By Jeffrey the Barak
As more and more newspapers disappear from the marketplace, more of us turn to the Internet to read our news.
But although there are many sources to choose between, only a few actually gather the news, and these news organizations have to give it away and foot the bill.
No longer can they rely on the business of printing, selling and distributing paper that sells for a quarter or a dollar, and no longer can they sell page after page of print ads to cover the rent, salaries and countless other expenses of news gathering.
To illustrate this, let me use one of my own daily routines. I have in my Google home page, a ‘gadget” or columnar panel that highlights Current News. This is tier one.
If I click on the header it takes me to current.com. This is tier two. Once here, I can select a news article or click on “more news” and then select an article. Let’s assume I do the latter and pick an article that is not in the top three. This is tier three.
In “more news”, I select an interesting headline, click on it and arrive at tier four, an excerpt of the article, that includes a link to the original article which in this case resides on bbc.co.uk
So I click through to here and arrive at the page on BBC, tier five, and see a television interview video and read the article, which was gathered in the UK by BBC staffers. None of my money went to the BBC, and I was five tiers away from the article.
Along the way, I saw advertisements. There were none on Google, which is one of the many reasons why it is better than the mouse-over pop-up ridden and animated Yahoo!, There were none on Current, except for links to Current features, but then on the “more news” page I saw a small ad for Mini (the car). At the article level of current I saw one ad for AT&T, and then at the final BBC tier, there were no ads, except for BBC features links.
So assuming I did not shop for AT&T service or BMW minis, I got my story for nothing.
This is great for me, and I am not complaining, especially since my eyesight is not really up to reading a traditional newspaper anymore. But somewhere, someone has paid a lot of money to bring me the story, and eventually, we may end up with a news shortage, because no-one is paying the bill.
Your conclusion is absolutely true and really scary. One thing I just cannot understand is that commuting time being longer and longer, the need for real newspapers in real paper should be soaring, although the contrary actually happens. Personally, I just cannot help buying my favorite (French) newspaper Libération every morning, just for the pleasure to read it outside a café, in my favorite commuting train, in bed (I’m a single), or anywhere else. Which doesn’t prevent me from reading newspaper websites, where you can find video and audio records.
Jacques,
I agree that if you have the time to stop for a civilized cup of coffee, real newspaper is the best way to read the news. Not until the electronic experience becomes such a great pleasure will the last real pages stay on the trees.
J the B
Good analysis, although I, unlike the rest of the civilized world, haven’t been sold on google per se for bringing me the news. I was a yahoo person before google came to the scene and even now I am inclined to go directly to news websites such as nytimes.com or alternet.org instead of clicking a suggested link on my yahoo homepage. Alternet is interesting because it ends up pointing me to sites where the analysis of events isn’t something that you would find in mainstream publications such as the New York Times (which is how I actually found the-vu). What bothers me now is that once upon a time, mainstream news sites would show videos but they didn’t insert ads into the videos. Now you have to always wait for an ad to play before you get the story.
But seriously, ads are making the online news reading experience as watered down as the television or print experience. It’s going to get even worse since studies show that not only more people are getting their news from the internet, but that they are spending more of their lives on the internet:
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Survey_Americans_prefer_to_read_news_1224.html
http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=66218