The big question is did the Chronicle increase readership enough to generate more ad sales or higher rates for existing ads? Selling 1,000 more copies per day is barely going to make a dent in the bottom line, as subscriptions generate a small portion of newspapers' operating expenses.JRod wrote:I read a story about I think the Houston Chronicle about how they committed resources to investigative journalism when others were shying away from it. They broke some huge stories and increased readership because of it.
Might not be, but that's not the model to which I refer. I think more newspapers could follow the lead of Newsweek, which shifted its editorial focus last year toward opinion (biased by nature) and objective analysis of the news and future trends because its editors and management realized there was no way a weekly news magazine could be relevant -- or solvent -- in today's hyper-fluid media cycle. I haven't seen anything published about whether that model is working financially for Newsweek, but I think the magazine is a more interesting read now than it was a year ago.JRod wrote:If you want people to read your newspaper you have to make it so people want to read it. Now some papers may take the TV news lead and offer focused opinion-news with a bias towards specific targeting towards a section of the population. That model has worked on TV, and it was the model of newspapers through out time. In communities there might have been numerous papers covering different slants and focusing on different populations. That type of newspaper will appeal to a certain type of person but I don't know if that's the future of the market.
Damn straight.JRod wrote:If newspapers do the same thing and expect that will success, that's a plan to fail. I don't know what the solution is, but newspapers were a medium to get news to the people. That model was broken apart by the internet and the news organizations only have themselves to blame for not adapting.
But what's innovative about the iPad and the news? What can the iPad do that a laptop or smart phone can't other than provide a larger screen for viewing than a smart phone and be slightly more portable than a laptop?JRod wrote:For news, I think the iPad is the best thing that could happen to a devastated industry. It offers the POTENTIAL for news to do something innovative.
That's my problem with the iPad. Many of its proponents are preaching that it's a device that's going to revolutionize publishing. I disagree. It's a vessel that offers another way to provide similar packaging to what already exists on the Internet.
The iPod and iTunes were the first device and commercial medium to bring legal MP3's to the masses, causing the rapid decline of the music sales industry. The Internet already has brought portable digital news to the masses through computers and smart phones and precipitated the decline of the newspaper industry. The iPad is just another vessel.
Honestly, I don't see how people are suddenly going to pay for newspapers on an iPad when they can get them for free, legally, now on their laptops or smart phones. That horse already has left the barn.
