Confusing distribution and consumption in News

Tim — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 17:25:58 +0000

I’ve recently been on holiday in Australia and had a chat to a family member about the future of newspapers.

It was a conversation that may be familiar to many people, and has probably played out thousands of times all over the world.

His position was that he had no interest in reading his news on a screen, and that he preferred a newspaper and was prepared to continue buying and reading them.

My perspective was that newspapers were a terribly inefficient way to consume news – it makes no sense to me to spend time designing and laying out newspaper pages, printing them, driving the papers around in trucks, selling them in shops and in the street, and then reading them and throwing them away.
And for all this effort, the news is a day old when you get to read it.

It struck me that we were talking about very different things, simply because we were confusing the distribution mechanism with the consumption mechanism for our news.
When reading newspapers, they are connected simply because in order to read your content in a broadsheet, printed format, it’s necessary to print and distribute the paper.

When content is distributed digitally, it can be consumed on a laptop, in an internet café, on a mobile phone, or on a reader like the Kindle using an e-Ink display. The distribution mechanism is not linked to how the content is consumed in a digital world in the same way reading a newspaper dictates the distribution mechanism in traditional publishing.

So the crux of our argument was really about how he preferred a particular way of reading his news, while I preferred a particular way of my news being distributed. And I was prepared to put up with an inferior reading experience.

It’s particularly interesting to me that Amazon has released a Kindle reader for iPhone. What this says is that their distribution mechanism and content catalog is so compelling that people are willing to read long-form content on a tiny backlit screen. The cost saving (no Kindle reader to buy) and utility (read your books any time you have your phone with you) make it worth putting up with the limitations of the iPhone as a reading device.
It suggests to me that if the content is compelling, the price is fair, the quality of the reading experience improves, and the devices become cheaper we should see much greater take-up of digital distribution for content that is currently still on paper.

The other area in which the Kindle is succeeding is slightly counter-intuitive… I’ve picked up from numerous comments online that the Kindle is being used by old people with poor vision, and by people who suffer from arthritis.

They find that the Kindle is much easier to read for them than traditional books because of the light weight of the device, the fact that they don’t need to be held open, and because the text can be enlarged to a size that is comfortable for them to read.

If the young folk and the old folk are both prepared to give up paper when the benefits outweigh the drawbacks, we’re looking at a compelling shift in the chosen method of consumption and the associated distribution.

What are your thoughts on how this will play out? Can you see a day when you no longer read long-form material like books, newspapers and magazines on paper?

Newspaper Circulation May Be Worse Than It Looks (abcnews.go.com)
Book View Cafe embraces the Kindle (kindleville.blogspot.com)
Evidence points against online news pay walls (billbennett.co.nz)
Amazon Kindle, first impressions (mathewpacker.com)

Shaping the Future of the Newspaper

Tim — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 20:27:23 +0000

The newpaper publishers are even more !@#ked than I thought they were if what I witnessed today was the best thinking the World Association of Newspapers could come up with.

I’m through the first day of our 2-day Media24 conference. Pretty interesting overall, with standout presentations from Steve Pacak (for shoot-from-the-hip straight-talking), and Sophia Stuart (for a snappy presenation and great nuggets of mobile wisdom).

For me, the shocker of the day was Martha Stone’s presentation.
I’m not going to knock her style or her slides here, it’s really the content that I took issue with.

Martha is the director of “Shaping the Future of the Newspaper” at the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers. From Wikipedia, “The World Association of Newspapers (WAN) is a non-profit, non-governmental organization made up of 76 national newspaper associations, 12 news agencies, 10 regional press organisations and individual newspaper executives in 100 countries. …the association represents more than 18,000 publications on five continents. ”

She delivered a long and winding presentation, full of figures that painted a frightening picture for newspapers in developed markets, and a moderately interesing one for developing markets. I think the figure quoted for North America was a 24% decline in the last year.
No matter… we’ve all seen the horror stories about the lay-offs and daily papers closing.
For newpapers, it’s pretty grim out there.

So what do do about it? Amongst the many approaches, I picked up these clangers:

Listen to your customers, find out what they want. You think? Wow. How long did it take to think of that one?
E-Readers. sorry, Amazon’s got you by the short hairs on that one. Won’t do better than a 70/30 split in their favour plus you lose the redistribution rights
Create a digital download version of the newspaper, and then get your readers to print it out at home on their own inkjet printers
Create hyper-niched, local, subject-focussed papers, like a newspaper for people who love a particular breed of dog in a particular area. We’ve already got ‘em – they’re called ‘magazines’ and they are in almost as much trouble as newspapers
Create super-niche publications, and then get souped-up logistics guys in vans to drive around dropping off particular papers to particular people on particular days. So you suggest we courier newpapers to individuals? And that’s a scaleable model for the future? Better than the internet? Better than wireless?
Head for the super-high CPM rates ($478 I think the slide showed) up at the end near “direct mail”. Avoid the internet down in the couple of cents CPM on the other end of the graph. You can’t build a business on a market inefficiency in the age of digital media. It won’t last.
Have a ‘voice’, tell ‘stories’ instead of repeating facts. Sorry, the bloggers own this one. You can’t beat passionate amateurs writing their stories for free. Free.

These were just the ones I remembered. To her credit, Martha did say that micro-payments are not going to work, which is correct. She is obviously speaking to a lot of smart people and listening to some of them. The bit that blew my mind was the near-sightedness with which she tackled the challenges facing newspapers.

Driving vans around is not a workable strategy in an age when the Kindle and others are getting content over wireless digital networks.
Asking people to download and print newspapers at home is ridiculous – that’s what we all use the web for right now.
Without using any paper.
And the hyper-niche market is well served by Google and the internet at large.
Any weird niche or fetish I care to explore is only a search term away.

In related news, the world’s largest manufacturer of newsprint recently declared bankruptcy.

Leave me a comment – what does the future hold for the tree-killers?
How will we line parrot-cages in the future?

Save journalism, online newspaper publishers beg EC (theregister.co.uk)
Newsday Plans to Charge for Online News (nytimes.com)
AP plans online rights tracking system (guardian.co.uk)