The Downward Spiral

Been far too long since I've been able to post, and I'm going to blame the GMAT for that. To make it up, here are three different angles to the ongoing saga of Old Media trying to adapt to the Internet Age and mostly failing. The dots should be easy to connect.

First, Rupert Murdoch is making good on his promise to cut off access to his news organizations' online content, and in June the British papers The Times and The Sunday Times of London will implement a subscription only policy for all online material. No longer will Murdoch be able to whine about "parasites" like Google helping to "encourage promiscuity" among online readers and steal his revenue streams.

Such petulance and its resulting folly has been well documented on this blog. It now only remains to be seen if the pay wall can reverse declining revenues caused by a 21% drop in readership from February 2009 to February 2010 (see NYT article above). My prediction, if people don't want your stuff for free, they're sure as hell not going to pay for it.

Secondly, there was a great Business Insider article recently regarding the relationship of the print media to the new Apple iPad. In short, it won't save them.

As I have mentioned previously, newspapers are in the content delivery business, not the news business. It is the delivery system that is dying, not the news itself. The article gets it spot on:

...the hullabaloo about the iPad-saving-publishers'-asses resembles the hullabaloo about what people thought the Internet would look like when it first burst on to the scene.

"Like TV", shouted the TV companies.

"Like a magazine!" shouted the magazines.

"Like a newspaper!" shouted the newspapers.

Of course, as it turned out, the Internet didn't look much like any of those things.

Precisely. Current news delivery is based on a business model only slightly more ancient than Mr. Murdoch himself, and is unlikely to adapt quickly enough to survive in the Internet Age.

Third, an excellent article from Mark McLaughlin at HuffPost on how wrong-headed media is about this entire issue. A great read, here are two highlights:

The holistic view of mass media overwhelmingly suggests that consumers are easily persuaded to pay for distribution but only rarely do they pay for content in a specific and direct manner. Advertisers underwrite content while consumers pay for distribution services.

In other words, it is not because of the internet that consumers do not like to pay directly for content, they have always payed for the delivery system rather than the news itself:

The reality is that the audience never paid for newspaper content. The audience paid the newspaper company to deliver the paper to their door and now they are paying an Internet Service Provider for distributing the content to their computer. The audience is still paying for distribution; they are just migrating to a digital distributor because it is better, cheaper and greener than newsprint.

 Let's just cut out the middleman, shall we?