There’s an article, A No-paper Newspaper I ran across in Newsweek online. The author, Daniel McGinn, ponders the fate of newspapers (is this speculation really still happening?) and can the e-readers, Kindle et al, save newspapers from falling into the abyss.
Here’s an excerpt:
Millions of us already read paperless newspapers and magazines on the Web, but e-newspapers, read on devices like the Kindle, would offer different benefits for both readers and publishers. For consumers who already spend too many hours staring at PC screens, e-newspapers would offer portability and an uncluttered reading environment, blissfully free from e-mail bells ringing or IMs popping up mid-paragraph. Among publishers, there's real hope readers will pay subscription fees for those benefits (something few Web readers do), and that advertisers will pay considerably more for ads on e-readers than they do on the Web. If these new streams of cash materialize, they could help an industry that's seen revenues fall sharply as readers and advertisers have begun abandoning high-margin print products. E-newspapers would also eliminate printing and delivery costs—typically half of what publishers spend to put out a newspaper.
If you own a newspaper or magazine and you want to make a digital play, and you are sure that you know how to create quality articles that I may want to buy:
Then why are you talking to me about putting ads on my Kindle? I don’t want ads. Just sell me the content I want—news and features.
Why are you talking about eliminating just printing and distribution costs? Why do you need a full production department to flow content to digital?
If you don’t sell ads you don’t need a sales department.
What does the news department cost when it’s really pared down to produce meaningful, in demand content? I don’t mean a package of stories I have to buy at a certain time on a certain day—just good stories, each of merit on its own that I can buy. In the era of atomized news, articles on topics that interest me, I don’t need a self-contained package of articles of which 90% don’t interest me that I have to pay for because someone determined it was the right news recipe.
And what does it cost to have just enough administrative services to take care of the business of getting those stories to me and manage the internal affairs of your content-publishing company?
If news is atomized and technology devices can distribute it that way, why can’t newspapers and magazines figure out how to atomize their content and sell it that way?
Next excerpt:
The biggest problem, though, is that e-readers work best for "linear reading"—reading long pages of text, as in a book—and not as well for the buffet-like browsing behavior that makes reading a newspaper one of life's great pleasures. Instead of offering well-designed pages that entice readers to skim a story they might otherwise skip, today's e-newspapers merely list headlines or tops of articles, which makes it hard to decide what's worth reading. As a result, although some analysts predict Amazon will sell a half million Kindles in its first 13 months on the market, they estimate only a few thousand buyers have used the device to read a newspaper.
Daniel made a big assumption here, reading a newspaper one of life's great pleasures. The declining readership suggests that a lot of folks don’t find it pleasurable and won’t pay for it.
He’s right Kindle is primarily designed to contain a book library and text-formatted docs. My guess is that newspaper content is being filtered through a conversion process that still treats it like a whole package of related content (by date only) trying to simulate as closely as possible the print version. Wrong approach. Think in database terms: discrete fields of data that allow the consumer to relate data by manipulating filters. For example, I may want to see all stories by a date and time, or range of dates. I may only want stories within a specific topic. Let me see a list of those with a short sample of the content (like Amazon does with books). If I choose one that I want, then charge me for that one at a price that reflects that piece, not the aggregated bundle price of articles I don’t want. Sell it to me for 3 cents.
Look, newspapers and magazines are thinking like the record companies. Because it worked for them to sell multi-song compilations in CDs for $15, they assumed consumers had no options and used that supply-side logic that says we make it that way so that must be consumer preference. Along came iTunes and atomized the catalogues and will sell me a song for 99 cents. Publishers have to shift to demand-side thinking, atomize their inventory and sell me a single article for a reasonable low price.
Last excerpt:
The biggest worry is whether consumers who've grown used to reading newspaper Web sites for free can be persuaded to pay $10 or more a month for an e-newspaper subscription. "Free tends to win out once it's been established in the customers' minds," says James McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research. "I know there are people whose hearts and souls are invested in saving the newspaper concept, but it's breathing its last breath already, in my opinion." As this technology evolves, newspaper junkies like me will be rooting hard that the e-reader evangelists can prove him wrong.
There’s too much assumption packed in that excerpt to address in this post; so, I’ll follow up with more on pricing in a separate post dedicated to it. The most glaring assumption is that consumers want to continue receiving their news in a bundled package from a branded publisher on a daily basis. Maybe some will, but it’s the wrong model in my opinion if it’s the only model you support as publisher.
I don’t think e-ink technology will save newspapers and magazines, because it relies on supply-side thinking and infrastructure, and that is what has killed the medium.
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