newspapers say we don’t read them, or need to
If you were to listen to today’s newspapers, blogs provide nothing but sensationalism, rehashes of other blogs, and are just generally ran by rather untrustworthy people sitting at their kitchen tables in their underpants, looking for whatever brings in the big hits. Yes, all major newspapers now feature blogs on their sites but don’t tell their editors that because all to many of them seem completely unaware of this fact as they boast about the need for newspapers to do the longform investigative work that seldom gets done anywhere else, and use this to justify keeping a quickly failing business model afloat through paywalls and lawsuits. And this is why it was very odd for a case against a news clipping service to basically say that readers don’t need any more than the clipping provides, arguing that giving away the lead of the article renders the whole thing totally irrelevant to the public which is why the clipping service should have to pay the papers.
Now, it’s true that only newspapers sometimes have the resources to send reporters on complex assignments and work on stories that will take months to result in a huge article that shines new light on something we thought we knew, or exposes a case we want to know more about. Since newspaper ownership is now more of a prestige symbol than a viable business, profits could be sacrificed for the PR value of the resulting story. But PR doesn’t pay the bills and the barriers to investigating big stories keep getting lower and lower. If you’re a professional blogger, you can get a really good chunk of your research done with Skype, Google, Twitter, and Facebook, and when you do need to go out and track someone down for some answers physically, airfare can certainly be justified since you could work from your laptop anywhere with a wi-fi hotspot. You’ll also get a well-researched story and it will cost you less and make you money in ad revenue.
But instead of learning from bloggers how to work more efficiently, newspapers are sticking to a dead tree with ink model and trying to mount paywall after paywall to protect what they’re saying people don’t even need to read past the first paragraph or two. And that makes me wonder why even read them until a huge story comes along. Why print all that paper? Why bother with good, old-fashioned column inches and not simply go all digital with an on-demand print option? The big papers are already doing that with e-readers so why not kill the trees, cut the prices and get bloggers in on the act, learning form them how to attract hits and make the best use of their time and resources? Of course not Nick Denton style mind you, but more of an Ars or Wired who are in the tech game and absolutely get it despite being owned by the dinosaur Conde Nast, which just so happens also made a winning choice on buying Reddit. If there’s so much stuff that’s not worth reading past a few paragraphs, why waste time and money trying to get paid for it?
