Old Media: More Utterly Clueless than Ever
We all know about the struggle old media is having finding viewers for their crap content. In this Internet age, we’re no longer restricted like we once were in the news we have available to us. Old media doesn’t get how the Internet works — if you want to charge money for your newspaper, it sure as hell better be better than free alternatives. And often, it isn’t. Find a popular story on the web and watch how many people write an article about it. That’s what old media “journalism” has become — copying what other people have already written. That’s all fine and dandy and back in the days when someone only had access to a handful of papers, they actually thought this was news…
Between Digg, Technorati, Delicious, Google News, Google Blog Search, and Twitter, I can find out just about anything the media ever reports on and often a full day or two before they cover the story. I honestly don’t know why old media even tries to compete with these websites — why not try and deliver more local news or other areas which are underserved? What’s laughable is that the old media thinks we need them — wake up. The sad reality is that the mediocre content journalists provide isn’t something most people are prepared to pay for on the Internet. People nowadays want the facts — not some bonehead that has a degree in journalism (aka a degree in nothing).
What exactly is a journalist? Slate recently published an article on the new domain name extensions soon coming out and on cybersquatting that was plagued with errors in every paragraph. The article read very well and if you weren’t a domainer, you’d probably think Slate did a great job covering the subject — the fact is, they didn’t. I’ll take an expert 100 times out of 100 over a journalist. What we need in this Internet age are more experts, not parrots. Why can someone like Aaron Wall (SEO Book) successfully charge large subscription subscriptions fees online while most newspapers can’t manage to get even $5 per month? Aaron happens to be much more knowledgeable about the topic of SEO than most people out there, while journalists have no marketable skills in the online world — that’s all it really comes down to.
Take a look at how many people wrote about Wordpress releasing version 2.8.1… Now why would I pay to have access to content like that when 200 other people have linked to it and likely written the exact same thing — and for free.? The NY Times has recently been talking about everything from subscriptions to charging you a small fee to access any article. Who the heck is going to pay money to access an article written by a journalist? There’s rarely anything unique there. Do something creative — survey 100,000 people about what they feel is currently underserved online and mark my words, people will pay for that. Writing an article about the person who did such a survey and giving your thoughts on it doesn’t add enough value to command a price. What’s wrong with free? Tech Crunch makes $100,000+ per month from advertising on their free website. If all you’re doing is putting your offline stories online, you can’t possibly have much in the way of additional expenses by choosing to go online.
Old media has work tirelessly and spent enormous amounts of money to build their brands — why would they throw all that hard work away for nothing? Is charging $5 per month for access worth having most of your visitors defecting to a free solution? And now for something even more ridiculous — would you ever link to someone’s website if they charged you money for the privilege of providing them with a link? How about requiring people to pay money for as little as quoting 5 words from your article? Isn’t that a great way to guarantee you get few links and search engine referrals?
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July 11th, 2009 at 2:09 pm
I always joke that I will take out the local paper here with a new online paper. I could do it with a moderate staff and probably make money in the first two years. If I didn’t have a successful business already I would try it. I can’t stand to see the old media sit on their hands and wait. They think just because they have a twitter account they are hip and modern. Its more than that and you don’t have to give it away. Yes ad rates are 10% of the hardcopy edition but its a reality and making less money is better than dying.
July 11th, 2009 at 4:10 pm
They do not call journalists anymore, they are call news gatherers aka cut and paste.
July 11th, 2009 at 5:22 pm
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I absolutely agree that traditional journalism is in a sorry state and not just because of the internet. When journalists started giving up objectivity in their reporting, they started down on a slippery slope of presenting personal opinion as news. Yes, there is a place for editorial opinion, but it should be clearly presented as such. Believe it or not, people like their news straight–they like being able to come to their own conclusions about what the news story means to them.
Journalism as a field is definitely is at a serious crossroads; those who adapt to the new reality will survive. There will always be a place for good journalists (also known as “Jack-of-all-trades” because if they don’t know much about a topic, they will do their research). However, the actual newspaper structure needs to change to an internet format–and fast.
