Jason Preston
Writing

How can newspapers make money?

Jason Preston · 2 min read ·

In case you weren’t sure by now that newspapers were, by and large, in Big Trouble, the NYT has announced that they’re going to drop 100 newsroom staff over the next year.

If you’re a newspaper facing the next fifteen years, you have to be feeling pretty grim.

I think you can attribute most of the problems newspapers are having today to three things:

  1. The New York Times launched for free on the internet, effectively setting the price point for news online going forwards. Largely because of this, consumers expect that their online news should be free. If you want to charge for it, you’re going to have to find something that the average reader feels right paying for.

  2. Craigslist. I think this one is just gone. Localized listings are no longer a market that newspapers can really control. People don’t want to have to check many places for classifieds. Even if one newspaper manages to beat out Craigslist, that doesn’t help the industry, it just helps one paper.

  3. The Free Rider problem. This is the big one. I don’t have the statistics in front of me and I’m too lazy to look them up (which proves my point), but newspapers account for at least 90% of all reporting in the freaking world.

    Wrap your head around this concept: without newspapers, there would not be news. Slowly, magazines, tabloids, radio, and TV stations have figured out that they can read the newspapers and “report” on what they’re reporting.

    I’m exaggerating for effect of course, but the point is basically accurate. The work that newspapers produce (the reporting of news) is being distributed and redistributed and monetized worldwide, and newspapers are not getting a cut of the secondary, tertiary revenue.

    The trick in the internet age is to put your content EVERYWHERE POSSIBLE and monetize it in every instance.

    Think about Revver. Any Revver video can be embedded anywhere (content everywhere). Wherever it is embedded, it includes a post-roll ad that pays back to the original content creator (monetize in every instance).

    It’s a tough nut to crack.