Benutzer:Solphusion/Zukunft der Zeitungsindustrie

Nachrichten auf Papier

News On-Paper or On-Line

Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable

Seminar: Das Netz und die News

http://viadrina.euv-frankfurt-o.de/~sk/SS00/news/plan.html

M U L T I Q U E L L E - The Future of News

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/shane_richmond/go/tag/view/blog_post/Future%20of%20newspapers

http://www.techmeme.com/search/query?q=future+AND+newspaper&wm=false&start=50

Why Do Internet People Think Content People Are Stupid?

I was reading an article where the Boxee CEO said content would eventually be al a Carte. Why does he, like so many other internet people think content producers are stupid ? Has he, along with so many others pushing internet video not noticed what is happening to the revenues of the content and distribution industries ? (...) Which is exactly why, as I have said before, Jeff Bewkes, of Time Warner’s model of TV Everywhere is the EXACT RIGHT MODEL for content creators, cable networks, and video subscription providers like your local cable, telco or satellite provider.

http://blogmaverick.com/2009/03/20/why-do-internet-people-think-content-people-are-stupid/

Kommentar von Boxee CEO mit Antwort von Mark Cuban

http://blogmaverick.com/2009/03/20/why-do-internet-people-think-content-people-are-stupid/#comment-62267

mark,

bundled offering is not going away. what is going away is the traditional concept of a “channel” and the idea that the cable company is the one deciding what content is included in the bundle. the user should and will be the one making the decisions on what he is going to pay for. while it may be bad news for some incumbents it is overall a great positive for the content industry and the consumer.

as a cable channel your primary concern is your ability to negotiate your way into the basic cable package with as many cable operators, and to get the highest fee for it. in an Internet/on-demand world your primary concern is the quality of your content, since you are held accountable by the consumer. if consumers want your content they will be willing to pay for it either with cash or with their time (watching ads).

in the same way that in the Internet age printing a newspaper is an inefficient way to deliver news, building a channel and programming a 24hr schedule is an inefficient way to offer video content. i understand it is a lucrative business. you invest in 1-3 originally produced (or exclusively licensed) core programs, come up with 5-7 cheap to produce shows, license a bunch of syndicated content, get cable companies to carry it and voila! you’ve got a great business. but this model breaks in an on-demand world, and while it may take a few years the change is inevitable.

it may be that the biggest risk you will face is that things are too good for you living off the cable model, and while you are trying to protect your profitable (yet future challenged) business, some talented, hungry, motivated guys on the Internet will produce better content for your audience and eat your lunch.

Kommentar

I often ask these cable cutters what they would pay for an internet-delivered service that gave them 15 of the top channels that THEY want, and it is usually around $10 to $15 a month. That pays to eliminate the hassles, and also to let them watch those specials and other programs that aren’t always on Torrent, at least not regularly.

So forget 500 channels for $50. What if we could deliver them 15 channels. ANY 15 channels, for $10-$15 a month. They pick. ESPN would eat up $3, but I’ll bet most of the others would be far, far less.

It’s still a “bundled” world, but the consumer chooses the bundle. Want a movie bundle? Another $5 gets you Starz, etc. or maybe you give them another $5 and they can pick and choose ANYTHING they want, drag and drop channels into their TV window, until they hit the $5 number.

AND, here’s where it gets interesting. Give them the ability to swap out any or all of their channels each month. Food getting boring? Replace it with Discovery. Current no longer, well, relevant? Replace with OLN.

Bundles are nice. But they are nice for the established way we do business now, which is a technology constrained world - ie there are only so many channels that can fit in a 750mhz pipe, or on a 24-transponder satellite.

The internet eliminates those constraints. And thus business models built on the artificial scarcity will have to change.

jim

Comment by Jim Louderback — March 21, 2009 @ 12:40 am

Kommentar

I think the a la carte idea has merit. Look at iTunes. Apple is hugely successful selling individual songs. Also look at the App store, where you can shell out $30 a month on just a few cool games. Sure, music and TV (or movies) are consumed differently.

