RE “89% of all citizen-journalists are just full of it.”

Where is Bob Shelby when you need someone to make a point for you?

I just read this article on the web and I’m on my way to the diner where I will enjoy reading the New York Post over lunch at the counter. I won’t focus on the news, however, but rather on insightful articles on the local social scene, sports and politics. I enjoy this regularly, which is notable being that I run Uppereast.com, which is a pureplay a hyperlocal Internet media company that competes with newspapers for local advertising dollars. They’re definitely not dead, I can tell you that, as we are battling them every day for business.

“89% of all citizen-journalists are just full of it”

Looks like a misprint. Real figure is more likely 99%.

I just got done reading this article and believe that businesses have to accept change or die, however, being a small business owner myself I know change is difficult and costly. To survive one must take steps or face the next race. I run buypcsoft.com and internet based software reseller that competes with larger more powerful competitors like Amazon for advertising space and I can tell you that, as we are battling this economy every day for business.

I’m in the demographic that’s supposed to be out to kill newspapers, and I still read one almost every day. Mainly the free local papers — I’ve yet to find any websites that are anywhere near as comprehensive (although there are some high-quality sites covering particular topics, the local rags are still the best one-stop shop).

Do the bullsh**ters no longer mention the record companies? Is their death old news, or is everyone still covering their ears and saying “la la la sue em all till they learn to obey the DRM” ?

Rock And Roll is dead too.

Read it in a newspaper once.

Thank you! The continued existence of radio, which once was America’s evening news and entertainment, shows that a communications medium can mutate and survive, as can many other businesses.
One point about the blogosphere: Most of the people scorning traditional media and propounding their erratically punctuated conspiracy theories are reacting to some piece of information that they would not have without said traditional media. How else do you know what McCain said last night, or what the latest Al Qaeda tape said?

Upon reading the “DETROIT FREE PRESS” in the morning, I compare yesterday’s news from the “INTERNET” to today’s news in the “FREE PRESS”.

Once upon a time, this comparison was not available; “DEMAND” for breaking news was “VERY” high.

Today, “DEMAND” for breaking news is ultra high and the “supply” comes from a perforated conduit system through a “CESSPOOL”.

“NEWSPAPERS” tend to be “OVER QUALIFIED” for today’s demands.

We can save a newspaper for a thousand years; but we can delete electronic communication in a second.

Well, thank God, the fact that my paper made $50 million last year and projects to make $50 m this year merely proves we’re dead. And the steady drumbeat of “they’re dead”s comes from usedtobees and neverweres, like the Pat Thorntons of the world.

For some reason our local Gannett paper think it’s fashionable for on-line readers to contribute their rants to comment sections; example:
“That 10 year old deserved to get killed in that I-95 crash. His parents probably voted for Bush, too.”
It’s the content that matters… written by people that do it professionally for a living. Not the newsprint, 60 lb coated offset or HTML.

Newspapers may not be dead, but their revenues are definitely set for a fall. Apparently, 50% of their revenue is from classified ad sales in autos, real estate, and jobs.

With craigslist growing the way it is, and with the mushrooming of several classified sites like http://www.weebers.com newspapers should not count much of revenue from classifieds in a few years.

With half their revenues gone, how would they survive? They could move online – i.e. all the journalistic reporting could be done online rather than in print.

Another option would be to raise prices. But how many people would pay $5 or $10 for something that they get for $1 or $2 today?

It definitely seems like a downward spiral – less revenue leading to higher prices or poorer reporting (or both), leading to even lesser revenue.

Just my two cents.

I love the Google reference. Truth is, and I think this was your point to some extent, people have no freaking clue what is dead or not dead. It all comes down to change and wanting to live. If you are willing to change your business plan and your main revenue sources to keep up with the technology, then you will survive and thrive. If you are not, then you can not die fast enough.

Drucker called this “creative destruction” and it is necessary for new technologies and advances to take place. Buffet calls it intelligent allocation of a limited supply of capital investment. Essentially, kill off the weak and the unwilling.

Great post and like the blog!
Kevin at http://bushbaker.com

Sounds like an unpleasant meeting, Bing. As a young man in the information business, I read newspapers for fun and profit, and I, like you, don’t believe they’re Dead, or even Moribund. There’s a functionality and portability to print newspaper that you can’t really get with the internet. Sure, you can take your Blackberry or iPhone into the WC, or sit down to breakfast with it. But it makes you look like a tosser to all those who aren’t doing the same. Sit down with a newspaper and you look dignified and earnest, even if you open to the comics section first, like me. Another added bonus: you’ll never accidentally read a work email reading the paper.

Newspapers aren’t going away from the Table of Public Interest. They just have to make a little more room like they did with radio and television.

