I was reading a few of the speculative musings about the as-yet-unannounced but much rumored Apple tablet computer, and ran into an interesting little column in the New York Observer by Jeff Bercovici.
The column takes on the hope, expressed by other writers, that a successful carry-everywhere tablet computer, done in the elegant Apple style, can be a platform for delivering newspapers, magazines, and books, and in the process save their publishers from becoming future road kill in the online highway.
There has been speculation that publishers are preparing multimedia versions of popular magazines for delivery on this widely expected product.
Bercovici, though, doesn’t believe magazines and newspapers can be saved, based on what he calls “the first law of the Internet”.
But a magazine isn’t just a brand wrapped around some words and pictures; it’s also a product, one whose nature is decidedly antithetical to the demands of the digital economy. Magazines are, above all, packages for diverse kinds of content: features, celebrity profiles, reader service, fashion, charticles—and, of course, glossy ads whose value to marketers derives from their adjacency to high-grade consumer porn. The digital universe, however, abhors a package. The first law of the Internet—and everything is the Internet now—is this: Anything that can be disaggregated will be. Once it was possible to sell albums; now, thanks to iTunes, music labels have to settle for selling songs. Once it was possible to sell newspapers; now the savvy reader cherry-picks headlines on Google News.
Magazine publishers are so gung-ho on the tablet because it holds out the promise of maintaining the integrity of the product-as-package. If an e-magazine is sufficiently beautiful and seamless to browse, this thinking goes, consumers will be willing to purchase and enjoy it as a whole, ads and all, just as they do with an ink-and-paper magazine. But people don’t buy physical magazines because they’re attractive and user-friendly; they buy them because buying a whole magazine was, pre-Web, the only way to get magazine-style content.
Two points being made. First, the production and distribution systems that gave rise to the dominance of major metro newspapers and magazines have now become, if not obsolete, at least anachronistic, despite the $70+ million that Gannett poured into its Honolulu printing plant not too long ago. And, second, disaggregation is becoming the rule, not the exception.
Howard Weaver made a similar point in his Etaoin Shrdlu blog late last year.
It’s pretty clear now the overall business model that enriched newspapers over most of the last 40 years was largely accidental. Newspaper publishers never had a strategic plan to have television eliminate half their rivals, leaving them with non-competitive pricing power. I doubt any ever realized their audience-building packaging decisions — news, sports, business, features, comics — were mainly artifacts of production and distribution realities. We delivered all that content in one newspaper package because that was at the time state-of-the-art: the best, most cost-effective way to distribute on a daily basis. There was no natural order involved.
Media success is still driven by distribution prowess and uneconomic, accidental circumstances, but those no longer work in favor of newspapers. Google is today’s dominant example.
I was thinking back yesterday to my start in the world of trying to communicate ideas and widen their distribution by breaking through barriers of public disinterest or hostility. In those days the issue was the Vietnam War, and communication was via simple printed leaflets. It was a few ideas typed out on a stencil and then reproduced on a desktop mimeograph machine, then hand carried to a public place where they would be delivered to people passing by via direct hand-to-hand, eye-contact transactions. While the big daily newspapers were making all the money, we were spreading ideas at the retail level, one-on-one, a leaflet occasionally sparking a conversation which could later draw another person into some level of personal involvement with the issues of the day.
Today it is far easier, and less expensive, to use a blog like this to reach lots of people. But there’s no equivalent to that feeling of standing on a street corner, making eye contact as someone passes by, and extending your hand to offer that stranger a leaflet containing information they would not see in the mainstream media, then trying to leverage such contacts into measurable changes in public opinion.
Communication and community organizing were part of the same process.
I just surprised myself with that observation. Information–news, if you will–wasn’t just a commodity looking for a market. It was part of a larger community process with broader goals and interests.
That suggests to me that, if disaggregation is the first key attribute of the Internet, decommodification is another. Both take aim at what has become the heart of the news industry.
I’ll have to mull this over for a while more.
Discover more from i L i n d
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
All of which, in a way, shows the folly of competing on the internet in the first place. Headlines on Google news are only as valuable as the reporting behind them.
Completely disagree about “decomodification.”
markets make a commodity. Commodities don’t “look for markets.”
newspapers face the same issue as anyone else providing value in exchange for the time or money of the client.
Newspapers devalue themselves when they merely echo local political self agrandisement, or report only allegations and don’t follow up with the actual proceedings in our local “justice” system.
On the other hand we know the names of all your cats.
