Traditional Media Gate Keepers Are Dying: What’s next?
April 10th, 2009 by Tom Francoeur
I started following The Media is Dying when I first joined Twitter, but couldn’t take the onslaught of terrible news, so I stopped. But the bleeding continues on such an epic scale that you don’t need to follow the carnage on Twitter to keep up.
In my own neck of the woods, The Boston Globe is on the verge of total collapse. The Associated Press seems bent on taking the Internet down with them in their own flailing attempts to reassert their long lost authority as a major gate keeper of electronic news. And just today, the LA Times is making headlines for running an advertisement on the front page that is formatted to look like a news story.
But instead of getting into another woeful blog post lamenting the foregone conclusion that the media gate keepers are dying and it’s truly the end of the world as we know it, what’s next? Your guess is as good as mine. Right now we’re still in middle of the firestorm, so it’s hard to see clearly where all of this is headed.
Amy Krigman, a co-worker here at Topaz Partners, commented that for print media the Christian Science Monitor model might work for the Globe and other newspapers on shaky ground. Go digital for the most part except for a few special print editions, such as the Sunday paper or feature magazines.
I remember when blogs first came on the scene and ‘citizen journalists’ predicted the demise of traditional media. At the time, these doomsayers seemed to be on the fringes, but in many ways what they predicted seems to be coming true.
What’s going to happen now that the traditional media gate keepers are dying out?
The old king is dead, long live the king?
Meet the new boss, the same as the old boss?
Please let us know what you think.
This entry was posted on Friday, April 10th, 2009 at 2:30 pm and is filed under Journalism, Marketing, News & Commentary, PR, Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
April 10th, 2009 at 3:38 pm
Tom, good post. The Globe’s ombudsman has been promoting the idea of paying for online content, but I’m very skeptical of that proposal.
The smart, bold move is to get rid of print entirely. The costs of newsprint and other raw materials, production and distribution are enormous. This is the nut of the problem. When you take into account the fact that the vast majority of people under age 30 don’t read print anymore regardless of price, print becomes completely absurd and unjustifiable.
Cribbing an idea from the Silicon Alley Insider, what the Globe should do is shut down print entirely and provide every Globe subscriber with a free Amazon Kindle. The Globe could make a deal with Amazon to take a cut of any additional content downloads made by the reader — books, magazines, etc. Advertising could be integrated into the Globe pages on Kindle.
GPS could be added to the device, so that readers could be delivered advertising messages and coupons that are directly relevant to their location. Reading the paper in a Starbucks? You get a special on French Roast coffee.
Printing The New York Times would cost twice as much as handing out free Kindles to all subscribers, according to the article. I imagine that the numbers would be equivalent for the Globe.
As Nicholas Carlson writes on Silicon Alley Insider, “What we’re trying to say is that as a technology for delivering the news, newsprint isn’t just expensive and inefficient; it’s laughably so.”
Someone will wake up to this new business model one day, whether it be the Globe or some other outlet.
June 19th, 2009 at 5:34 pm
Good idea! But there’s Kindle’s dirty little secret to consider. Often times, no artwork (graphics, photos, etc.). With some books & pubs, it doesn’t matter so much. Others (think “Greatest Generation”) it does, and the yes/no on photos, etc. seems to be inconsistent not just among publishers, but even day to day for specific publishers. Surprising, because Kindle should be supporting flash video value-adds. Go figure…