I think newspapers are dead because they continue to shrink as opposed to expanding. Do not get me wrong I liked reading the newspaper. The depth of information provided is great – especially on local issues. The reason why my local paper, Atlanta Journal Constitution, is dead is the following:

• Business section made up almost entirely of AP/newswire stories
• Local coverage is all but gone except for the city of Atlanta. The county I live has a population grater them 8 states but no coverage.
• Classified are out of sight cost wise and prices silly for a shrinking market.
• Can not order weekend only delivery
• Their editors never call, write or even snort back – even if the face of glairing errors – or when you think something needs looking into.
• Because the quality of staff has gone down ( cost cutting) so has the writing, often the stories are very biased.

Well, I think the guys over at Gannett would be really happy to hear this. It might cheer them up after their $3 Billion write down and losing half their value over the past year. They’re not dead, maybe just comatose.

I like newspaper too. I have about a dozen I can chose from in the morning on my way to work. There’s so many that I usually just go for the free daily at every station across London. I’m lucky because on my way home, a guy hands me another free one at the tube station entrance. Newspapers must be doing so well that they’re giving them away for free!

They won’t die of course, but they will not be profitable like they were before and won’t attract the same talent as they used to. If you posted this article to Digg, you would get routed.

News papers will be around for a long time, try wrapping a fish with your blackberry, try using your laptop as a drop cloth when you are painting the walls in your house. As for reporters, well they are a neccessary part of the ecology, similar to weeds and other low forms of life that make up our enviroment.

Actually it is only 88.467% of citizen journalists that are full of it. You do the internet a disservice by rounding.

What about the smell of “newsprint”? It is a visceral connection with news….Can you get that from the internet…sound bytes.

Excellent post.

I 100% agree I have meetings with bull****ers all the time who tell us why we should spend thousands on advertising on there websites yet our own newspaper advers are consistantly producing more visitors and better footfall time and time again.

I would never stop our press ads and I think its now more of a Balance of all media that we have to try to achieve and thus best distribute our budget accross all advertising sources.

Dale Search Marketing

The other problem is that these comments are always made by people who pride themselves for being on the bleeding edge on media, forgetting that there is still a huge segment of the population who isn’t as technologically connected. they never get out of their own self-contained universe to know what all the other folks who don’t live like them are doing – not the kind of people I would trust with my money…

Somehow the impact of a picture and story on my computer screen just isn’t the same as the newsprint, you can’t hit it with the back of your hand, hand it to a friend and exclaim, “DID YOU SEE THIS?”

On the other hand, I hear my step daughters talking all the time about “what’s really going on in the world cause of what they read on the web”…jjeeeezzzz. If it’s on the web it’s gotta be true..right!!

I threw a newspaper route when I was a high school teenager in 1973, and my six-year-younger brother threw one too when he was thirteen years old. It’s hell throwing a newspaper every morning, with no way to take time off if you have to go out of town, and have no one who can pick up the work and do it right. But it was a great way for a energetic kid to work off some energy, get out to meet people when collecting for the month.

As an adult, I have found I can read a newspaper far faster than I can read the web, because I was already a fast reader.

Web pages sure take a long time to load, and so it takes longer to read than a newspaper.

The newpaper stays put if I get interrupted, and I can return to it later.
Web pages disappear.

Gary said: What about the smell of “newsprint”? It is a visceral connection with news….Can you get that from the internet…sound bytes.

Oh, and what about the ink on your hands, that transfers to your light-colored clothes before you can wash it off?

When people say the newspaper business is dead, I think they are really saying the newspaper business is not a growth business anymore. And the weasels of Wall Street do not like businesses that are not a growth business, unless they are short-sellers.

Your article is dead, and as a writer whoever you are, you should kill your career in any kind of journalism. I have a headache thanks to your article.

a long-standing complaint about newspapers — and media in general — is that they beat a story to death, whether it’s britney spears or hurricane katrina.
well, newspapers are beating to death the news about their own financial problems, thereby making those problems look worse than they are.

So 89 percent of citizen journalists are full of it? Perhaps. I think 89 percent of newspaper and magazine columnists are full of it, but the other 11 percent create some amazing stuff. Same with that 11 percent of citizen journalists.

And the internet lacks credibility? By that logic newspapers lack credibility because of the Weekly World News.

I have more to say on the subject at whapwhap.com.

Can’t we all just get along?

Newspapers aren’t gonig to die. What will die is the expectations of those who work in the newspaper industry, mostly those in the newsroom.

Journalists have always thought they were immune to market conditions because “they are defending democracy”. Little did they realize their journalism was being subsidized by classified ads (which had accounted for about 30-40% of all newspaper income until recently).

There will always be a market for news printed on paper, but that market is shrinking.

Look to what the Tribune company is going to start doing with their papers. If it even looks like that model will be a financial success in a couple of years, it will quickly become the new standard in the newspaper industry….and papers will be different.

