Following up on saving newspapers vs saving journalism, this article tells about how small a percentage of the typical newspaper business is really actual journalism. It is very small.
The paper investigated, apparently a pretty good one too, has almost twice as many people just covering sports as it has journalists, for example.
This one is worthwhile too. It outlines some reasons why micropayments doesn't work. For example, it prohibits sharing in this brave new social-networking world.
I was a big fan of micropayments back in the day, and I was one of their biggest sellers when BitPass was working, before it went bust. But it was clear that people preferred to buy a big bundle of content rather than many small bits, even when there was no price advantage to doing so. So I guess it just won't work. I think people don't want to use attention on deciding many times a day whether to spend twenty cents or not.
It would be interesting to study papers from decades ago as well to see if they really were much better. I have a feeling most papers were top-heavy with sports coverage back in the day. Also, before syndication, a comic strip would only appear in one particular paper and they were used to draw readers. Clearly most people cared about the same stuff readers of today do, but we just have more places to get it.
ReplyDeleteYes, they are just drowning in new competition.
ReplyDeleteLike photographers because of digital: everybody can do it now, and they do, so prices of pictures have fallen dramatically.