The Death & Birth of News

They need to adapt to the modern times. Going digital is the smartest decision.

awesome video that sums up the state of the newspaper biz in this really bizarre time.

did you say SF Chron loses $1 million / week? how is that possible?

Most of these newspapers were bought by a leverage buyout and that purely means the age of greed has left the printed media in disarray and forced to make payments that are impossible to make. Don't think for one minute that this is a sole outcome of the digital age because it isn't. Their is a nitch for a newspaper in many people's lives and they will sorely be missed. If you look to online news sources the most common news item was brought to you by a newspaper, what will happen now is anyones guess. I only hope that a reliable source can pick up the slack and we are not relying on blogs the rest of our lives.

Anyone else catch the irony of this story of local reporters wrestling with how to find ways of generating ad revenue while being immediately followed by Current.com's new video add for the Nissan Cube?

Irony, you are my favorite kind of humor, next to quick British wit of course . . . nothing tops that!

I love the shift toward local, immediately relevant news... there's been so much neuroscientific research about the effects of non-local news on our brain's cognitive load and also, emotionally, on our subjective well-being... turns out we are happier knowing more about things that are "local" and immediately relevant and directly connected to our everyday lives... so something like EveryBlock that puts news in context is fantastic. I want to know more about my immediate neighborhood and get less riled up about things that I have no control over or direct impact from...

Kennymotown is correct. The media magnates loaded up with debt while purchasing the smaller regional papers. Then they cut costs by delivering a sanitized, vanilla version of the "news' to all of their affliates. Why should they be surprised that local people stop buying "news" that has failed to acknowledge the heart and soul of the local community? It is a newspaper version of Walmart. Now let them reap the harvest of poor judgement; no bailouts, please. Of course, some self serving politicians may demand that we save them in the interest of "freedom of speech". They are only protecting the local voice for the politicians agendas. I am disgusted!

can anyone tell me how the SF Examiner is still up and running when it is distributed for free daily throughout the city?

I'm an actual newspaper employee. Lack of interest and the digital era is partially the problem. The biggest problem is ad revenues. People want a newspaper that most likely just can't afford to be produced any more. There's so many factors to list, decline in revenues, greater market share of classified ad revenues, increases in print costs, gas costs for distribution. But people still do want the paper and the investigative journalism they bring would put any city without it in a major conundrum. Print advertising is still just as effective and affordable, as any other advertising I believe.

I see people say things like "They need to adapt to the modern times. Going digital is the smartest decision." If it was that easy it would have happened.

No one in publishing is fighting digital news, but you cannot afford to do any real journalism from web ad revenue, period.

Look at all the blogs and online news today, most of them are referencing stories from tv or print media, so what will blogger talk about when no one does the initial reporting, not to mention does it in a professional journalistic, and (mostly) objective fashion?

No one is paying 10,000+ for banner impressions. Are papers just supposed to move to all-digital and do it for free?

Idiots.

Having on demand information and being able to source information from different sources at any given time is great, but digital news also means anyone can set themselves up as a journalist and write a blog.
That makes the professionally qualified and legally trained journalist an endangered species.
Then there's also the irony of the situation that no one hates change more than a journalist.

great piece on a super interesting topic! looking forward to checking out those local news sources.

coincidentally, i just sat down and read the Chronicle for the first time in a while today (i normally get all my news online) and was surprised how much i enjoyed the experience. i am slowly re-integrating paper into my work and entertainment flows as i become more and more aware of feeling physically affected (eyestrain, neck/back aches, zapped of energy) from spending too much time (ie all day) at the computer.

i love the flexibility (search, easy cross referencing, instant access to the data you want) found in online news but i think the next important step is to get the articles you want to read onto devices that dont strain the eyes (like paper, except not wasteful). gps targeted iphone ads seem like a really great way to monetize and actually serve consumers with ads relevant to them, making the ads feel less obtrusive.

I tried doing this in my small town a year ago but with a different model and it didn't work; one because there's a lot of old people here who think a mouse is an animal and also my selling skills are not too great :)
But
This is a great idea and it should continue to be pursued, it's not going to work EVERYWHERE but as time passes it will.

