I read newspapers online….why?
The San Francisco Chronicle is dead.
So apparently are the 150 year old Rocky Mountain News, The Baltimore Sun, The Chicago Tribune, The LA Times, The New York Times and just about every other major and minor newspaper in the country.
Dead or on life support and nearly dead.
This did not need to happen.
Indeed, it should not have happened.
Everyone, including my extremely well-informed friend Jeff Jarvis says, (among other things), Craigslist.
Well, that is certainly true. Craigslist took the 30% of the revenues that newspapers used to depend upon from their classifieds and translated them to a web-friendly format.
Ironically, Craigslist was just down the street from the Chronicle in cutting-edge San Francisco.
The tragedy (and the lesson here) is that The Chronicle should have been Craigslist!
They already had all the pieces in place – the brand, the relationships, the history, the classifieds. There was not great new technology that Craig Newmark invented. He didn’t have a patent. He wasn’t Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. He was nobody. (Nothing personal here Craig, but seriously….)
The Chronicle could have been Craigslist.com in a heartbeat and today be worth $3 billion, instead of going out of business.
What was their problem?
Not lack of imagination. There were plenty of web hip people already on their staff. Their problem was a lack of courage.
Courage.
The courage to completely embrace the new technology and shed the old ways.
I am sure that is someone on the SFGate.com staff had recommended the Craigslist route the paper’s staff would have immediately said ‘that will kill the classifieds’. Well…..hello?
When I was the President of NYTimes TV, Joe Lellyveld was the Managing Editor of the newspaper. He said, (in early web days), nothing could go on the website until it had first been published in the paper. (Didn’t quite get the concept. Proudly told me he didn’t own a TV set. Great.)
Now, listen up, because here is the really important part. So important, I am gonna put this in bold:
What is happening to newspapers today, is going to happen to TV networks tomorrow.
Did you get that? Did you get that NBC and CBS and Travel Channel and Discovery and National Georgraphic.
There is still time… but the ship has already hit the iceberg and we are taking on water.
What you see happening to newspapers today is going to happen to you in 5-10 years.
Because the web embraced text before it embraced video, but video is now becoming a web process, as surely as text. And what the Internet did to text it is also going to do to video.
So wake up!
This is no time for ‘incrementalism’.
You have to move… now.
You have to embrace new online ways of working and ways of publishing and ways of monetizing. Because there is no tomorrow for you.
The Craig Newmark of video is already out there.
Wake up!!!!
For God’s sake… wake up.
3 Comments
Pingback: First they came for the newspapers… | Its Our City | WHYY
Michael Rosenblum February 28, 2009
Colin,
The whole newspaper picture, I don’t have to tell you, is deeply distressing. But there are rays of light, and I think in the long run the future is pretty good. But the long run does not feed your family or pay your mortgage. Newspapers that are making the radical jump to online and multimedia seem to be the best bets. Those that are sitting tight with their eyes closed would seem to be the worst. A triage is coming for sure. On the bright side, The Star Ledger, which you will recall was on death’s door not so long ago, trimmed 40 percent from their staff and has now embraced video in a big way. Seth Siditsky, who runs their online video service tells me that they are training 10 more to go into video now. The output from the Ledger is great, and as newspapers go, local news and cable are going to need a feeder that is cost effective. You can’t go to air with nothing, and (by the way) with newspapers gone, so is their source of information. So local news, either on your own, or better with the paper behind you, is a real and viable source of revenue for what you do so well. I noticed Bernard Weil in the npac link, and he is a finalist for this week’s $15k VJ prize here in Brussels. Broadcasters like the CBC and even CTV have also moved rapidly to the VJ model and would always welcome someone who can bring in a quality story without cameraman, producer, editor and so on. Its a competitive world, but you are in a competitive position. If you can move your paper’s ownership to the video model and demonstrate revenue, and fast revenue, I think your paper can survive and even thrive – just not as it used to be. I am more than happy to present your management with a very successful working model if they are so inclined – lemme know. If they are not going that way, head for the people who desperately need cost effective great quality video (and there are still lots of them) and offer them a solution to their biggest problem.
Colin Mulvany February 27, 2009
Michael,
My ship is sinking. I need a pep talk. After reading this: http://npac.ca/?p=2060 I’m not sure what to do. I know newspapers are in a transition to an all-digital delivery method. What advice would you give all of us newspaper videographers who have these new video storytelling skills, but will soon, because of layoffs, have no place of apply them. I have a family to feed, so do I leave the visual journalism profession (before it leaves me) or stand and fight from the bow of a sinking ship?