Newsosaurs
March 15, 2010
I read “It’s Hard To Watch The Newsosaurs Turn A Blind Eye To Their Own Extinction” right after I flipped through the New York Times’s Sunday magazine clone from the Wall Street Journal outfit. Let me comment on each information MIRV and offer a couple of observations from my search vantage point.
First, TechCrunch’s write up has a killer comment:
Everyone wants to wall off the Web and keep grazing on declining ad revenues.
I agree. This is a combination of fear, anger, and ostracism. I enjoy pointing out that in the information economy, the traditional giants no longer own the country club. Each day, the former owners find their future will be as caddies to the new information elite. This is, I suppose, a bitter pill to swallow. The TechCrunch article includes the much quoted “burn the boats” admonition from one of the early superstars of the zippy-doo Web that is not the cat’s pajamas. Like Google’s advice to struggling industry, the listeners think that their outfits have already burned the boats, embraced technology, and reinvented themselves. This mismatch between advice and its perception is characteristic of the domain collision that is now taking place. The passage that caught my attention in the TechCrunch write up was:
The longer media companies wait, the bigger disadvantage they will have when they cross over to the other side and find a whole new host of competitors who never had any print legacy businesses to protect. Those competitors right now are blogs and online news hubs who are still furry little rodents in the underbrush, but who won’t stay little forever. The sooner print media companies cross over, the sooner they can be on pure offense. Their online strategies and business models won’t be crippled by any allegiance, or need to protect, to the old print business. If they wait until their online revenues become 25 or 50 percent before they fully commit, it will be too late.
I don’t disagree with the thought. I disagree with the “will be too late.” It is too late.
The example to wish I refer is the oversized, glossy, 80 plus page WSJ Magazine filled with “reading.” Well, that’s interesting. I just counted about 32 pages of ads plus a number of features that are tough for me to determine if these are placed for consideration or are actual editorial. The stories focused on cars and fashion with a profile tossed in for good measure.
I remember being told by my Financial Times’s delivery agent before I dropped my print subscription that he tossed the magazine insert because it was too much of a hassle. I wonder if my delivery person for my Saturday WSJ will follow the same path.
Did I read any of the stories? The answer is, “No.” None of them appealed to me. I have a person who works for me who drives a Mini Cooper and it seems to have constant tire problems. I am tired of with it executives who overcame hardship. Who hasn’t? Fashion? Not interested. I wear black Travel Smith jackets, black never wrinkle pants, and black shoes that do not set off any alarms anywhere I travel. Spare me the trendy. Was there any financial info, business intelligence, or juicy insights into making money grow? Nope. The WSJ added sports and now it is adding a New York Times’s magazine type publication every couple of months.
What’s my take?
- WSJ is going after the NYT advertisers. That’s okay but the effectiveness of print ads have to be demonstrable. That might be tough unless the editorial product provides some content consideration. The boundary between an auto story and an advertiser might be getting a few molecules narrower, might it not?
- The problem with traditional media is not content; the problem is finance and business models. Offering me 30 pages of ads in 80 pages of paper is somewhat 17th century in today’s world.
- The Financial Times’s last home delivery offer to me was $50 a year. Will the Wall Street Journal face the same subscription challenge as readers discover that blending sports, Details magazine editorial, and business profiles might be out of step with what subscribers like me do on a Saturday?
Now search? How will I be able to locate the Gucci suit on the WSJ Web site? Answer: Not until the WSJ figures out image indexing and some other search tricks. I bet that when the iPad version of the WSJ Magazine comes out I will be able to click on a suit and see a map of locations where I can buy a suit that will fit most 20 year old soccer players. Maybe for some folks. Not for me.
Stephen E Arnold, March 14, 2010
No one paid me to write this article. I will report a failure to charge for my writing to the editor of the Army Times, an outfit focused on information in the modern world.
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