https://research.qut.edu.au/dmrc/people/amanda-lotz/
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"Information may want to be free, but journalism can't be: An industrial analysis of newspaper disruption"
- Book out later this year - Media Disrupted: surving pirates, cannibals and streaming wars
- the way internet communications tech disrupted music, television, film
- studying internet disruption of TV since early 2000s
- by looking at one sector, maybe that might help us have more sophisticated conversations about how net tech disrupted more sectors
- I rely on macro level data
- Graph in Conversation piece - ad spend on platforms
- 2nd graph - what has happened in terms of sales - shows strong decline from 1977 ie, before digital emergence
- phenomenon with much longer history than the digital era
- Reuters study graphs - time spent with news was 16 mins per week
- I'm going to talk about journalism in a way that journalist don't usually talk about journalism - that is, that it's a business
- Other industries have responded well
- perhaps the focus has been on the wrong thing - breaking down to profit and revenue, it's about trying to shift the focus a little bit
- maybe if we can look at the situation from another angle, we can start looking at actual solutions
- an industrial analysis starts with this statement: the business of newspapers is attracting, then selling attention - that's how it worked. That doesn't diminish its societal functions
- we have to understand where the money came from to make that all possible
- the bundled newspaper was the result of the technological conditions of the pre-internet age
- to get the economics of it to work, you had to attract a big, heterogenous audience
- it was designed that way to deliver value to the that big heterogeneous audience
- a difference between news and journalism - news, a thin account of events; journalism, contextualized reporting of the news
- sometimes journalism finds things, and then they become news
- bundled newspaper had loads of other things - obits, crosswords, comics, movie listings etc - and it had ads
- ads were revenue stream for newspapers - were 80% in US, 70% in Aus
- they added to value of readers' experience ie, before internet shopping
- internet communications tech unbundled the newspaper
- behaviour of reading a newspaper, you see the headlines, you see the ads, you move across and up and down, looking and thinking
- this doesn't happen online. People aren't going to news websites and scanning around etc, we just look and read the thing we want
- that matters to advertisers because that diminishes the value of the space there
- information can be commercialized - weather (bom), on demand - a very specific advertising location
- "ubiquity of news on social media and websites diminished its commodity value"
- key slide - advertising $ have shifted to better tools. A tech like "search" means businesses can place ads infront of people who are searching for a product, ie school shoes
- in contrast, a display ad in a paper - who is going to see that?
- None of this has anything to do with news or journalism
- newspapers are no longer the best way to attract attention
- the value of the bundle has eroded; advertisers are using better tools
- newspapers have lost the ad revenue that supported the news and journalism
- in the background, there's a couple of other factors - the corporatisation of newspapers & cross media competition
- corporatisation - leads news orgs to enter digital age in weakened state. Publicly traded stocks, began late 60s, full force by 80s
- at that point, newspapers became beholden to profit and loss reporting
- corporatisation was the kindling before the spark of digitisation
- cross media comp - it meant that all news orgs could do all things - they all make videos, they all make audio, etc
- Big international players can circulate more widely, beyond their original region
- Implications: only enough scale for few. There's a few players that are competing for what's left of the attention dollars.
- And subscriber money is limited, and it goes to those who have distinct value proposition
- In a country of only 25 million, how many players can a subscriber model support?
- if you're "somewhat" interested in news, are you likely to pay for a subscription?
- what about local? for the most part, the internet has not really replaced this. there's a market for readers and advertisers
- However, local doesn't scale. So that makes it look less like a good investment
- what are the solutions?
- the core problem is funding - but we need to understand that ad money is the past
- subscription and public funding at scale are most viable solutions
- "we still need the roads. we're going to have to figure out how to pay for them."
- a democratic society cannot function without news and journalism
- the "value" of journalism cannot be exposed by graphs or data trying to consider what is lost if it's not there