardian.co.uk, Monday 15 June 2009


It's been a truly awful year for American newspapers. Just last week, journalists at the Boston Globe voted to reject a package of cuts demanded by the paper's corporate parent, the New York Times Company, as the price for keeping the enterprise afloat. Now the Times plans a draconian 23% wage reduction and may put the Globe on the block – not that buyers are lining up to buy money-losing companies with labour problems. The mess at the Globe is only the latest in a parade of newspaper closings and cutbacks. Earlier this year Denver's Rocky Mountain News was shuttered, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer shut down its presses, laid off most of its staff and went online-only.

With their once-comfortable information and classified advertising monopolies long gone and their business plans in ruins, American newspaper publishers are desperately casting about for new ways to make money. At a recent meeting, they focused on a single idea: make people pay for online content. Shortly afterward, the American Press Institute released its Newspaper Economic Action Plan, one of the strategies the publishers are looking at.

The API's plan is a remarkable document, a distillation of all the retrograde attitudes that have gotten newspapers into their current, terrible fix. Its theme is a prevailing article of faith among many in the news business: newspapers spend money generating valuable and socially relevant content; readers, bloggers, Google and aggregators such as the Huffington Post have been getting it for free for years. They've been reading it, copying it, repurposing it to their own advantage. It's only right and just that they should pony up.

The problem with this "we produce something of value and should be paid for it" attitude, though, is that it is just an attitude, one shaped by a sense of grievance and a gut feeling about what is – must be – right and just. This is a terrible way to formulate any kind of complex strategy – George Bush made decisions the same way. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/jun/15/newspapers-boston-globe-paid-content

[NJCher]

1. in search of a business model

I don't see it, either. The newspaper guys are behaving a lot like the RIAA.

I've had to attend a series of panel discussions on the future of the newspaper, so I've heard the thinking of the industry and it is indeed very much as this author says: a sense of entitlement and "I want that back."

The last panel I attended was in early spring of this year and they were talking about micro-payments. In other words, every article we read, we would pay a few cents for.

I don't think people will pay for it with enough volume to make any difference.


Cher