Reporting lives even if newspapers don't

Your lack of perspective is astounding and obviously no one has informed you that the world is in a financial crisis, but your final statement that "the demand for news can (and will) be filled by sources other than professional reporting" is most absurd. Consequential news requires genuine, professional reporting. How else do you see that demand being filled?

 

Mistakes you are making:

1) Having a very short memory. The news industry was dying *long* before this current financial crisis.

2) Lack of depth of information. News-industry revenues are declining much faster than other ad-related revenues, signifying something deeper wrong with them than just the downturn.

3) You believe that people demand "consequential" news. They don't. They demand highly focused, asinine news that feeds their biases. Bloggers, amateurs and PR professionals are glad to fill the demand for news in the same way McDonald's feeds the demand for food. It may not be good for people, but it's what they'll buy.

 

Rick, all you're doing here is stating what hasn't worked and suggest that as a result nothing else will.

There's nothing empirical in your interpretation, because you're not willing to entertain any future possibilities.

 

Whenever I *hear* something else, I'll give my opinion on its viability. But I haven't. I've heard "subscription" and "micropayment" and "alternative media," and those have all been tried. And failed.

I'm quite willing to entertain possibilities. Let's hear them. I'm willing to entertain the possibility of zero-point energy extraction, too, but I'm going to want to hear a specific, feasible proposal that hasn't been tried before I give it the time of day.

Give me a business proposal that hasn't failed repeatedly, or give me one that has and explain to me why this one is different. I'm not seeing any of that, though. I keep hearing "something will come up" and all that jazz, but nobody has any real ideas, because there are none, and that's hard for some to admit.

 

Rick, unless you're willing to offer up some ideas yourself, you've got no room to gripe about what others haven't done, or tried, or have proposed. Or what hasn't worked.

 

I'm not griping. I'm naysaying. I'm debunking.

There may be no room for complainers without ideas, but by definition a person who says things aren't going to work shouldn't have ideas on how it might work.

 

If we want an example of reporting that makes money online, we need look no further than the large array of online newsletters that financiers and other investment types successfully run. I get a few of them and am happy to pay for them, just as many are happy to pay for the WSJ online. The catch is that you have to help people make money, or they stop subscribing. Much of newspapers' problem is that such a great percentage of their content is banal and of little value. I can get box scores, AP news, user-submitted pictures and syndicated gardening tips anywhere for free. Even local news -- which people love -- is the sort of thing that Americans continually undervalue. Sure, they'll bitch and moan when it's gone, but most of them won't pay a red cent to receive it because most of it is relatively trivial.

I think we will eventually see that the America news media corporations policy of slashing the doers and thinkers was an odious mistake. Everyone and everything else will likely prove to be of less eventual value than someone who provides unique, leading-edge content, whether it's someone who consistently breaks sports news, someone who digs up great features before anyone else, or someone who understands how to stay on the leading edge of new media apps for the website.

Management dead weight is a large part of the problem, but what decision-maker decides to fire himself/herself?

The biggest obstacles to any would-be blogger are establishing credibility with a non-local audience; finding a way to bring traffic to the site; and establishing any sort of a revenue stream.

 

Which means I've debunked 100% of the ideas currently on the table, because no one is trying anything new.

 

1) Fully aware. I've been in the industry (now on the Web) since 1979 and I've worked through the bankruptcy of a major news service in the early '80s. I primarily fault publishers' greed for gutting the product and thinking consumers wouldn't discern the difference. The introduction of the Web only hastened newspapers' demise. However, VC money for Web enterprises shut down almost completely after 9-11. It is gradually coming back.

2) See No. 1. Newspaper publishers, with already ridiculous margins, decided they wanted more, so they gutted their products and their payrolls, forcing many of the best journalists out of the business altogether.

3) Your belief that consumers "demand highly focused, asinine news that feeds their biases" is the kind of thinking that got newspapers in trouble in the first place.

 

If you believe that the problem is publishers driving away readers, how do you explain that newspapers have more readers than ever before?

 

Wendy and Cranberry ... Does the name Chuck Wepner ring a bell? You guys are doing great imitations thus far. .. The Bayonne Bleeder lives.

 

Does newbie looser mean anything to you?