But the new iPhone 3.0 subscription model will certainly allow content providers to sell directly to consumers. Which network will be the first to introduce their own iPhone app with their shows delivered on-demand?

The world is going a la carte, and on-demand. People want content anytime and anywhere. But it won’t be easy. The shift is happening right now.

Jose Alvear

Comment by Jose Alvear — March 21, 2009 @ 1:35 am

Kommentar

Once upon a time there was a professional class called Scribes. Scribes were a professional class because the base upon which to learn to write - books - were expensive. Books were purchased by the elites only, and they were purchased by the foot.

Then the printing press happened, and suddenly we had an explosion in writing. The professional class of scribes disappeared as everyone learned to write. This change heralded many other changes, including democracy.

The current change, where in the professional class of “content creators” is being dismantled by the elimination of the monopoly of content distribution, will again change the world. Everyone is going to be “creating content.” In fact they already are. Looked at YouTube lately? Or the Blogosphere? Twitter? Digg? Hacker News?

As an internet person, I don’t think content people are stupid. I just think you guys are in the middle of the traumatic realisation that business as usual isn’t going to cut it any more.

On the upside, with the explosion in content, there is money to be made in being purveyors of quality content. I will willingly pay for content delivered to my laptop that suites my tastes. Probably more than the old networks used to pay for my eyeballs, to boot.

Comment by Brett Morgan — March 21, 2009 @ 2:17 am

Kommentar

In the future, using an intermediary like a Cable, Satellite or Telco TV (IPTV) company, won’t be an option. Content owners will deliver their programming directly to consumers. And they’ll need some technology folk to deliver their programming, so I guess there will be some kind of intermediary. But not like what we know as TV Service Providers today. Comment by Jose Alvear — March 21, 2009 @ 6:07 am

From MC> You couldn’t be more wrong. You might want to look at the economics of content and the technology of telco/cable/sat video distribution. Everything that can be offered on demand on the internet can be offered the same way through cable and telco video subscriptions. The same cheap hard drives that make it easy to support on demand on the net are available to everyone, including cable and telco video providers. The difference is that video providers have a ton more bandwidth and better delivery systems available.

Bepreisung

1. Bepreisung - Vergleiche

• Aktualität -> Reuters
• Stundensatz -> Beratungen
• Minutengebühr -> STN
• Dokumentgebühr -> GBI
• Anzahl der Abrufe -> Marktstudien
• Grundgebühr, Lizenzen (Berichtigungen) -> DIALOG
• Umsatz -> GBI
• Pauschale -> Genios, Lexis-Nexis
• Komforformat -> STN
• Textlänge -> Juris
• Felder-Anzahl -> Genios

• Unbundling

• BEISPIELE: Bericht aus Irak, Bericht aus Köln-Kalk, Bericht über Fußball, Bericht über Kunst, Bericht über Politik, Bericht über Wissenschaft

Fazit

ideales Preismodell: (Problem der Exklusivität - Wettbewerb)(Nur bei Lokalen Themen möglich)

Mix aus:

• Aktualität - first available to subscribers (expensive), then drop it to free sometime after 18-36 hours.
• Textlänge - je länger, so teurer (Mindestlänge)
• Komforformat - mit Videos/Fotos kostenpflichtig - Basis nur Text
• Anzahl der Abrufe - kaum frequentiertes wird kostenlos (nur für Themen wie Sport definierbar, Mindestaufrufe für Kostenpflichtigkeit)

Geschäftsmodelle (klassisch)

• Einzelverkauf
• Abonnenten
• Anzeigen
  • von Unternehmen für Produkte
  • von Unternehmen für Stellenangebote
  • von Privatleuten, Kleinanzeigen

Geschäftsmodelle (online)

