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We Never Paid for Journalism

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Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#51

Post by ghaff »

WalterBright wrote: post #43
jawns wrote: post #18

Former news editor here. I left the journalism world about eight years ago because of the poor shape the business was in. But I still love journalism and hope it finds a viable business model. I wanted to address a point that this blog post brings to mind. There were advertisers then, and there are advertisers now. The advertising market hasn't dried up. So why was the business model robust then and in shambles now?…

> newspaper advertising has always been a low-return-on-investment marketing avenue Back in the 1980s (in the Datalight/Zortech days), the only game in town was advertising in computer magazines. We knew it worked because the day the monthly mag appeared on the shelf, we'd get a big spike in sales, that would then taper off through the month. It was fairly easy to correlate which computer mags mattered, how ad placem…

Heck, Computer Shopper was an absolutely huge magazine that was almost nothing but ads. There were some mostly low quality articles to lend a little credibility but basically people bought it for the ads.

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#52

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

vilhelm_s wrote: post #50
jawns wrote: post #18

Former news editor here. I left the journalism world about eight years ago because of the poor shape the business was in. But I still love journalism and hope it finds a viable business model. I wanted to address a point that this blog post brings to mind. There were advertisers then, and there are advertisers now. The advertising market hasn't dried up. So why was the business model robust then and in shambles now?…

I would point to the graph here: https://baekdal.com/thoughts/what-killed-the-newspapers-goog... The increased income of Google (which is nearly all ads) matches the decreased income of the newspapers, so it doesn't seem like the ad spending actually decreased, it just moved away from the papers.

Ugh. For an article whose point is "the sum of these lines does X," you'd really thing they'd graph the sum of those lines.

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#53

Post by dhruvrrp »

vilhelm_s wrote: post #50
jawns wrote: post #18

Former news editor here. I left the journalism world about eight years ago because of the poor shape the business was in. But I still love journalism and hope it finds a viable business model. I wanted to address a point that this blog post brings to mind. There were advertisers then, and there are advertisers now. The advertising market hasn't dried up. So why was the business model robust then and in shambles now?…

I would point to the graph here: https://baekdal.com/thoughts/what-killed-the-newspapers-goog... The increased income of Google (which is nearly all ads) matches the decreased income of the newspapers, so it doesn't seem like the ad spending actually decreased, it just moved away from the papers.

Which is completely in line with what that person said. Why spend $x on newspaper advertisements when you can spend them on Google and have much better targeting.

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#54

Post by bynkman »

The rise of Craigslist is one factor. But I'm surprised that nobody is talking about local advertisers vs national. National business and websites are more likely to advertise on a (local) news website, compared to your local business. For example, twenty years ago a local mom and pop pizza joint would be apt to advertise in a newspaper, due to a captive local audience. But today, they'd be less likely to advertise on a local newspaper website. So there goes that revenue. And you're not going to find them pushing ads to the Huffington post.

Also the rise of online business review websites (Yelp, Google Reviews, Trip Advisor, ect) are now more useful and specifically targeted to an audience looking for local eats. (And also killed the Yellowpages.)

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#55

Post by tapland »

sudosteph wrote: post #9

> The LA times peak circulation was in 1990 when they delivered 1,225,189 papers daily. Wow, I had no idea that city papers had such robust delivery networks back then. I can almost imagine an alternate timeline where papers might have survived by leveraging that network to deliver books or other items from a catalog before Amazon. I suppose their scale was in part only possible due to their consistently sized produc…

When I lived in Solna in northern Stockholm, the same municipality that houses most of Karolinska Institutet one of the worlds top non english-speaking medical schools, I noticed the hospital using the nightly newspaper distributor to deliver letters about appointments and blood tests.

It was pretty sweet getting them at night, leaving the test in the morning and having results in 24 hours from the doctor ordering the tests.

