Like me, you are probably tired of hearing the death knell of the newspaper and print industry, in general. But I have to admit that I am now coming to the very reluctant conclusion that the ‘printed’ form of newspapers, like the old videotape recorder, will most likely cease to exist within the foreseeable future. There is simply no practical reason for (printed) newspapers and magazines to survive. And, unless the news/journalism industry finds a realistic solution to create real substantive revenue to fund the generation of online news stories, especially good investigative journalism, news coverage as we know it is at risk. A good solid enterprise investigative piece can easily cost a newspaper tens of thousands of dollars and it is not unusual for them to run well into six figures, before all is said and done. Additionally, financial costs aside, this does not consider the risks taken by journalists being put into harms way in remote corners of the world. Good investigative pieces will no longer be de rigueur. The compensation to file a story from a war zone, for example, will simply not justify the costs and the personal risks.
‘Rip and read’ broadcast news will no longer be well fed from the trough of story lines generated by the print media from which they have been feeding from over the past 40 years. Aggregators of content, the new online paradigm, may have nothing to link to, since 80% of the words online come from a print originating story.
So what happens in the new digital paradigm, one with out print? We have already seen a host of new content aggregators including Andrew Breitbart’s breitbart.com and Michel Wolfe’s Newser. And I have had the privilege of working with a new company in Eastern Europe with a promising predictive content personalization technology that uses behavioral targeting to aggregate stories. As a recent story in Advertising Age¹ illustrates, the seeds of news content comes from a prevalence of poaching stories. In one month of Politico 14,749 web sites excerpted all or part of Politico stories. 7,101 of these websites sold ads around those stories, and 29% of the average story amounts were excerpted. For one particular Politico story followed for this article, 50 individual sites excerpted all or part of the story; 30 websites provided links back to Politico (40% did not link back and likely had no attribution); 13 copied more than 50% of the story; and only 1 website, Yahoo, has a formal distribution deal.
A great deal has been said and written in recent weeks regarding content aggregators. But, if there is no good income model online; if nobody will opt for micropayments; if nobody subscribes, how long can (good) journalism survive? Understandably, there will always be a dearth of opinion, blog and excerpting of the viral web. But what happens if we lose field reporting in areas of conflict or undercover pieces that cost many thousands of dollars? Will news become so homogenized that we lose any real investigative substance? The vast majority of news content online today originates from a newspaper which thereby creates the very thread of stories and opinion that make up online content/opinion as we know it. New age publishers are going to have to figure out a way to generate revenue in ways that don’t involve dead trees, or they will fail.
So I pose this hypothetical question: If a strong news core goes the way of VCR’s and film cameras, will there be anything left to aggregate online?
¹http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=135627
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