Feb
20
Written by:
Dan Maas
2/20/2009
Just as the idea of a school without textbooks is unfathomable to so many people, so is a major city with no newspaper. While Tuscon and Denver are not there yet (both still have other newspapers), the closure of the Tuscon Citizen with over 130 years of history is hard to ignore...
Just as the idea of a school without textbooks is unfathomable to so many people, so is a major city with no newspaper. While Tuscon and Denver are not there yet (both still have other newspapers), the closure of the Tuscon Citizen with over 130 years of history is hard to ignore... but it is happening and it is because of the shift in media. Newspapers have been, throughout American history, the lifeblood of an informed public. But today, their business models are collapsing. So much of their revenue has been based on classified ad sales and advertising from the private sector, that the Internet in general and sites like craigslist.org are taking their toll. Why pay a newspaper to print your ad for a limited circulation when it can freely distributed to an unlimited audience? Without advertising revenue to pay for the overhead of a newspaper, how can they survive? Does an informed public need newspapers or just news?
I connect this trend to textbooks and have visited schools that are becoming increasingly less reliant on the industrial-age standard for authoritative information. From a school in Colorado Springs (Harrison) where there are no textbooks to our own music teachers who decided against a textbook last year to afford technology that would better enhance their instruction, the trend is on the move. When information is a self-service inductry that is nearly free to publish and distribute, it changes the dynamics. I think the only hope for newspapers is for them to migrate to the web... nearly all have web sites, but how many update their web sites only after they go to print? And having web sites is only the beginning. People don't just want information distributed to them... they want to co-create information and news (note the Prahalad &Krishnan book reference [;-).
Our industry is being impacted too, but since we are tax-funded, the impact is slower to arrive. Government functions are always more resistant to change, which is often a good thing as it can provide stability in times of crisis. But our mission is to prepare kids for the future and more educators are abandoning the reliance on textbooks... in preference to the co-creation of knowledge WITH students.
5 comment(s) so far...
Re: Cities without newspapers... what's next? Schools without textbooks?!?
A timely posting given the demise of the Rocky Mountain News today. I think part of the problem with newspapers is that they made a fundamental error in the beginning - they gave away too much online content for free. Now it may be too late to put the genie back in the bottle. Subscriptions dropped as people seem to think they can "just get their news for free on the internet." What many do not stop and think about is, if their newspaper goes under, the online version goes with it. Others argue that blogs are the way to go. Many "news blogs" are really more of news aggregators, though. Without the original news reporting, we will be left with a hodgepodge of tightly focused blogs whose "reporters" are only constrained by their equally tightly focused readership. As I was contemplating losing the Rocky last night, I mused about the role of professional vs. amateur journalism. I was often struck by the Pulitzer prize winning photographers of the the Rocky who brought the news to us visually. Perhaps it was the cover photo of Todd Helton, arms raised, celebrating going to the World series. Perhaps you might have been struck by the photography in the aftermath of Columbine. Those images tend to stay with us. I just don't think someone's grainy cell phone pic is going to have the same effect.
By Ava Webster on
2/27/2009
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Re: Cities without newspapers... what's next? Schools without textbooks?!?
I agree with much of what you've written. However, I think the mistake the newspapers have made is not to build their business model around the web. It would be impossible for them to control information access... if they tried to control it and not "give it away," people would just go elsewhere. The revenue for newspapers is not based on subscription fees anyway.
The revenue is based on advertising. The newspapers that insist on depending on pages and pages of ads inserted into an ever shrinking collection of articles plus a classified section are doomed. Look to Google's example. Information is free, but in giving information away, there is A LOT of money to be made. This is a fundamental failure to understand the new nature of media and information. And I worry that we will make the same mistakes thinking it's about textbooks...
www.coloradodaily.com/news/2009/feb/26/rocky-mountain-news-close-publish-final-edition-fr/
By Dan Maas on
2/27/2009
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Re: Cities without newspapers... what's next? Schools without textbooks?!?
I saw a discussion about online newspaper/magazine revenue streams just the other day but can't remember where it was. The guy had an interesting thought - what if the the news aggregator sites paid for linking through to articles?
>>Look to Google's example. Information is free, but in giving information away, there is A LOT of money to be made. <<
Yes, but isn't Google in one respect really just a giant aggregator? They _are_ making money - based upon the work done by others. Again, who is going to pay the reporters to go out and investigate the story to begin with? Will we be looking at the newspaper version of wikipedia? The Rocky already had something similar to that with its "Your Hub" section. Lots and lots of stories about what the local school was doing, what the kids were doing, etc. I don't see any in-depth investigative reporting coming from that model. Who gets invited to a White House press conference in a world of news by blogging? Even on a lighter note, who will tell us which athlete is using which cliches if there are no sports reporters with the inside scoop on the locker room? While we may not have print newspapers in the future, there will still be a need for journalists. Now we just have to figure out how to pay them.
"If you don't read the newspaper, you are uninformed; if you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed." -- Mark Twain
By Ava Webster on
2/27/2009
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Re: Cities without newspapers... what's next? Schools without textbooks?!?
Google makes (tons) of money just finding links to resources. They do it by showing you an ad just before you leave Google to go to the authorative site. An online newspaper would be the destination and the revenue would come from the ads that would be in place upon your arrival. This is not hard and the overhead is tiny compared to newspapering... and there is plenty of revenue potential to hire the reporters and photographers and... and... and... look at Google's revenue: they have so much money, they build web-based software for free. And they are just the search tool. An online news company that figures this out can make this work in a big way. And of course, they already are and the loss of our beloved Rocky is really just a warning to those who fail to understand the migration to the new medium. We do not have to sacrifice any quality... in news or in education... by going to the new medium.
By Dan Maas on
2/27/2009
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Re: Cities without newspapers... what's next? Schools without textbooks?!?
Hey Dan, after our blogging conversation about newspapers going out of business, thought you might like to read this link www.bizjournals.com/denver/stories/2009/04/06/daily16.html which takes you to a post about AP looking at charging news aggregators, etc. for its stories - much like how I talked about how newspapers should have charged for their online product from the start and how they should currently charge for linking through.
Here's a sample-
"The Associated Press will cut fees paid by U.S. newspapers that run its news coverage and says it will challenge websites that run its news content for free.
"We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work. ... We are mad as hell, and we are not going to take it anymore'" ...
"AP said it will work harder to protect its copyright, which has been difficult to defend with the proliferation of news sites on the Internet."
"The service is fighting with websites about use of its text under “fair use” rules and it has sued some news aggregator sites, too."
By Ava Webster on
4/7/2009
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