Old Media's Five Fatal Flaws
Flawed Assumption #1: A Captive Audience
Our Limited Attention Spans = Bite-Sized Consumption. I would read most of the daily newspaper when I was a kid, almost every day, sometimes even browsing through the classified ads! I got exposed to a wide range of articles and issues that I never would have, were I instead consuming (as we do today) articles piecemeal from a variety of publications on a single topic. There are a small number of news websites I browse, but even so, I often take in only headlines. Increasingly many of us are starting at a news aggregator like Techmeme which may have 20 different links to an article about the same topic. And often when we do click, we bounce right away or don’t read to the end.
This is a problem for publishers dependent on an advertising model that distracts users and hopes they take a detour to learn about the latest paid ware, and then return to the publication to continue reading it. Since we’re already probably on a detour from a detour, our return is increasingly unlikely.
Flawed Assumption #2: News Readers are Buying Stuff
We’re Getting Our News on Mobile, But Not Buying There. Mobile-only news consumption has accelerated to an unprecedented extent, according to the Newspaper Association of America. Using comScore data, they reported that in August 2015, roughly 90 million online newspaper-consuming adults used mobile devices only, compared to just over 40 million using both personal computers (PCs) and mobile devices, and fewer than 50 million only using PCs.
It’s more difficult for a consumer to take an advertiser-friendly action (like buying something), however, from a mobile device. Given that most advertisers spending money online are hoping the consumer takes some kind of action right away, the shift to mobile news consumption is problematic: the value of ads there is lower to advertisers and thus (with the usual time lags and inefficiency) this value will be lower for publishers as well. Retailers focus intently on conversion rates — what percentage of the time you make a purchase as a function of how often you visit their website.The bad news: desktop browsing e-commerce conversion rates (at 4.66% in the US) are well over THREE TIMES higher than they are on smartphones (1.43%), according to data gathered in the fourth quarter data of 2015. With the death of most classified advertising, commerce and news consumption are further apart from one another than ever.
Flawed Assumption #3: Being the Distribution Engine
Distribution is Driven by Social and Search. Offline newspapers and magazines of old could reliably double-dip by having large numbers of paying subscribers who also got to see advertising. US daily newspaper circulation peaked in 1984 at 63.3 million and in 2014 stood at 40.4 million (down 36%). But online these days, clickbait headlines are the order of the day, with publishers hoping their stories get retweeted, shared or “go viral” via ever-present Facebook or Twitter sharing buttons (many of which are supplied to websites by vendors whose price for this ‘free’ functionality is gathering user data at publishers’ and users’ expense, interestingly). Today many publishers actually pay social networks to distribute their articles, buying social advertising and hoping to make it up in an increasing volume of ads they in turn show to those who click (many of these users don’t like that and choose to install ad blockers, unfortunately). In addition to giving their users the power to distribute the news, these same social networks arealso in turn competing with publications by aggregating news headlines algorithmically, and/or via their own editorial teams.
Flawed Assumption 4: Having the Best Content
Citizens Are Creating the Most Compelling Images and Video. That people on the ground are creating and sharing ever-more unique and valuable information continues to prove true, often heartbreakingly so. Sometimes the people capturing these events are themselves involved or are changing the way these events transpire. Citizens who photograph or video-record/live stream something happening are on the scene (by definition) immediately in a way that a news van just can’t be. News outlets will eventually deploy automated drone cameras in places with high population density like urban centers, but until that happens, the immediacy and fidelity provided by most-everyone having a smartphone with a high-resolution video camera, will be hard for old media to match.
Flawed Assumption #5: Not Having to Create Crap
The Fragmentation of Media Means Fewer Unique Stories. Local newspapers still cover unique or important local events or stories that wouldn’t otherwise get attention, and the major outlets create the kind of intensive investigative journalism that I’d guess a lot of journalism grads want to be doing. But for many of the reasons articulated above, there appears to be a large and important need to create a lot of filler to put in the sausage machine. That filler could be simply parroting other work or public information in order to get keyword or aggregator traffic when a new story has just broken, or it could be a bold initiative aimed at “creating and publishing more than 2,000 videos a day using artificial intelligence software” (a strategy articulated by the company formerly known as Tribune Publishing).
The point is that despite any high-minded ideals, the pure economics of news and publishing will mean that serving the lowest common denominator will be the most necessary of evils for publishing companies.
Perhaps, though, this is as it has always been and nothing new for the “if it bleeds it leads” news business.
This was published on Medium as well.