The Financial Crisis and its Impact on Journalism

I have a wells fargo account I just opened. I deposited my payroll check thursday around 3 pm and it is FRIDAY 10 PM and NO MONEY!!! I gave them my whole check to deposit and over 24 hrs later, I am hungry, my stomach is growling. I am getting really depressed. I work hard and LIFE kicks my ASS around ALL DAY!!!
Life is not ROUGH, the DEVILS in it are though.
I wish I could buy something to eat!!!
Honestly, I cant wait till I die and my misery is gone.

If Vinod was working with newspaper execs that early on, it would be really fascinating to know what their vision was. The newspaper business was in a crisis before the Internet arrived. There's a lengthy list of business dynamics that reared up in the 1980s and '90s like unions, the advertising paradigm, competition from cable TV, stiffer competition from local TV news, the renaissance of news/talk radio, and even the expansion of morning drive-time in metro areas (and the list could go on).

Chester: Thanks for the used books example. And yes, rarity is always valuable. And information about rarity can bring down the price of items, such as used books. De Beers approach is to control the rarity of diamonds, which are not as rare as you might think.

The Internet has drastically affected the used book business, too.

Used to be that you could search for years to find that one title you wanted; this happened to me many times. In the old days, some bookseller in Idaho might have had a book that a guy in South Africa desperately needed, but they couldn't find one another.

Now, if it's available from one of the thousands of bookdealers who put their inventory online, you can find it in 10 seconds.

As a result, t

What we really need in addition to services like SocialBrite is a Craig's List-type offering for non-profits. I know of many companies that would love to donate time, services, furniture, supplies, equipment, etc, but it's so hard to do effectively that it becomes too much hassle. You've said it before - there's a great opportunity for a technology company to develop and host this - matching the needs of the non-profits with the extra resources of corporations.

Agree about the fragmenting, we'll all be using something different next year anyway, no sense worrying about who's using what and how much, we're all out there on the edge trying things out and experimenting. I doubt we'll be using Twitter or FriendFeed in two years anyway.

I'm remain a huge fan of Techmeme (my home page which alternates with feedly and a few others). I do wish they would roll out different channels though.

Robert, thanks for the clarification.

I love the fact that things keep on changing in the this shattered/fragmented media landscape of today. And I don't think they will ever stop changing.

That makes it challenging for both media and PR to tell their stories. Or rather, to get attention for their stories and the subsequent conversations.

Tom: I disagree with your thesis. I specifically made the choice to blog less to focus on Twitter and FriendFeed and I see that that investment has paid off very well for me.

Yes, my blog traffic has gone way down, but my FriendFeed posts are now being found all over the place in Google and are going up and I'm the #1 most followed person there.

On Twitter I still am in the top 10 in terms of organically gained followers, which is quite impressive.

Now I have a distri

Didn't he use all those tweets to drive traffic to his blog by linking to media & posts there? If not, why not? Seems to me it could be both/and instead of either/or. Work backwards from good blog posts, highlight them in tweets + link back to blog.

Tom, great post. We've been pointing out the value of content creation when we speak to audiences of marketers and PR people. The reality of reduced staffing at many local media outlets means more opportunities to generate content for clients.

Press conferences that go uncovered by the media can be vidcast via websites; photos of events can be shared with interested audiences, and of course, powerfully influential blog sites like SVW rise up on the radar of publicists trying to get th

Louis: Thanks for speaking for Robert, I know that you know him well. I used to sit next to Robert at Podtech and I would often say to him, I don't know how you do it because he was able to do it all, and do it all the time. But even an online athlete such as Robert needs to decide where his time produces the most value. It's clear that the real-time web is currently a less valuable use of time than publishing on well established web sites such as his own. That might change. You clearly need

Robert hasn't ditched Twitter and FriendFeed in a New York second. He's taking a one week hiatus from both, just like he has taken hiatuses from his blog on previous occasions.

He may have quickly written how he "was addicted" to both and made it sound past tense, but all he has done is moved his current attention to one focus of activity, rather than broadly covering all pieces.

Even today, when he said he was "off FriendFeed", he made a comment on his own posts. So this is t

Louis, you are right, Robert's traffic on the real-time web increased substantially. But it's ephemeral, it doesn't provide the same value as his blog traffic because it doesn't exist within Google in the same way web site content exists, it's not as searchable, as Robert points out. And the loss of that traffic does indeed show a loss of "thought leadership" as others have pointed out. At the moment, one set of traffic numbers related to the real-time web does not equate with "static" web tr

Jason: I totally agree. The demand for high quality news reporting isn't going away, in fact, it will increase, as we have less of it. It might very well come from the same people that produce it today but not from the same companies. It's the companies and their business models that are being disrupted. News reporting and journalism will survive and prosper.