I guess it all works out.
People are probably not going to buy digital magazines, but they will read them if they are free. I already receive several free digital magazines. The reader benefits from the editorial packaging of useful/desired information, including things that they might not find on their own with Google. The publisher benefits by distributing their publication to as many people who want it as possible at low cost compared to printing and mailing. (Hence, they can provide it at lower cost or for free.) The advertisers get people to look at their ads. Everyone benefits from the format except for those who make money from web ads.
I might be willing to pay the same price as now to have my newspaper delivered in a digital format if I had a portable reader that could nearly emulate the experience of the paper page. I like how a physical newspaper draws my attention to subjects that I am likely to ignore when viewing a list of headlines on a web site.
Good editors help me know what I might want/need to know by presenting articles on topics that might be off my radar. Of course, this is also true of good blogs like this one.
The New York Times Reader is the best newspaper-like experience I’ve seen on the Web. These days they charge for it, but I did try it a couple of years ago. On my Tablet PC it was a pleasure to use. But still, I prefer paper myself.
Soon the Blio Reader is to be released, and it looks promising. http://www.blioreader.com/
When I started using the online version of the Economist, I would flip through the hard copy, but use the online version for a larger font.
Then I started going almost soley to the online version because it was available a bit sooner. Online or not, I still like reading the Economist as one animal. That being said, a magazine with quality journalism deserving a complete read from cover-to-cover (or start-to-end) is becoming a rare breed.
There are many issues here. One is that newspapers went to commodity wire service stories to save money, making their “unique content” less valuable.
Very few mention this “obvious” factor: (meaning it is glaringly obvious to me but apparently not to others): newspapers and magazines alike are mostly filled with propaganda supporting the Powers That Be. Whatever isn’t pure propaganda (everything’s getting better and better!) is “entertainment”–in journals like the New Yorker and The Atlantic, a lot of filler is aimed at “pleasing” the 20% of the workforce which is still highly paid and well-off (reviews of fancy restaurants, snarky tidbits on pop literature topics, etc.)
People are abandoning the mainstream press not for techie issues but because the content is mostly worthless propaganda/valueless.
There’s a saying in the high tech “geek” community: “Information wants to be free.” It’s a cute way of stating a serious tendency. Information will “escape” without a lot of countermeasures to restrict it.
Look at musical “piracy.” When music was first digitized, that offered a lot of benefit to the music industry and they profited. Artists had new possibilities for editing tracks and producing sounds. CDs became cheaper and cheaper to produce.
With the development of high speed internet and the mass adoption of powerful home computers, it became possible to rip the data from the CDs and share it freely with friends, or even strangers. Napster was invented (or at least exploded) for this function.
The music industry responded with technical counter-measures and repressive legislation, arrests and lawsuits. Some artists sided with the industry. Some with the fans, figuring easy access to their music meant a bigger fan base for their concert tours. Besides, most artists were not getting much money from the record companies. Some artists, Ani DiFranco quite famously, made a lot of money selling her music directly to her fan base through the internet.
Apple faced these conditions and tried to find the price point at which enough people would opt for the convenience, and legality, of avoiding having to stay up all night downloading mp3s, most of which might be heard once or twice. The yfound that point to be 99 cents, with some restrictions. Or $1.29 with fewer restrictions.
Yes, some “piracy” of music continues. Many of the “pirates” wouldn’t be buying the music anyways, so it is hard to assess the actual losses which incur. And more consumers are listening to a broader selection of music than ever before.
I want creators of original “content” to be well-paid, whether they are journalists, film makers, musicians, actors, etc. Even individual bloggers like Ian Lind and Larry Geller are mostly commenting on information provided by writers who need to get paid before the rest of us have material to play with. (Well, except for the cats, the rats and the cooking.)
How do “we” resolve this dilemma? How do we avoid strengthening the politically-connected rentier class to whom we will be obliged to pay outlandish prices, while still ensuring writers and artists make a decent living?
Information in the digiatl age is “leaky.” It WANTS to be free. The techno anarchists and “pirates” will continue to find a way to punch holes in the hardened structures restriciting its liberation. A “Milagro Beanfield War” for the information age.
Let’s shred the corporate overlords, swim in a sea of free ideas and culture and still ensure the original artists are provided for.
That’s a tough balancing act.
You might wish to look at what Lenova is offering: http://video.forbes.com/fvn/tech/lenovos-hybrid-pc?partner=globalnews_newsletter%3f