• Anzeigen
• Pay-Content mit Teaser -- pay wall
  • 1. Beispiel: Wall Street Journal -> geht nur bei Finanzinformationen, welche generell ungerne geteilt werden
  • 2. Beispiel: New York Times hat es versucht mit QPass u. TimesSelect
  • 3. Beispiel: FT.com erst 30% frei, jetzt nur noch 10%
  • 4. Beispiel: Bloomberg $1,500 a month for its news content, but also offers access to databases and exclusive software
• Personalisierte Zeitung
  • Beispiel 1: I-News der MediaNews Group

ads will be matched to each reader’s choice of stories

• e-Reader
  • Beispiel: e-Reader der Hearst Corp. -- das Gerät soll an Publisher verkauft werden und vom Revenue der auf den Gerätn verkaufen Magazine und Zeitungen soll ein Teil einbehalten werden

• Unbundling

Führer im Jungel der Informationen

• Steven Johnson, CEO des New Yorker Startups Outside.in, glaubt unterdessen, dass sich die Zeitungsverlage im Internet-Zeitalter entsprechend gehörig umorientieren müssen, um langfristig Erfolg zu haben. Das News-Aggregieren und der Verbund in Netzwerken wären das Business-Modell der Zukunft, mutmaßt Johnson.

• Sillicon Alley Insider -> Outside.in

Aggregate, Curate, Network http://www.businessinsider.com/outsidein-saves-newspapers-2009-3

Vergleich online und offline

Nachrichten(Informationen) auf Papier

• statisch
• keine Verknüpfungen (zum Medium - zu anderen Medien)
• Werbung hat hohen Streuverlust
• teure infrastruktur -> dies führt zu geringer Konkurrenz und Bildung von Monopolen

Nachrichten(Informationen) im Hypertext Format

• dynamisch
• Verknüpfungen zu Medien - HYPERLINK!
• Werbung kann gezielt geschaltetet werden
• preiswerte Infrastruktur ohne Kosten für Kopien

print, online, and other non-print content revenue for newspaper http://purplemotes.net/2009/02/16/the-fate-of-traditional-print-media/

Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable

von Clay Shirky

kurze Auszüge

“The Wall Street Journal has a paywall, so we can too!” (Financial information is one of the few kinds of information whose recipients don’t want to share.)

“The New York Times should charge for content!” (They’ve tried, with QPass and later TimesSelect.)

Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.

No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the reporting we need.

Text

Back in 1993, the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain began investigating piracy of Dave Barry’s popular column, which was published by the Miami Herald (...) In the course of tracking down the sources of unlicensed distribution, they found many things, including the copying of his column to alt.fan.dave_barry on usenet; a 2000-person strong mailing list also reading pirated versions; and a teenager in the Midwest who was doing some of the copying himself, because he loved Barry’s work so much he wanted everybody to be able to read it."

Gordy Thompson, who managed internet services at the New York Times (...) said something to the effect of “When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.”

(...) they needed a plan to deal with it, and during the early 90s they came up with not just one plan but several. One was to partner with companies like America Online, a fast-growing subscription service that was less chaotic than the open internet. Another plan was to educate the public about the behaviors required of them by copyright law. Alternatively, they could pursue the profit margins enjoyed by radio and TV, if they became purely ad-supported. New payment models such as micropayments were proposed. (...) Then there was the nuclear option: sue copyright infringers directly, making an example of them.

The unthinkable scenario unfolded something like this: The ability to share content wouldn’t shrink, it would grow. Walled gardens would prove unpopular. Digital advertising would reduce inefficiency, and therefore profits. Dislike of micropayments would prevent widespread use. People would resist being educated to act against their own desires. Old habits of advertisers and readers would not transfer online.

The curious thing about the various plans hatched in the ’90s is that they were, at base, all the same plan: “Here’s how we’re going to preserve the old forms of organization in a world of cheap perfect copies!”

(...) people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke. With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.