One question though, what happens if one of the local business owners happens to kill someone... does the journalist still write about it even if the business owner is paying him?

It's over, well almost. We still get the Sunday paper. People are exchanging ink stained hands for a keyboard & monitor. It's too easy to pass up access to infinite & instant news or information sources in a fraction of the time it might other wise take. I can weed out the ads far easier than with newsprint, but I definitely can't read everything online. Unfortunately, economic & technological changes can't be avoided in a constantly developing world. I was saddened to hear that the Rocky Mountain News had to shut down.

We need newspaper and the newspaper model. If newspaper went to a weekly and only provided analysis and in depth investigative stories in print and posted all the hyper local news online would be a great model. The journalist who controlled the hyper local media could have access to copy editors and researchers to ensure integrity. And advertosers would not just be buying into a single entity but a mashup of hyper local content.

I stopped my subscription over ten years ago to the Democrat and Cronicle when it occured to me that our ideas about ignorance had changed. I was raised thinking that ignorance was brought about by ignoring the news. The new ignorance in my country is caused by reading and believing a biased news source. The truth will always prevail but opinion has a short shelf life.
The demise of the newspapers has more to do with content than their method of using a delivered print. Time will show this to be true as their new web sights are ignored for the same reasons.

Except the most needed type of news for the insular American is foreign news. This pod does not investigate what would happen in a world dominated by local news and absent of international news.

How long until current fails? What ticker symbol do you guys use?

One of the problems with technology is that it killed the "news cycle." We used to be able to receive a bit of news, think about it, then react. There was time for a reasoned response. With instantaneous communication, that time for response has disappeared. We are all forced to react based on our first emotion or instinct. That's not always good.

The media. What a fabulous load of self-serving rubbish their wails of protest amount to.

"It's Craigslist! It's the Web! They have destroyed us!"

Whoa. If I want a story some Pulitzer Prize winning journalist has written I'm not going to Craiglist to find it. Sy Hersh wrote a series of New Yorker articles and assembled them in a book, called, "Chain of Command." I'm reading it.

The secret? It's easy. Write really well, factually, and people will look at it. They'll even PAY!

As most people do, I'll stay loyal to any media outlet that won't lie to me, play fast and loose with propaganda, nor up the ante for the privilege of being duped and dumbed down with infotainment and advertorial crap..

Consider. For the purpose of controlling how people in your home town get around, you decide to monopolize transportation. You buy up all the car dealerships, buy up everybody's taxis, buses, trucks and cars. Theoretically you're sitting pretty. You're the boss.

But actually you aren't, because if, in your haste to build a monopoly, someone opens up a very popular, affordable bicycle shop a problem appears. There is an alternative.

The bike shop is going to gain customers who want nothing to do with you. Meanwhile, you are buried in the debt of all those other competitors you just had to gobble up. Good old interest on debt is all you can pay back. Forget principal. You pay that down starting maybe ten years from now.

So. Your income has to be huge just to keep the game going, because you don't have money to expand and improve your product -- all you have is debt.

To shed expenses, the first thing ritually discarded in any corporate enterprise is Quality. Meaning, in this case the reason people read great newspapers - high-paid high-value writing about verifiable facts.

But you're stuck. It's like owning a fish and clipping its fins off to save money and then complaining - "It just sits there!"

As the product decays more people think - "Why am I paying these dolts for a rotting mackerel in fishwrap?"

Burned by years of waiting to see media improvement the public finally learns they can read what they want, and reject what they want, on the internet. It's like a public library, except that you can browse to your heart's content in your underwear.

What could have saved the media? Recognition that its product wasn't worth the expense to make it landfill.

The game killed the game. It shifted from a manic competition among egomaniacal professional scribblers (to prove who was Top Dog) to a contest among numbered companies to control completely what the public got to see.

The lesson they never understood? Pravda, Izvestia, and Tass. It wasn't the net and Craigslist that sabotaged them - they sabotaged themselves.

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