4th of 5 Reasons why printed media will evolve
Note: This is the fourth part of my week-long series of posting 5 reasons why I think the printed media will have to evolve and what I think it should evolve to. The steps will be posted daily starting with this on a Monday, and ending on this week’s Friday.
If you missed the first part “Time is of the essence”, you can find it here.
The second part “Advertising dollars are being spent elsewhere” is here.
The third, expected part “Ecology and global warming” is here.
4. Less news for more money
Now that we’ve settled the whole ecology stuff, we can get back to the fact on how the web will force evolution towards the printed media. Facebook just gained its 200 millionth user and if the idiom about the monkeys and the typewriters is in any level accurate, the service alone should produce a good novel every day. Now, multiply that with every website in the world and quickly you have the source where all news comes from.
Surprisingly many of those are empty, hmm.
This leads us to the next issue, amount of content. With papers there’s always the paradox of having enough content to make printing feasible. With that kind of approach added to the requests of advertisers to have different things for different people we end up receiving our daily newspaper turned into an ad collection with random articles here and there. I’ve noticed that browsing through the evening newspaper in our office doesn’t take long and even if I try to read every single interesting bit there, I’ll finish the task rapidly. Not to mention the fact of how many news I don’t want to read because they do not hold any informational value to me.
Magazines however have usually more, they are more timeless. As I mentioned in the first part of this series, the newspapers totally lose the fight with time against the web – and thanks to the web, even television is faster than the newspapers. To fight against this self-created paradox, newspapers have their own websites (that all seem to have the same news from Associated Press) proving their print version even more futile.
But magazines, they usually have articles and some real journalism there, they are kind of like blogs – they have exclusive things, such as opinions, points of views and relevance. Something the newspapers cannot do in this age of “who’s first?” – but even magazines can’t compete with the richness of the web. You can have points of view from all continents, opinions from different backgrounds and pretty much all the information is available online that you see relevant. The best part however is the social part, people are commenting and criticizing the articles, long or short, but the comments usually always are longer than the news itself.
The best part in all this, is the fact that in time, I have gathered a large collection of sites and feeds that I constantly follow and they are waiting for me every morning being fresh, ecological and totally relevant. Even my morning comics arrive to brighten my mornings. Unlike the newspaper that is huge in size and 80% of the information in it are completely not interesting to me. When we think of the cost of subscribing to a newspaper versus the price of an internet connection (even if we’d think that this would be the only reason for me to buy a web connection and didn’t have it at work, cafes or anywhere else) the price would still be pretty much the same – for less news.
So, how can the printed media do something to make the situation better? The same way web sites eventually create traffic – do some journalism, drill deeper to the content, make something exclusive and try to offer a relevant experience. Most newspapers have huge media corporations as owners and they have hundreds of writers – why I can’t I subscribe a more personalized newspaper with the journalists I want to hear from? Could I just buy articles from one journalist?
Currently it feels like most newspapers just copy (and translate) news from the web and each other (after copying it from the web) and I’d really not want to pay for that what I’ve already read online. Sure it’ll function now, but it’s a bit like starting an inbred family.
Won’t work in the long run.
Check out tomorrow’s and the last post of this series, “The penetration of the internet”.
Related posts:
- Euphemisms of Markus
Filed Under
Connect
Made by Symmetric Web
Distributed by Smashing Magazine