The expense of printing created an environment (...) Advertisers had little choice other than to have their money used that way, since they didn’t really have any other vehicle for display ads. The competition-deflecting effects of printing cost got destroyed by the internet, where everyone pays for the infrastructure, and then everyone gets to use it. (...) the law firm hiring a secretary, and that kid down the block selling his bike, were all able to use that infrastructure to get out of their old relationship with the publisher, they did. They’d never really signed up to fund the Baghdad bureau anyway.

offen

“Micropayments work for iTunes, so they will work for us!” (Micropayments only work where the provider can avoid competitive business models.)

“Cook’s Illustrated and Consumer Reports are doing fine on subscriptions!” (Those publications forgo ad revenues; users are paying not just for content but for unimpeachability.)

If you want to know why newspapers are in such trouble, the most salient fact is this: Printing presses are terrifically expensive to set up and to run. This bit of economics, normal since Gutenberg, limits competition while creating positive returns to scale for the press owner, a happy pair of economic effects that feed on each other. In a notional town with two perfectly balanced newspapers, one paper would eventually generate some small advantage — a breaking story, a key interview — at which point both advertisers and readers would come to prefer it, however slightly. That paper would in turn find it easier to capture the next dollar of advertising, at lower expense, than the competition. This would increase its dominance, which would further deepen those preferences, repeat chorus. The end result is either geographic or demographic segmentation among papers, or one paper holding a monopoly on the local mainstream audience. --> aufgrund der hohen Hardwarekosten gibt es nur wenige Zeitungen, diese wachsen langsam, wenn eine bessere Artikel hat, entsteht klassischer Weise ein thematisches oder geografisches Monopol

Outside.in Saves Newspapers

http://www.businessinsider.com/outsidein-saves-newspapers-2009-3

Aggregate Readers are looking elsewhere for national news, sports, finance and entertainment news. In order to differentiate and compete for readers, local media companies need to get “more local” or hyperlocal. They need to answer the question: "What's happening right around me right now?"

However, the current business model and editorial cost structure don’t allow them to hire reporters to cover every neighborhood.

At the same time there is an explosion of hyperlocal content being created right now. Professional and amateur bloggers, local reviews, municipal data. Today there are hundreds or thousands of “stringers” in every market that are craving more traffic and more revenue.

This creates an opportunity.

That opportunity centers on Aggregation. Dynamically sourcing every single local piece of content and organizing by discrete neighborhoods -- or even specific addresses -- gives the kind of targeted and timely local coverage that print newspapers never dreamed of attempting.

Curate But every publisher has a different editorial voice and a different audience. And the quality of the content in this new model varies much more dramatically than traditional editorial content coming out of a newsroom. How do you make sure you are featuring only the content you want and not sources or posts that don’t fit your editorial vision?

That’s where Curation comes in — being able to sit at a dashboard and pick and chose, highlight and suppress — make editorial decisions on top of a massive aggregated data set.

Historically, editors make curatorial decisions about their own internal content — which stories to assign, what to feature on page one. Going forward, those types of curatorial decisions will be made on other people’s content as well.

Jeff Jarvis says to "cover what you do best and link to the rest" and the new model for news will involve lots of linking to other sources -- but there will be editorial choices involved in that linking. The whole point of curation is to link to the best of the rest.

Network But how do you solve the revenue and inventory challenges these companies face? One way is to build Networks. Local sales efforts are done best by local sales teams. Period.

Local inventory is becoming a commodity because the national ad networks have massive volume and can sell at lower rates, effectively driving prices down.

Local sales teams have the best relationships and the greatest opportunity to create solutions for their advertisers, if they only had the inventory that ad networks have. Local papers will be able to offer geo-targeted ads -- down to individual neighborhoods or smaller -- that will be uniquely appealing to those local businesses.

So, newspapers need to become the network. They need to partner with the blogs and hyperlocal media properties in your market and represent their inventory. This will allow newspapers to compete for sizable budgets in their markets and leverage their longstanding relationships with local merchants that the big networks don't have.

Sure, there will be different margins because revenue needs to be shared with the bloggers, but today's ad networks are big, growing and profitable. Local newspapers should be too.

