Tempting fate there Jacques given what happened to the last guy who said that.

Don’t get in any fights this weekend ok?

I don’t believe the point is 100% true but yes an awful lot of so called journos need to have that observation in their faces – as a screen-saver at least.

With a broader, more competitive, cheaper channel that cannot be dominated by a small group of players, the money has diluted (as you say) by law of supply and demand.

All those journalists suddenly face the realisation that they could have been writing pretty much anything all those years for whatever difference it would have made (I strongly suspect that many of them knew this long ago).

In fact, for many papers, the cover price doesnt fully cover printing and distribution.

So in theory they should be better off with electronic media, because they were making a loss on distribution anyhow and even without any cover price they still make a smaller loss with web hosting. They would be better off too, if it wasn’t for all that dang competition.

There are two free local papers delivered round my area and you get them whether you want them or not, I doubt anyone would purchase such a thing. They are quite literally lawn spam, and I do hope the publishers go broke soon. They contain classifieds, real-estate ads and some articles supposedly of local interest. They can be handy in the garden.

I think Murdoch is right in that we are fast coming to an end where papers are free on the web as that model simply doesn’t work.

I have spent a little while trying to figure how they can make money and I’m damned if I can figure it out.

Here’s what I think

I think the entire model is screwed up. The tree version ought to be a lot more expensive and should pay it’s own way along with an acceptable return. For instance The Age readers are not going to start reading The Sun Herald if the price of the tree version was 50% higher.

The webs version ought to be cheaper less the costs of the tree version or what the market will bear.

The ads should no longer be treated as the bread and butter of the operation and should only be thought of as the icing on the cake. In other words if the money comes in, it comes in. If it doesn’t, too bad, but the business won’t go broke because of a lack of ads.

Murdoch is strongly angling for charging over the web. In fact there was meeting in Chicago over the past few weeks over this very issue and it will be interesting to see how it turns out.

Other issues.

Why on earth should should say Fairfax have two news operations in both cities when one paper with a local supplement would suffice? You don’t need two editors for what is essentially or should be one newspaper…. The Age and the SMH. There is probably still enormous duplication going on there.

Murdoch is also right about one other thing, in 15-20 years time people will simply carry around some sort of electronic tablet and the tree version will end.

It is clear that there is a body of readers that strongly values the opinion content, unfortunately most of them are NYT writers and friends. A much larger body of readers weakly values the opinion content, at slightly, but clearly not much, higher than zero.

They thought that people were reading the NYT to know what Bob Herbert or Maureen Dowd or some copyboy who the boss liked had written about events. The revelation was that people read the NYT for the news, amazing as that seems if you are a NYT opinion-writer contemplating your own marvelousness and perspicacity.

This may be right but even so, among the top 25 most emailed items in the last 24 hours in The New York Times at this moment, opinion pieces are numbers 3, 4, 6, 12, 15, 17, 18 and 19. Looking at the data for the past 7 days, opinion items are at 3, 4, 8, 10, 12, 15, 23 and 24.

The newspaper doesn’t publish the raw numbers involved, but it is clear that there is a body of readers that strongly values the opinion content. As we know, that body was insufficient for the Times to persist with the Select experiment, but the value of opinion columns should not be written off.

All the op-ed stuff, quirky colour pieces, brights and Alex strips are just amuse bouches chucked in.

I would only add that your points about charging are largely substantiated by the NYT and the smashing success of TimesSelect (remember that)?

But I would argue that they got TimesSelect arse-about. They thought that people were reading the NYT to know what Bob Herbert or Maureen Dowd or some copyboy who the boss liked had written about events. The revelation was that people read the NYT for the news, amazing as that seems if you are a NYT opinion-writer contemplating your own marvelousness and perspicacity.

The WSJ caught that from the outset – opinion journal has been free, partly because there is not much point in publishing opinions if people can’t read them, and partly because there are so many opinions out there that people will just skip the expensive ones, even if only in favour of someone else’s summary thereof.

But their business and markets content, which people did pay for, was not free. Same as the AFR here.

Which largely proves Jacques’ point since those two organisations do operate mini-monopolies in their markets, but also highlights that there is a difference between opinion, which imho will never be successfully monopolised or cartelised, and real reporting, which is resource-intensive and valued, and may be.

Similarly, this extends beyond just finance news. my dad used to (still does I believe) subscribe to the Age, despite the execrable opinion and editorial pages and dismal local news coverage, because he needed to know what was going on in the Victorian Labor party (I’m not kidding). But he still read the Herald-Sun to know what was actually happening around him!

My final thought is that markets and finance reporting is particularly intensive because you need qualified staff and deep contact lists. But people like Michael Totten, Michael Yon, JD Johannes and some of the bloggers at places like obsidian wings have demonstrated that conflict-reporting can be done free-lance and ‘open-source’, and numerous bloggers at places like calculatedrisk or Arnold Kling have started demonstrating that even business reporting need not be the sole domain of newspapers.

Another good point. I’ve given up lugging home kilos of the weekend papers partly because I felt niggled about throwing so much of them out unread.

Also these days, instead of getting into the weekend papers like a warm bath as someone once memorably described it, you can just dip in and out of a wifi-enabled laptop on the bed breakfast table between the coffee and toast.

“I see Julia Gillard’s just had a wardrobe malfunction.”
“Really, show me!”
“Careful, yer getting marmalade on the mouse.”

Cue Henry Green’s pungent description of a classic English breakfast.

I’d also add that newspapers don’t deliver the same profit margins as other media, being much more labour and resource intensive than electronic outlets and so the conglomerates that acquire newspapers with little understanding of how they actually work beyond “synergy with our other media/entertainment properties” , keep squeezing the rags to deliver more than the 10-15% or so that the old print barons happily lived with. So consequently the reader expectations aren’t met and the punters move on.

But as you mention, it’s the decline of classifieds revenue that’s really sticking it and turning it around.

And while this list is aimed at book publishing, I think some points are also applicable to the newspaper game as well.

Anyway, good piece. For a blogger.