Yes, I would pay for a subscription to, say, The New York Times and, maybe, my local newspaper, IF I could get my daily fix on a portable internet-enabled device, such as a Kindle. At least I would know that the writers would be vetted and that I wouldn’t have to suffer through bad writing, horrid sentence structure, and unclear statements. Except for a few well-funded sites, citizen “journalism” tends to stink. No one wants to pay good writers what they are worth, so citizen journalism sites tend to hire anyone, whether or not they can write well.
To get my subscription $$$, a professional newspaper site would have to do the following:
1. Keep the site simple, free of pop ups, slide across ads, and flashing images, so that it doesn’t take forever to load a page. Simple ads would be okay, for I do understand the realities of running a news site.
2. Give me access to their archives for free or at a reduced cost.
3. Offer other goodies, such as the book review and entertainment sections: ONLINE!
4. Make navigation as easy as possible, and also offer instant indexing of important news stories.
5. Most important, give me back my objective news stories, and don’t tell me how to think. Let me digest the news the way I want. If I want someone to “analyze” a situation for me, then I’ll go to CNN or MSNBC or some other political wonk site. For breaking news, I’ll go to Twitter’s Trending Topics (which often breaks news hours before CNN).
Newspapers have just been too slow in reacting to modern times. By not being proactive (by placing their internet ducks in a row, say, about 1990), they are now scrambling to keep up with the flow of internet news, much of it poorly written.
In the end, quality will prevail, but it may take a few years for the Old Gray Lady and her ilk to pick themselves up and adjust to an internet world.
By the way, as a side note, I have noticed that domain bloggers often just regurgitate what other domainers and, yes, what real journalists post online. Moreover, I have seen more bad grammar and creative spelling on domainer blogs than anywhere else. I figure that if a blogger doesn’t take care of the basics, why should I find his or her posts credible? Why should I believe that the blogger’s research methodology is any better than his/her sloppy spelling and sentence structure?
Just a thought, not aimed at this particular blog.
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July 11th, 2009 at 6:24 pm
Completely agree Shane - 10% is 10% better than nothing. They might need to do like GM — restructure themselves and cut the fat. I’m sure at least some parts of their newspaper would be profitable if properly managed.
Ms. Domainer, thanks for taking the time to leave such a thought-provoking comment. I think you’re right about a lot of us bloggers are guilty of poor grammar / spelling for which there really is no excuse and it certainly would come off as being unprofessional to many.
Like you said, they need to go back to objective news and not try to compete with sites like Twitter which more and more people are using to get their breaking news. Rarely have I not already heard about any breaking news by the time the media mentions it — between Twitter, Digg, Technorati, etc — not likely someone hasn’t mentioned it if the story was any bit important.
July 11th, 2009 at 9:36 pm
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Reece,
Thanks.
I enjoy your blog and your comments on Namepros.
July 12th, 2009 at 7:19 am
Now now. I briefly flirted with journalism in college. Was put off after meeting a Pulitzer prize winning journalist who said he would sell his own grandmother to get a story. He said it with some pride.
Think of the concept of a “scoop.” I mean, back before commercial flight and instant communication, I can see where getting a story first was important. But as we came into the modern age, and the scoop became an advantage of minutes rather than days, it all seemed rather silly. Now the networks jump all over each other to bring the latest Michael Jackson tidbit at 3:39PM rather than 3:40PM. They still act on the mentality of a century ago.
If they haven’t woken up to that, I see little hope that they will wake up to the internet.
July 12th, 2009 at 7:18 pm
Let them die - they deserve it.
In my city, Vancouver BC, one company owns 3 of the 4 daily newspapers. They can’t seem to figure out the the reason they are losing money is that they are competing with themselves. An awful lot of the articles are simply paid advertising fleshed out into stories of little relevance.
I get my news online for free, the writing’s not great but I’m stupid enough not to notice, and the content is fresh. Realistically in the time it takes to print an article, the story is old, I’ve already read it and I’ve got context and discussion from the radio.
Let them die.