Old Growth Media And The Future Of News

The following is a speech I gave yesterday at the South By Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin.

http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/2009/03/the-following-is-a-speech-i-gave-yesterday-at-the-south-by-southwest-interactive-festival-in-austiniif-you-happened-to-being.html

Could Customized Newspapers Bring Readers Back?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/09/business/media/09print.html

Text

MediaNews Group, the nation’s fourth-largest newspaper chain, said it would test a customized newspaper service this summer at The Los Angeles Daily News. (...) The service, which allows readers to pick and choose only the stories that interest them (...) MediaNews’s experiment, which it has named “individuated news” .

“I-News is really about choice,” said Peter R. Vandevanter, vice president for targeted products at MediaNews. “We’ll let the reader decide what they want to read and on what platform.” (...) It is unclear if subscribers will pay extra for the printer, or if it will be part of the subscription fee.

At the Nieman Journalism Lab, part of Harvard’s Nieman Foundation, a blogger related it to the many failed experiments years ago to market a fax newspaper, the first of which was in 1939 in St. Louis.

Back to the future: MediaNews revives “print your own newspaper”

The Nieman Journalism Lab http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/03/back-to-the-future-medianews-revives-print-your-own-newspaper/

MediaNews Group has announced plans for I-News, a system that will print your own customized newspaper on your own printer:

Text

The “individuated” stories selected by each reader are sent to a special printer being developed for MediaNews that each customer would have at home. The printer will format the stories and print them or send them to a computer or mobile phone for viewing later in the day. Ads will be delivered as well. Where possible, the ads will be matched to each reader’s choice of stories. For example, a reader who selects high school sports stories might receive ads from retail sports stores, or skiers might receive ski-related ads.

It’s difficult to imagine a lot of enthusiasm greeting the i-News concept. Among the grounds for skepticism:

• The goal of reducing print frequency won’t be accomplished by shifting printing expense to consumers. The price of reams of paper and printing cartridges will likely outstrip the consumer’s cost of a home delivered paper on newsprint.
• The system adds inconvenience at the consumer end in the form of printer management.
• It can already be done with FeedJournal, free, without a dedicated piece of equipment. Why would readers want to pay for a narrower service that requires another appliance in their house?
• This method eliminates or minimizes serendipity, which is one of the things print still does better than digital delivery; it’s something consumers like, for both news and advertising content.
• Newspaper companies should be getting out of the hardware business, not into it, and especially should avoid investing in proprietary, dedicated devices like this.

Hearst to launch a wireless e-reader

The publisher plans to introduce a large-format device this year based on electronic-ink technology. http://money.cnn.com/2009/02/27/technology/copeland_hearst.fortune/

Text

Hearst, which publishes magazines ranging from Cosmopolitan to Esquire and newspapers including the financially imperiled San Francisco Chronicle, has developed a wireless e-reader with a large-format screen suited to the reading and advertising requirements of newspapers and magazines. The device and underlying technology, which other publishers will be allowed to adapt, is likely to debut this year. (...) So-called e-readers like Kindle and the Sony Reader are hand-held gadgets that use electronic "ink" ...

Hearst exec Kenneth Bronfin says that e-readers "will be a big part of our future."

With print revenue in decline and online revenue unable to fill the gap, the $300 billion global publishing industry is increasingly looking to devices like e-readers to lower costs while preserving the business model that has sustained newspapers and magazines.

What Hearst and its partners plan to do is sell the e-readers to publishers and to take a cut of the revenue derived from selling magazines and newspapers on these devices. The company will, however, leave it to the publishers to develop their own branding and payment models.

(...) it has been designed with the needs of publishers in mind. That includes its form, which will approximate the size of a standard sheet of paper, rather than the six-inch diagonal screen found on Kindle, for example. (...) For durability, the device is likely to have a flexible core, perhaps even foldable, rather than the brittle glass substrates used in readers on the market today.

Kenneth Bronfin, who heads up the interactive media group for Hearst (...) led an investment by Hearst more than a decade ago in E Ink, a Cambridge, Mass.-based startup spun out of research at MIT, that supplies the electronic-ink technology used in the vast majority of e-readers on the market today, including Amazon's Kindle, devices from Sony), and a crop of next-generation products set to launch in the next 12 to 18 months.

