Everyone is asking about the impact on the Wall Street Journal of the New York Times decision to release all its news and most of its archives from the bondage of paid access.
For those of you who may not have seen a copy, The New York Times is a newspaper that is popular with the elites in a couple of cities on the east coast of the United States. It is published by the same company that publishes NYTimes.com, one of the best and most-read news websites in the world.
The Journal’s decision is more complex. It has printing plants all over the world, so that it can deliver its print product first thing in the morning. Most of its readers are not buying the paper with their own money, so it’s not clear how elastic their demand really is. Or whether they’re actually reading it, I suppose.
The Journal is able to get absolutely premium rates for its print advertising because it has an absolutely premium audience who can buy and sell the kind of nerds who read the New York Times. Especially the Times’s Sunday readers — losers who like crossword puzzles, long magazine articles, and the latest news about Richard Wagner. The dynamic money-makers who read the Journal don’t have time for that nonsense. On Sunday mornings, they’re reading their Blackberries, shopping for summer homes, and waiting for markets to open somewhere.
Does the Journal really want to reach the kind of riff-raff who want to read the news for free? Those people don’t even aspire to owning a fine Swiss timekeeping instrument, let alone have half a dozen sitting in an automatic winder in their walk-in closet waiting for an appropriate occasion.
The answer, of course, is that the print edition of the Journal will fade away soon enough. Newsprint is getting more expensive. Printing plants are very expensive. And by the time you get it, the news in the paper is already beginning to rot on the page. And if Rupert Murdoch moves the paper to shorter, punchier stories, he’ll have created a made-for-online product.
If the Journal doesn’t come up with plan for a gentle transition to a free online service, that day may not come gently and it will be hastened by the likes of Bloomberg, Reuters, Conde Nast, a few hundred bloggers, and (yes!) The New York Times.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.
Month: September 2007
The New York Times has finally put Times Select out of our misery. But wait, there’s more!
The Times is also releasing its archives from bondage. At least, all stories after 1987 or before 1923. Stories published between 1923 and 1986 are still for sale.
This is tremendously good news for everyone:
Times Digital stands to benefit the most. I’ve been convinced for a long time that the only role for Time Select was to protect the printed newspaper from cannibalization. The Web is now free to compete with print to be the main platform for the Times’s news.
Maureen Dowd, Tom Friedman, Paul Krugman, and plenty of other columnists whose work should be some of the most-linked-to material on the Web will find a new and enthusiastic audience. As well as millions of people who don’t like their stuff, but can’t bear not to link to it.
Bloggers will be able to freely and permanent link to important news stories and columns, as well as past stories that place today’s news into meaningful context.
Web users will be more likely to read Times’s archives from links in blogs than from the paper’s database interface. The Times will become the most authoritative source for background information on a wide variety of topics. Not only will take some of that traffic from Wikipedia, it will certainly become an important source for Wikipedia. This is definitely not a zero-sum game.
And all these links will create a rich context of metadata that will add value to the the Times’s content.
Other news organizations — from community weeklies to national dailies — should take this as a signal that it is now officially insane to keep past stories off the grid. It’s not just selfish, it’s bad business.
I’m excited about the role of intermediaries in the news business. In my research, I have found that the Times is missing out on a great deal of traffic from intermediaries ranging from Google News to the Drudge Report. Not only will the Times be able to make up for lost time, they have positioned themselves to take advantage of one of the most important strategic trends in online media.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.
Netscape.com was always the biggest wasted opportunity on the Internet. Somewhere in its history, it was a site for small an medium-sized businesses. At some point after AOL merged with Time Warner, its reason for being was to shill Time Warner media properties.
Still, according to Compete.com, five million people visit Netscape.com every month.
Last year, AOL launched a relatively bold experiment by turning Netscape into what some have called a “Digg clone” but always felt like somebody spilled a test tube full of Digg’s DNA and never really cleaned it up properly.
Netscape.com is now a place where right-wingers and left-wingers taunt one another by voting up partisan diatribes: “Candidate Thompson Praised for Global Warming Views” or “Bush’s Bogus Bailout” or “Upcoming Changes at Netscape”. Actually, that last one was designed to taunt everyone who invested their time and energy at Netscape.com.
Meanwhile, news.aol.com (to continue the genetic engineering metaphor) is another weird hybrid. It doesn’t really have an editorial voice, so it reads like an AP wire feed with comments enabled. Though I’ve grown to appreciate the core concept of a newsfeed that is optimized for interaction — every story has a quiz, poll, in-page gallery, or wacky picture — it’s impossible to take seriously as a news source. No one is going to feel taunted or challenged by any story there.
In a world where intermediaries are becoming dominant sources of news and information, one of the world’s biggest media companies still has no strategy for two of the best-known portals on the net.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.
Google’s shift to hosting its own wire service stories is a notice to laggards that you can’t succeed by providing the same information that everyone else is giving away.
It’s one of my major themes that intermediaries (including Google) are increasing their role in connecting audiences with news (or all content for that matter). In an intermediated world, your particular copy of a wire service story adds little value to the mix. And at some point, adding yet another copy decreases the value of the whole mess.
In a world of networked media, news organizations need to focus on what they do best. For all but a handful of newspapers, that’s local news. They should have been doing it anyway, but Google is making it a survival skill. They may want to aggregate some national and international news for their unique audience, but editors really have to reconsider the time and energy they’re devoting generic wire stories. Expecially now that their readers can get them from Google.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.