Print v. Digital Followup
You know, after my last rant I was thinking more about this annoying thing I see a lot on the interblogs where they love to predict the imminent demise of print publications. Part of it stems from that fact that apparently so many bloggers see no difference between an untrained blogger spouting off (like me) and someone who’s trained in journalism working for a salary. There’s clearly room for both and each one has its strengths and weaknesses, but to believe that professional journalism is dead thanks to the citizen journalist brigade and a few mildly successful blog networks seems the height of silliness.
But beyond that there’s a lot of mockery about how slow these companies are to adapt to the new technologies. Every blogger has this bloggergiven understanding of everything it takes to run a print publication and knows the obvious answers to all print publications problems. Open up the content. Make it free. Blog more. Subscriptions are for losers put more ads on the pages. Add in some social networking. Why’d you add in social networking, your system sucks.
Here’s the thing. They all seem to know the answer, yet who in web2.0 is making all this mad money? What is TechCrunch’s revenue? What is Gawker Media’s revenue? Flickr’s? What is the size of their organizations? The answer is that people don’t know exactly what to do. They don’t know how to monetize things. That’s why there was that kerfuffle sometime ago when Federated Media decided to get creative with their advertising and started to mix editorial in.
And these are the companies who live and die by the web. Even they are still experimenting and trying to figure things out. It’s really easy to have a rockin’ business model when that model doesn’t have to involve making a profit. You send out your reporters to screw with people presentations at a trade show and then call it civil disobedience for a few extra page views. Awesome. Pay per page view seems to inspire more tabloid style reporting than journalistic reporting..
Sure there’s probably a lot that print media needs to savvy up to but the bottom line is that they have a huge income stream that they need to defend. They have gigantic infrastructure which means a lot of ongoing costs that the web doesn’t know anything about. I’ve seen web companies who live and die by online advertising hem and haw at making tiny changes to the design of their website for fear of SEO repercussions. How much more worrisome must it be to modify your whole business model? To decide to trade existing revenue (declining as it may be) for the hope of making more money in something totally different?
So the pace of change at these companies may be glacial but they are changing. And while I’d sure love to see a little more risk taking at these institutions, the bottom line is that they need to be careful. Just like every large company needs to be careful in how they move - they’ve got a hell of a lot of bills to pay every month. They’ve got one hell of a lot of money coming in every month and they can’t just cannibalize that money in the hopes that the prevailing wisdom is actually correct. I’m sure the blogoweb will continue saying that that quaint industry, print media, is dead, long live the blogoweb. Just like they said that Microsoft was dead. But I suspect that that is actually very far from the truth.