I'm not so sure the news is becoming irrelevant. It seems more like paper is. Tom, you are a professional so you know that, as a few prominent bloggers want to believe, there are no high priests of media who sanction the news we will all consume. There are some wacky editors for sure, but the downfall of newspapers isn't because they chose to not cover stories. You rightly point out the toppling of the classified ad model. A newspaper, as currently published, must have wide distribution for c

This single data point is correct - Scoble's traffic has decreased.

But, if you consider that he has blogged less than half as often as he did previously, you could argue that each story got more views. And what is his goal anyway? If his goal is to gain visibility and participate as the Web evolves, then the best places to do that are on the blog, on Facebook, Twitter and FriendFeed. And nobody does that better than Scoble, myself included.

If this is the only metric you can

This is an excellent post.

I launched a blog on my site just a few weeks ago and am already appreciating the challenge involved in providing meaningful content according to a regular editorial calendar.

The fact that these platforms require little or no monetary investment suggests that publishing online is a cinch. Far from it. It represents a significant investment of time, thought and care.

As a communications professional, it's vital that I engage with others in

You're right, but I am not full frontal negative. The good journalism will survive. The technology alters and disrupts the delivery mode, but not the need for the content. Call me delusional, but I think the audience will seek the solid, quality journalism wherever it arrives.

I commented on my blog about it:

I guess the YouTube video insert did not work. Here is the link instead.

Advertising will also collapse. Google tried to do ads on AM/FM radio, but the bids were only $0.15 for 30-second ads. Radio stations can't live on $6 per hour so the radio industry quit on Google.

The same with TV. We pay $2 to run an ad on cable TV via Google.

Google's advertising platform will kill TV advertising (currently, a $70 billion industry). All of those ad agencies, TV studios, camera operators, etc., will lose their jobs.

"Value" has two meanings. MBAs are taught in business school that their goal is to "maximize value", but that means only monetary value. "Value to society" means zero to them.

Tom's essay is a good summary of many trends. Digitization lowers the costs to zero.

Another good example: Rick Astley's song "Never Going to Give You Up" has been viewed over 100 million times on YouTube. Google's royalty payment to the songwriter? $17. Digitized media is not good for artists.

Thanks, and I'm glad you have a sense of humor.

Check out this YouTube video put out by a member of the news media.

Allesandro: You can have both :) BTW I like your site.
James: Excellent points. I'm reporting on what is going on and not trying to judge things, which is very tempting. History will be the judge :)
Doug: Yes, newspaper companies could have rearranged their deck chairs in a nicer order, but that's what happens when dealing with a disruptive technology--everything is crystal in hindsight.

In the movie "Our Man Flint", a co-conspirator says to his evil scientist counterpart, "I told you I was right", to which the scientist responds, I don't care if you were right, I care more about intelligence.

You may be right, but I prefer the company of intelligent people, found on the staffs of newspapers.

Of course, I agree with this but have questions.

When the newspapers and traditional media companies fail, how can we be assured of quality reporting? With the Iran election crisis, major media companies like CNN & Fox are relying heavily on Twitter reports and blogs. Can we trust these citizen reporters?

You sight both Google and Craiglist as disruptive business models but they are far from perfect. I've heard many a client express disappoint with search traffic when looki

Good analysis, Tom.

Re the challenges facing newspapers: I wonder if they would be better able to deal with the discontinuity now, if their owners hadn't treated them as assets to be gutted and leveraged like any other buy-out target? Certainly management and directors share the blame for treating them only as financial assets to be squeezed and sold off.

Lovely, painful, true. Modern day Greek tragedy.

You have the makings of a great screenplay. Maybe the stage and screen can become a next great seduction! But then, there's transformation hitting there, too.

This was a great read. I'd love to hear it performed at a J-School-themed slam in San Francisco's sunny South Park.

Why must it be one or the other--social or traditional PR? Clients want it all, and that's OK. Thing is, everything comes down to credibility and traditional media still has plenty of it, despite what disruption lies ahead. Who wouldn't prefer a WSJ story front page above-the-fold to a flash-in-the-pan pop on Twitter? When companies start publishing Facebook and Twitter results to their News pages I'll consider advising clients to stop investing in building relationships with old school m