The media industry, as we know it, is in toilet. And if we weren't so distracted by the stock market, Bernie Madoff, face-eating chimps, and Octo-Mom, we might be talking about this problem more.
David Carr, in this week's Times, says that one way that the newspapers should deal with the crisis is to stop giving away the candy for free.
The Web has become the primary delivery mechanism for quality newsrooms across the country, and consumers will have to participate in financing the newsgathering process if it is to continue. Setting the price point at free — the newspaper analyst Alan D. Mutter called it the “original sin” — has brought the industry millions of eyeballs and a return that doesn’t cover the coffee budget of some newsrooms.
The big threat would be that newspapers could lose the readers they have, lots of them. The mitigating factor is that a lot of those readers aren’t paying anyway. And keep in mind that people are already paying for quality content all over the Web: The Wall Street Journal, Consumer Reports, The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Tiered Web access — from a bare-bones free product to a rich, customized subscription — could be among the solutions.
Yeah, because The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette is a daily read of mine. If people have to pay to read the Times, they are going to just go back to blowing things up on their computers. Frankly, I think that newspapers are going to have to pay their readers to look at their stuff.
Then he says that aggregators (and bloggers) are just stealing the work of journalists. Already, guys, check out this fab map of immigration patters in the U.S. My guess is that it took a staff of five three weeks to put this together. And it's yours, for free.
And then there's my favorite media critic du jour, Jon Stewart. In case, you've missed it, he's been really laying into the financial analysts at CNBC and CNN. It's good stuff.
Michigan Messenger (via Scott) has all sorts of good links with their responses, including Cramer trying to lamely respond on the Today Show. That was quality TV. And they wonder why their numbers are in the toilet.