Telekom testet elektronische Zeitung

http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/tech/0,1518,569756,00.html

Die Deutsche Telekom experimentiert nach Informationen des SPIEGEL mit einem E-Paper: Im Herbst will der Konzern einige Dutzend Kunden in Berlin mit einem portablen Lesegerät ausrüsten, das Nachrichten anzeigt. Einen News-Lieferanten für die elektronische Zeitung hat die Telekom bislang nicht.

The German powerhouse plans a test run with a few dozen prototypes in Berlin this fall. The project is code-named “News4me” and is carried by Deutsche Telekom Laboratories, one of the company’s R&D arms. Peter Möckel, head of Deutsche Telekom’s R&D department, says his company sees a market in the gap between mobile phones and laptops. http://www.crunchgear.com/2008/08/04/germanys-telekom-is-developing-a-kindle-competitor/

News4Me Personalisierte elektronische Zeitungen überall empfangen Das Projekt News4Me hat zum Ziel, eine individuelle, elektronische Zeitung zu erstellen. Komplette Ausgaben oder einzelne Rubriken aus unterschiedlichen Zeitungen können abonniert und dann zum mobilen Endgerät übertragen werden. Inhalte und Layout werden entsprechend des individuellen Leseverhaltens kontinuierlich angepasst. Der Nutzer profitiert zukünftig überall vom bequemen Zugriff auf aktuelle Nachrichten und Informationen, die seinen persönlichen Interessen entsprechen. http://www.laboratories.telekom.com/ipws/Deutsch/News/Archiv/2008/Pages/News4Me.aspx

• Algorithmus filtert Artikel nach individuellem Interesse

http://www.innovations-report.de/html/berichte/kommunikation_medien/bericht-112121.html

Is this the newspaper of the future?

Last month I wrote about flexible display company Plastic Logic, who plan to have a factory up-and-running to produce electronic readers by 2008. Yesterday, Polymer Vision announced the Readius, an electronic reader with a rollable screen that folds to the size of a mobile phone.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/shane_richmond/blog/2007/02/07/is_this_the_newspaper_of_the_future

Plastic Logic Reader

the Plastic Logic reader is already being touted by some sources as the Kindle killer. At this week's Tools of Change for Publishing Conference in New York

http://www.coolhunting.com/archives/2009/02/plastic_logic_r.php

Pew Survey Confirms What We All Know: Net Beats Newspapers As A Source For News

Quelle: http://www.buzzfeed.com/search?q=newspapers&page=2

More people get their news from the Net than from newspapers. While this will hardly count as news to most of our readers, the Pew Research Center seems surprised by the shift. In a survey of 1,489 adults in the U.S. conducted in early December, 40 percent said they get most of their national and international news from the Internet, compared to 35 percent from newspapers. The percentage of newspaper readers has been pretty steady since 2005. What’s changed is the number of people admitting they get their news from the Internet as well, up from 24 percent the last time the Pew Center asked this question in September, 2007.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/12/25/pew-survey-confirms-what-we-all-know-net-beats-newspapers-as-a-source-for-news/

Time to start a newspaper

Own your Zip code. The next frontier is local, and this is a great way to start. http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/01/time-to-start-a.html

Hearst, MediaNews: You can invent the future in San Francisco

MEMO TO: Steven Swartz (CEO, Hearst Newspapers) and Dean Singleton (CEO, MediaNews Group) http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/02/hearst-medianews-you-can-invent-the-future-in-san-francisco/

Text

They should drop all breaking news and focus on analysis and features. Their biggest value to readers would be as a guide to all other media. (...) And yet this whole package is sold as a “news” paper, in a package wrapped with a breaking news section. This may have made sense until a decade ago, but it doesn’t any more. Build up the “guide to all media” functionality — that’s the part subscribers are paying for, because they want and need it. Keep arts, travel, books, movies and all the rest. Add technology, internet and even magazine coverage. Include some geographically zoned sections if ad demand warrants it. Build other weekly, monthly or seasonal niche publications using the enterprise’s wealth of content.

