Newspapers, and to a lesser extent magazines, are in a downward spiral. Readership is down so they cut staff. Quality suffers so readers quit subscribing. Advertisers see dwindling readers and go elsewhere. There's a debate about where this all leads--Are we just going to rely on a mass of citizen of bloggers/ journalists? Will the government or private foundations have to step in to finance a dying industry?--but the downward spiral is not likely to stop until news outlets begin to think less about their medium and more about delivery of their content.
Increasingly we rely on RSS feeds, Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, and blogs to get our news. I don't read one newspaper in the morning; I read six, sometimes more, but only the sections and articles I care about. In other words, it's not that I'm not reading, it's that I don't count any single outlet as indispensable. If one starts charging for features that I want or need, I will take my eyes elsewhere.
Some traditional media outlets are experimenting with hybrid blends where they charge for some content and not for others. Others give free preview periods, presumably to drum up interest, where users can view the article(s) during that time only. Both of these routes are destined for failure, because all it takes to subvert them is one enterprising person who copies it, emails it to their friends, or posts it on their blog. The New Yorker blocked an article on Steve Barr, the founder of Green Dot charter schools, but the author made it available elsewhere. Mother Jones gave a free preview for Dana Goldstein's sensational article on Democrats and education. The magazine has it blocked now, but Google cached the entire thing.
As bad as those experiments are, one from Time has promise. It's called Mine Magazine, and it lets users select their favorite (Time Inc.) magazines, has them answer a few questions, then signs them up for their own personalized magazine. The first 31,000 "subscribers" got a free print edition, and the first 200,000 got an online version. This trial run has only one sponsor, Toyota, but there's no reason it couldn't be rolled out on a larger scale with more participating publications and advertisers. My personal magazine would have exercise tips from Men's Health and Runner's World, recipes from Gourmet or others, news from the New York Times and Washington Post magazines, and the articles (yes, articles) and jokes from Playboy. It would have sports stories from Sports Illustrated and ESPN, but also from non-traditional sports outlets like The New Yorker. I currently pay for none of these, and probably won't in the future, but I have to think advertisers would pay for the cost to publish Mine Magazine if they knew my demographics and knew I'd read it.
We're not going back to a world where the majority of people subscribed to their local daily newspaper. Most of us have our own personalized information-gathering system already; media outlets who fail to see that will continue their decline.
1 comment:
When I started college I expected that I'd get a paper once I had a stable residence, but I'm leaning strongly the other way today. I agree that Time's approach has some real promise -- it allows the kind of customization of sources that people already do (as you described) but decreases the cost of gathering info, like a regular publication does. Even personalized hard copies won't satisfy everyone, if only because of the delay between creation and delivery. Time's split approach might be the best of both sides, so I hope (for the sake of preserving thorough reporting from print media) that it slows the decline.
Post a Comment