May 15th, 2008
The newspaper's last stand
Interesting news today…or was it yesterday? I have no idea. I got off an eleven hour flight from Johannesburg this morning, and then had to race to the US embassy to get more visa pages in my passport because I’ve managed to fill every available visa slot with stamps, causing a border guard to warn me that I could face problems at airports in future if I didn’t have sufficient space.
CBS has bought ZDNet. That’s interesting to me, as the CBS studios on the corner of Franklin and Melrose, which is the same location at which they film “The Craig Ferguson Show,” is about four blocks from my apartment (not that that would affect me much as I never had much reason to go into a CNET office, either, but is interesting nonetheless). I wonder if CBS will find a way to merge more video into the ZDNet experience. I think that’s a more promising avenue for growth than podcasting, which though useful for people who are stuck in traffic or like to jog while listening to technology news (geeks…jogging???), is not the sort of thing you want to do while sitting in front of your computer at work…which is how most people likely consume ZDNet content.
Contrary to what some Talkbackers seemed to imply in Dignan’s post, I doubt CBS will ditch technology news. You don’t buy a technology news company to turn it into a magazine for horticultural enthusiasts. I’m sure, however, that there will be big changes.
Anyway, I’m a bit unplugged from the technology world on account of my journeys through Africa over this past week (and I’m not done; I leave for Ghana this Saturday, returning to LA that following Wednesday). So, forgive me if the blogosphere is abuzz with news that Steve Ballmer and Richard Stallman have decided to bury the hatchet, creating a programming world where proprietary and open source software can live together in peace and harmony. I don’t know anything about that.
The London Underground is one of the world’s most comprehensive subway systems. You can get pretty much anywhere in London with it, and combined with the London bus system (double-decker, of course), means most London residents don’t need cars. That’s quite a contrast from auto-addicted Los Angeles.
Consumption habits are a bit different, however, in a car culture versus a subway culture. There are overlaps. Audiobooks and iPods are both useful to either type of commuter, irrespective of their mode of conveance. One thing you can’t do in a car, however, is read (though that doesn’t mean I haven’t seen people doing just that while driving in LA; there is such a thing as becoming too comfortable with driving).
Lots of people, however, read on the London Underground. Newspapers are common, a sharp contrast to the United States where newspapers are considered a dying breed. Of course, the most popular newspapers are the free ones hawked by punters standing around Tube entrances, which do include dollops of real news even if they like to fixate on the latest shenanigans of Pete Doherty after his release from a suspiciously brief stint in prison (Pete Doherty, it would appear, is the Paris Hilton of British tabloids, as he doesn’t appear to be a musician of any particular note, being famous, as it were, for taking excessive quantities of hard drugs while hanging around with lots of beautiful famous people).
Books are also quite popular, and more importantly, are actively promoted on billboards throughout the London Underground. I can’t think of anywhere else that would happen (perhaps New Yorkers have similar experiences).
Newspapers are facing withering competition from Internet news sites, and that affects British newspapers as much as it does American ones. However, British newspapers have one place that serves as a revenue perch that keeps them above the rising Internet waters, and that is the preponderance of mass transit and its popularity among ordinary brits…
…well, at least until everyone buys eBook readers and loads their reading material from digital kiosks. It would seem to me that the best long term hope for newspapers is to distribute their content in situations where consumers have nothing better to do than read. Trying to compete on the wide-open Internet is important, but provides their brand less of an advantage versus newer upstarts.
They do, however, have strong distribution capabilities at the sort of places that congregate around metro stops. If the future is digital and printed material will expire like primitive species displaced by more complex ones, perhaps they can leverage their advantages (distribution) while embracing the future (eBooks) preemptively through digital kiosks, which seems a better option than waiting for someone else to beat them to the punch.
Even that stragegy is questionable, as there will someday be ubiquitous networking, an event that will cause eBooks to merge with the Internet, thus driving today’s distribution advantage to extinction along with paper-based printing of news material. Kindle-style devices, however, can be made network-aware in future versions once networking truly is everywhere (which today, it isn’t…you can’t even get cell phones calls in the London Underground, which a lot of people consider to be a VERY good thing). Today’s eBooks, however, serve as a useful intermediate stage in the evolution of hard-form news distribution.
If newspapers push the devices, subsidizing them to make them more affordable to the masses (though they have to sink far below the current $300.00 price point before they become universally accepted), they would have the power to give their own brands top billing.
Of course, they have to move quickly, as if the ad revenue stops, they won’t have the money to take risks on a new kind of distribution model.
John Carroll has delivered his opinion on ZDNet since the last millennium. Since May 2008, he is no longer a Microsoft employee. He is currently working at a unified messaging-related startup. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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