Now, here’s the second big, bold step to consider: Drop all other daily editions. Perhaps not immediately, but soon. Concentrate your sales efforts on moving the bulk of the week’s advertisers into the weekend edition.

If you move directly and completely to digital delivery of news, your audience will follow (...) Attract social networks around content areas. This is critical—in a sense, newspapers have always served as community social network hubs; they need to do so online.

Google to Digitize Newspaper Archives

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/09/technology/09google.html

Text

Google has begun scanning microfilm from some newspapers’ historic archives to make them searchable online, first through Google News and eventually on the papers’ own Web sites. Readers will be able to search the archives using keywords and view articles as they appeared originally in the print pages of newspapers. It will obtain permission from newspaper publishers before scanning their archives.

Google said it was working with more than 100 newspapers and with partners like Heritage Microfilm and ProQuest, which aggregate historical newspaper archives in microfilm. It has already scanned millions of articles

Google will place advertisements alongside search results, and share the revenue from those ads with newspaper publishers.

But many newspaper publishers view search engines like Google as threats to their own business. Many of them also see their archives as a potential source of revenue, and it is not clear whether they will willingly hand them over to Google. “The concern is that Google, in making all of the past newspaper content available, can greatly commoditize that content, just like news portals have commoditized current news content,” said Ken Doctor, an analyst with Outsell, a research company.

Newspapers that are participating in the Google program say it is attractive. “We wouldn’t be talking about digitization if Google had not entered this arena,” said Tim Rozgonyi, research editor at The St. Petersburg Times. “We looked into it years back, and it appeared to be exceedingly costly.”

Newspapers’ Digital Biz Models: Guardian, FT, Bloomberg

Text

How much money do newspapers make from online and how long does print have left? A session on newspaper business models at the FT Digital Media and Broadcasting conference wasted no time in finding out the score for its panelists: John Ridding, CEO of the Financial Times and FT.com, says his business makes 20 percent of revenue from online while Tim Brooks, MD of Guardian News and Media, paidContent:UK’s parent company, said it was 15 percent for GNM.

FT.com gets less free: the FT‘s Ridding predicts a “happy digital ending” for newspapers, but said the answer will be found through subscriptions, not advertising. FT.com’s part-free business model has been much discussed, but the “free” part of that equation is shrinking: in October FT.com reduced the number of stories you can read without a subscription from 30 to 20 per month—Ridding said in passing that that number is now just 10 stories per month. The FT has always said 30 was a starting point that would be tweaked in future. FT Group profits rose 13 percent to £195 million in 2008 thanks in part to increased subscriptions, so the company appears to be seeing how far towards entirely paid it can practically go.

Brooks admits executives within GNM have discussions about charging for content “all the time”, but the company’s aim is to expose its journalism to as many people as possible so it will stay free for now. The next part of GNM’s strategy is unveiled Tuesday when it announces plans to open up the company’s digital infrastructure to the world through an “open platform”.

The real competition to newspapers are online-only publications, professional blogs and social networks: “Twitter will be the best news feed on Earth. If you want to know what’s going on in the world right now, you should go to Twitter.” Fenwick’s advice, apart from killing print, is to leverage news sites against sites like Facebook, “create the greatest mobile site” and find ways to give readers not just news but things like data and useful apps. Bloomberg charges $1,500 a month for its news content, but also offers access to databases and exclusive software.

Kommentare

- israel lheureux I’ve always thought news should adopt the High-Tech business model: expensive at first, cheaper later. Instead of putting content behind an all-or-nothing paywall, make it first available to subscribers (expensive), then drop it to free sometime after 18-36 hours. That way, information can be both expensive AND free. The price point never starts at 0 for high tech products. But it always ends up that way. News should be the same.