I don’t know if newspapers are on their way to extinction or major downsizing, or not. I do know I used to buy two a day and haven’t bought one in 4 or 5 years. I read two or three, sometimes four, on the web each day for free. At least one, the NY Times, is evidently making a profit on the web. So maybe it can continue to exist if others fail. Who really knows? I do know I’ve made good money short-selling several newspaper publishers in the stock market.

I think one of the biggest problems with newspapers nowadays is the obvious political bias of the stories in the newspaper, something that former New York Times Editor-in-Chief Abe Rosenthal abhorred for very obvious reasons.

After the VERY heavy-handed way the New York Times egged on the protest against Augusta National Golf Club in early 2003 and the fiasco of the Jayson Blair scandal that forced Editor-in-Chief Howell Raines out, you’d think newspapers across the country would get the message and leave the editorializing to the Editorial/Commentary pages. But they didn’t, and the subsequent Rathergate scandal (of which the Times played a tangental role) soured a lot of people on the mass media in general.

In short, Alvin Toffler’s prophetic vision of the de-massified media he predicted way back in 1979 in The Third Wave is now proving to be devestating to newspapers in general because new media outlets are taking away the two biggest sources of newspaper revenue, namely advertisements and classified ads.

Just wanted to say, as a newspaper person of 30+ years who is looking to hang around another 30 or so, I LOVE YOU!

Us ink-stained wretches will survive, in some fashion and form, forever, so, all your BSers, quit cher bitchin.

The ‘news’ and the ‘forum’ ought to be distinguished here as a matter of defining terms, and the blogosphere ought better be considered more ‘forum’ than ‘news.’

Online, you have both news and forum, unbundled, combined, mixed and infinitely remixed. The larger the forum (a good thing) the less efficient is the forum (not necessarily a bad thing).

Online, depending on your level of competance and efficiency, you can navigate away from the bullsh**ters with more or less ease.

Whereas with hardcopy, you have less news, smaller forum (no comparison here really), and, in a peculiar way, you are less likely to navigate away from the reknowned and longstanding bullsh**t of which there has never been a shortage.

From my perspective, it just looks like more and more types of media continue to appear, while available time does the exact opposite – it disappears. As more media becomes available, the less time we have to pay attention to all of it. So, we wind up with increasingly fragmented audiences; people choose the media that best fit their lifestyles and limited free time. This of course causes the more traditional media to lose market share as new media increases their own. But I’m confident that newspapers and other traditional media will “settle into their niches” within the new media landscape… while some new media themselves may even fall by the wayside.

I’m going to use this in my newspaper advertising sales presentations. It’s better than some syndicated research!

Interestingly enough, I found this very lucid analysis while searching for article on companies heading into bankruptcy. The internet being what it is, I should get hits to dozens of write-ups, blogs, articles, etc etc, one would think. Actually, no, not even a half dozen. Thus, from my perspective, I am not sure this internet-thing ever actually came to life. Has it?

Also, regarding the numeral statistic shared of 89%, that was a typo, wasn’t it? I agree w/ Minnesotan Alex. I would feel more comfortable with the number 99.89%.

Newspaper as a medium isn’t dead, but print editions of the major metropolitan newspapers are absolutely dead. Small town newspapers will be around long into the future because the Internet presence in small town America just isn’t sufficient to supplant the value of local news coverage, but the major metro newspapers dependent on national audiences/readership will transform into some Slate equivalent sooner rather than later.

All the major newspapers have already shifted to a smaller broadsheet. Transport and printing costs are skyrocketing, a big hit on the national newspapers with geographically diverse readerships. Here in Washington, the Wash. Post is also facing increasing pressure from the unions that print and ship its issues. Major metropolitan markets are also most likely to have a strong media presence on the Internet too, which supplants the value of newspaper editorials and columns. Already the Internet has totally supplanted the newspaper as a source for classifieds and personals.

For the tenuous economic viability of a printed paper, just look at the Washington Post. It’s interest in Kaplan Test Prep is basically subsidizing the print edition.

Newspapers will continue to suffer — and maybe even die — unless management realizes that you can’t sell a product that you already are giving away. Every newspaper is available for free on the Net. And then newspaper management wonders why people aren’t buying the hard-copy version. Until management stops making their websites free, there is no reason to buy the hard-copy version. Yes, starting to charge for the websites will pi** people off at first, but pi**ing off a few freeloaders is better than suicide. One of the excuses editors have used is “If we don’t give it away on our website, they’ll get is somewhere else.” Maybe. But they won’t get your writers and reporters covering your local news and sports. You supposedly have the best writers and reporters. Their work has value.

The people killing newspapers are the business people buying them and thinking only they have to make these huge profits. They care little about journalists. Zell scoffs at them.
But my deepest worry is that if we lose our newspapers, we hit another important freedom that makes our country so different from others. The demise of newspapers hits democracy.