While the 50 cents per edition that newspapers charged was not enough to cover their costs, it sent a signal to advertisers that they were getting a certain type of eyeball. An eyeball that had 50 disposable cents per day to buy packaged news in a local market. That 50 cents was an important signal. Newspapers would find other ways of getting those same eyeballs, by striking deals with hotels and airlines and essentially supplying papers at a deep discount, but making it up with the fees they could charge to advertisers based on their access to travelers, who have a lot more than 50 cents to spend. Some publications took it one step further: they covered business and their readers could put the subscription on their corporate cards as a business expense. Personally, it cost them nothing. This is the strategy of the WSJ, the FT, and what the NYT would like to be with DealBook, etc.
We Never Paid for Journalism
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Re: We Never Paid for Journalism
#32> 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…
My wife and her brother made pretty decent money as 11-14 year olds delivering papers in their neighborhood. About 80% of houses got at least the Sunday edition.
Re: We Never Paid for Journalism
#33Former 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?…
As a consumer, the biggest appeal of print newspaper advertising (as opposed to web, social media, etc) is legitimacy.
No fly-by-night scam operation will be able to afford a full page ad in a reputable magazine, and I hope newspapers also do due diligence on the advertisements they run, as their reputation (and possibly even legal liability, especially in certain fields like medicine, etc) is at stake.
This means I can be confident an ad in a magazine won't be an outright scam and I can somewhat trust it (sure, it's still trying to sell me something that I wouldn't have otherwise bought, but if it's relevant and I'm confident it's not a scam or low quality crap, then why not?).
The same does not apply to digital advertising where there's plenty of shit, no human actually reviews the ads and given the ads are very targeted there's little chance anyone else sees the ad (in a magazine, everyone sees it, so an expert in the field can speak up, unlike for a targeted ad where only the people in the targeting criteria - who often lack the knowledge to make an informed decision - see the ad).
The other advantage of the lack of tracking is that I get exposed to ads outside of my daily workflow. I work in IT, and if I were to browse without ad blockers (cancer blockers as I call them) I would just see IT or business-related ads all over the place. I don't want to see those - I already know what products I need for IT and have the knowledge & experience to do my own research. On the other hand, a print ad which knows nothing about me might show me an ad for cat food - I want that; I know nothing about the subject and am willing to trust the magazine's reputation behind it.
Re: We Never Paid for Journalism
#34The same is true for TV in most places, shows are/were carefully constructed to maximize the odds that you wouldn't change channel during the commercial break
Re: We Never Paid for Journalism
#35Earlier 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…
And the thing about child paper routes is that they were considered a form of contractor. The newspaper would provide you the papers on credit, at the end of the month you would collect the amount of the bill from the customer, then pay the newspaper the amount you were billed. The billed amount may have been 50% or so, I don't recall the exact amount.
Re: We Never Paid for Journalism
#36Former 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?…
> With the dawn of digital advertising, where every view, click and conversion is neatly accounted for, advertisers have come to realize that newspaper advertising has always been a low-return-on-investment marketing avenue, even when it was the only game in town. They just didn't have the metrics to prove it.
How does this compare with television advertising? I see them as similar. Is traditional television advertisement per-viewer revenue dwindling compared to the past? I know the subscriber count is reducing and they have alternative income streams via subscriber fees. Is it that the ROI on television advertising remains higher compared to print simply because there are still a significant number of eyeballs?
Re: We Never Paid for Journalism
#37Former 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?…
My understanding is that Craigslist really killed the newspapers. What funded them was a combo of full page adds and the classifieds. I remember paying $30 to post a garage sale. Since Craigslist expanded you could see each newspaper get steadily smaller and smaller over the years.
Re: We Never Paid for Journalism
#38I subscribe to:
* https://www.economist.com/ - good coverage of various subjects worldwide.
* https://www.washingtonpost.com/ - good coverage of US politics
* https://www.bendbulletin.com/ - because I live here and they're the only ones that always have someone at things like city council meetings, county commissioner meetings and the like.
Re: We Never Paid for Journalism
#39I 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.
Interestingly (to me), Edward Bernays is discussed a lot in Mario Vargas Llosa's latest book Tiempos Recios (Fierce Times), as the "most influential person in the history of Guatemala" due to his PR work on behalf of United Fruit. Unfortunately I believe it is only available in Spanish currently.
Re: We Never Paid for Journalism
#40Journalism 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 mitigate these things).
I wonder if there are enough people that would pay $X/mo for this to make it viable. I'd happily pay at least $20/mo.