- Kingsley Idehen I still don’t understand why newspaper business proprietors (and other bastions of old media for that matter) still don’t understand the following: 1. The Web is morphing into a structured and federated database 2. Every business enterprise is a database curation business in disguise 3. Database depth and quality matters 4. The medium of value exchange has changed from TV, Newspaper, Radio to a digital imprint on the Web called a URI (a URL for People, Places, Events, and related facts etc.) 5. Data is like “Wine” 6. Pathways in, through, and across high quality vintage databases is how you maximize the real asset: Data 7. Data is the new energy, so tap into it now! Subscription models applied to semi-structured content is not the way. The same goes for traditional obtrusive Ad models, both are completely broken. Basically, “Shrink Happens”, but it doesn’t have to be the business model, just the medium of value exchange

First it was the New York Times, and now its the UK Guardian. Both have realized that they are sitting on treasure troves databases covering people, facts, and events etc.. Shrinking the value exchange medium is in full progress across the newspaper industry. Read: 1. http://www.guardian.co.uk/open-platform Kingsley

The future of newspapers in 1981, and what it tells us about emerging technologies

http://www.futuresavvy.net/?p=341

A fascinating 1981 two-minute KRON news story about home computers and the future of newspapers. The story covers the pilot project of two San Francisco newspapers seeking to create an online edition. The presenter starts: “Imagine if you will sitting down with your morning coffee and turning to your computer to read the day’s newspaper. Well it’s not as far fetched as it seems…”

28 years later it’s exactly what we do. But it seemed far-fetched then, and this was not a misjudgment: it has taken us until now, the full 28 years in most developed countries, to get to the point where mass online newspapers rival mass print editions in the market.

The news clip features early 1980s computers - the text-only green screens - and achingly slow phone-set modems. A newspaper takes two hours to download (with no picture, ads, or comics). So there are technology limitations.

Then there are economic barriers: the local-call hourly charge is $5 (=$10 for the paper) while the print copy costs 20c.

And there are system-wide market-adoption issues: there are only “two to three thousand” home computers in the Bay Area at the time. Home computer penetration is obviously related to utility (usefulness/cost) of the machine.

The Future of News: 14 Years Ago

Arthur Sulzberger & Walter Isaacson on making money online — in 1995

The Neiman Journalism Lab has gotten its hands on a forum with the Publisher of the NYT and the-then Editor of Digital for Time Inc., in which they struggle with the question of how the Interwebs were going to impact their print biz.

http://battellemedia.com/archives/004877.php

Charlie Rose - Marc Andreessen

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4837435862114260403&ei=16m9SaDBOJWG2wKRnNHFAQ&q=Marc+Andreessen%2C

ab 30. Minute

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http://www.metaprinter.com/2009/01/metaprintercom-launches-newspaper-and-new-media-news-aggregator/

The Metaprinter News Aggregator is currently tracking the 27 newspaper blogs and news sites listed below (in no particular order).

PBS.org’s IdeaLab NAA Digital Edge Blog OnTheMedia.org Metaprinter.com PressThink BuzzMachine ContentBridges.com Financial Times Media Yahoo Finance: Publishers-newspapers Doc Searls Weblog MondayNote Rob Curley Nieman Lab Poynter.org NY Times Media RoughType TimWindsor.com Seth Godin PrintCEOBlog Cnet News - The Social Newsosaur Mashable A List Apart Fitz&Jen TechCrunch Gannett Blog CJR.org

As the Internet Grows Up, the News Industry Is Forever Changed

The news industry, congenitally nervous about its future, looks at the Web this spring and sees cause for panic. Advertisers are rushing to the Internet. Readers, even of the best newspapers and magazines, are abandoning print

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/13/AR2006061300929.html

The structured web and journalism

About a year ago I wrote a couple of posts about the future of newspapers. In the first, News from Nowhere, I raised the possibility of a 'semantic newspaper', one where the articles are not written but constructed from various pieces.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/shane_richmond/blog/2007/10/12/the_structured_web_and_journalism