If you can bear it, a list of links to key recent articles covering the debate about whether micropayments could save the newspaper industry.
Mathew Ingram: A list of posts about micropayments for news
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Tag Archives: Newspapers
Editor&Publisher: Different owners but shared content – two US newspapers pool resources
“The Philadelphia Inquirer and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette have been quietly sharing content for nearly two weeks, exchanging daily budgets and trading even the most high-profile stories,” Editor&Publisher reports.
It’s ‘the latest example of the ever-growing trend of newspapers with no common ownership or JOA trading news,’ according to E&P.
Did you buy a newspaper yesterday?
It was a bid to help the US’s ailing newspaper industry: Buy A Newspaper Day. It had a Facebook group and everything. Unfortunately, 19,397 people said they weren’t attending. Charity endeavours aside, out of interest, how many Journalism.co.uk readers bought a newspaper yesterday? Vote below:
GarcíaMedia: Newspapers redefining daily
“Never on Monday – or Tuesday, or Wednesday: how newspapers redefine ‘daily'”: With a look back to an interview with Sam Zell in November, Dr Mario R Garcia does a round-up of the shifting definition of ‘daily’ for newspapers in the US.
Thirty things you might miss in a world without newspapers
1. Material to stuff your Guy Fawkes effigy with on Bonfire Night.
2. Paper mountains at your local recycling depot.
3. Liners for your kitty litter trayers, rabbit hutches etc.
4. The joy of finding and reading other people’s paid-for newspapers on the train/underground/bus.
5. Wrapping for your fish and chips.
6. Material for your papier mâché models.
7. Getting your letterboxes jammed stuck with weekend supplements.
8. Part-time employment for your children.
9. Newsagents. And newsagents whingeing about the newstrade.
10. Ad inserts and catalogues offering 1001 pointless gadgets to solve problems you will never have.
11. The ability to buy soft porn under the not-very-convincing pretence of being interested in the daily news.
12. Cliché-ridden headlines and terrible puns.
13. Insulation when sleeping rough (although cardboard works just as well).
14. Free CDs, DVDs, posters etc that you will never listen to, view or display.
15. Material to protect the floor, soak up spilt tea etc when the builders are in.
16. Something to read when you are on the loo (doesn’t seem quite right to do that with a laptop, although mobile devices are a bit more discreet).
17. Inky, black fingers.
18. Deforestation (although it is equally possible that fewer trees might get planted in managed forests).
19. The unintelligible cry of news vendors on street corners.
20. Having free papers jammed into your stomach at the entrances to underground stations.
21. Training the dog to fetch the paper/attack the paper boy/girl/person in the mornings.
22. Large piles of free newspapers dumped in skips.
23. Skidding on sodden lumps of old newspapers left out in the rain on pavements and roads.
24. For future generations, birthday gifts of a copy of the newspaper that was published on the day they were born.
25. Something to clean the windows with.
26. The environmental impact of printing, delivering and collecting returns (and the loss of related jobs).
27. Trying to read broadsheet newspapers on crowded trains/planes/buses etc
28. The wonderful, if often unintentional, wit of A-boards outside newsagents.
29. A surveillance device for bad spies.
30. Fuel to get the kindling going in your open fire, Aga, woodburning stove, bonfire etc.
But seriously…
FollowTheMedia: How to preserve your inauguration newspaper
Some off-line / old school tips from FollowTheMedia via the Society of California Archivists on ‘how to make your inauguration newspaper survive the years’. Number one: ‘store newspapers papers in a cool, dry place. No attics or basements that can attract extreme temperatures and humidity.’
HuffPost: What Google Can Do for Journalism
Dan Froomkin suggests seven ways Google could help journalism (if it really cared). Full story…
David Byrne Journal: No more news
Musician David Byrne makes an intelligent analysis of the current state of the news industry, comparing it to what happened to the music industry in the 1980s.
“What will happen when most of the country has nothing but entertainment, gossip and sports as sources of information? It’s a country ripe for takeover, if you ask me… Blogs and Internet news sites can’t fill the gap, as they don’t have the resources to sustain a team of reporters working and digging into a story — sometimes for months before anything sees the light of day.”
Rusbridger: Major cities in the UK could be ‘without any kind of verifiable source of news’
Speaking on the Radio 4 Today programme this morning, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, and the Independent’s first editor Andreas Whittam Smith, expressed their concerns, as well as tentative optimism about the current UK newspaper climate.
“I think we have to face up to the prospect that the first time since the Enlightenment you’re going to have major cities in the UK, in Western democracies, without any kind of verifiable source of news,” said Rusbridger.
“That hasn’t happened for two or three hundred years and I think it is going to have very profound implications,” he said.
Whittam Smith referred to an ‘extremely tough’ environment and said that he was once again being asked on a daily basis whether the Independent will survive.
“The risks to all newspapers are very great,” he said, “[but] the Independent has always been innovative.”
“It has to be innovative again in these circumstances,” he said. Moving into the Daily Mail building ‘is an example of that’ he added. Like other businesses, newspapers will have to ‘share the facilities the customers don’t see’ he said.
He said that people still liked to read print, and that if free newspapers were taken into consideration circulations in the UK are only down by one million: from 14 to 13 million a day.
“People do like the stuff on the printed page – what they don’t like so much any longer is paying for it,” he said.
Rusbridger said that newspaper companies with paternalistic or maternalistic owners would fare better than those ‘with big debt’ and other types of ownership structures.
The Scott Trust [the Guardian’s owner], he said, ‘to some extent protected [the Guardian] from immediate effects of the market’.
Both agreed that there would be newspaper casualties in the near future.
Poynter Online: An example of a newspaper doing well without a… paper
Troubled US newspapers should look to Denmark’s Avisen.dk when considering whether an internet-only edition is sustainable, writes Ernst Poulsen over at Poyntor E-Media Tidbits.