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#56

Post by [deleted] »

ghaff wrote: post #49
Reedx wrote: post #40

Journalism is in such a disastrous state, I feel like/hope there's a growing appetite for a source that is of genuinely high quality and has an uncompromising approach. No ads, no clickbait, no partisan nonsense, no dark patterns, no hit pieces, no mixing of news and opinion. Just uncompromisingly focused fact-based journalism (of course there will always be some bias and mistakes, but there's a lot you can do to mit…

You pay about $20/month today for a digital subscription for one of the global brands like the New York Times, Economist, etc. which still have ads to a greater or lesser degree. They're doing kinda/sorta OK with digital subscriptions but basically journalism is expensive to produce.

[deleted]

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#57

Post by jldugger »

jldugger wrote: post #20

This is a somewhat obvious take on the decline of paper journalism. Yes, you paid for that newspaper / magazine, but the majority of money is in the ads space. Even that payment? A screening tool for advertisers -- if you don't read the paper or more importantly see the ads, you'll presumably cancel and save the money. There was a tweetstorm by some journalism prof I can't recall that was basically saying newspapers…

Found it!

https://mobile.twitter.com/JeremyLittau/status/1088503510184...

A few choice quotes:

> For those who aren’t quite sure why these media layoffs keep happening, or think “it’s the internet!” or “people don’t pay to subscribe,” there’s a lot more going on.

> Classified ads were a damn boondoggle. $500 in a mid-metro to place a car ad. The more expensive your item, the more you got charged. No wonder people rebelled the minute they were offered the ability to do it for free. Newmark didn’t kill classifieds; news publisher greed did.

> Profit margins for companies like Gannett and Knight Ridder were commonly around 30-40%.

> So chains started gobbling up papers all over the country in the ‘80s and ‘90s. They took on debt to do this because with 40% margins, there wasn’t much downside in that model.

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#58

Post by twic »

jbattle wrote: post #19
jagged-chisel wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other major distribution network already visited every addressable location and took packages of varying sizes: the postal service. Newspaper delivery was closer to 'real-time' - it was printed this morning, and arrived for consumption during morning coffee. Many children took paper routes for some cash and delivered on their bikes. You slow down paper delivery when you start sending along multiple shipments, wei…

I never thought of this angle before, but imagine if a SV startup started a distribution model in 2019 depending on young teens riding their bikes around neighborhoods early in the morning before school. There'd be endless articles shaming them for child labor and for foisting their costs on to vulnerable workers. Really not sure what to make of that. Other than maybe our outrage triggers have been honed to a razor's…

> imagine if a SV startup started a distribution model in 2019 depending on young teens riding their bikes around neighborhoods

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/05/charg...

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#59

Post by musicale »

ghaff wrote: post #51
WalterBright wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> newspaper advertising has always been a low-return-on-investment marketing avenue Back in the 1980s (in the Datalight/Zortech days), the only game in town was advertising in computer magazines. We knew it worked because the day the monthly mag appeared on the shelf, we'd get a big spike in sales, that would then taper off through the month. It was fairly easy to correlate which computer mags mattered, how ad placem…

Heck, Computer Shopper was an absolutely huge magazine that was almost nothing but ads. There were some mostly low quality articles to lend a little credibility but basically people bought it for the ads.

People like advertisements and used to read whole magazines made of them, but web advertising is a hated, privacy-violating, battery-draining, performance-crushing, pop-up and autoplay-infested, malware-tainted monstrosity. Advertisements used to engage and attract magazine readers, but web advertising detracts from web sites so much that ad blockers are immensely popular if not essential for a pleasant browsing experience.

I think that means we're doing it wrong, but nobody wants to admit it.

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#60

Post by dang »

vearwhershuh wrote: post #6

I would encourage anyone interested to read Edward Bernays (nephew, through both parents, of Sigmund Freud). He lays out why journalism is a loss leader for people who want control. It makes a lot of otherwise confusing market dynamics around media make sense. Making money, directly, on journalism is almost never the idea.

I used to think it was a strange coincidence that Bernays was Freud's nephew. But it wasn't. Bernays promoted his uncle in the U.S., so the fame of the two has a common cause.
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