It’s not about saving newspapers

It’s about saving journalism. And some folks still don’t get that.

I don’t normally get all worked up about blog posts that are completely wrongheaded. But this comes from the business section of the LA Times, so someone must have read it or approved it. At least I hope they still do those things there.

You’ll probably need to read the whole article to grasp how wrongheaded it is. But here are a couple excerpts, with my responses:

Unless the English-speaking world’s newspapers find a way to charge for the content they currently give away free on their websites and allow to be aggregated and sold to advertisers by Internet search-engine companies that pay no fees for the privilege, most papers won’t survive very far into the next decade.

There are a few things wrong with this:

• Newspapers still garner decent revenue from the print side. That amount is falling, but most newspapers are still profitable (even if their profit margin is less than what they need to service their debt.)
• Most newspaper content isn’t sold to advertisers. Even by newspapers’ own staffs. We think of the Internet as a disruptive force for news staffs, and it is, but it’s just as disruptive (if not more) for ad staffs.
• Why should news aggregators pay a fee for the “privilege” of aggregating news? They’re adding value to news content, not the other way around. (Yes, the news content itself has value, but organization adds to that existing value.)
• Does Tim Rutten not understand that search and aggregation drive Web hits?

Clearly, there’s a major misunderstanding of how the Web works happening here. Aggregation and search drive hits. Aggregation adds value to existing content. But wait, there’s more:

The facts are stark: Over the last three years, American newspapers alone have lost 40% of their classified advertising — $7 billion worth — to free Internet sites such as Craigslist.

That money is not coming back. You can’t force people to buy ads. Which makes this even more ludicrous:

… The problem is that newspapers can’t begin charging for online content or licensing their journalism to search engines unless all the English-speaking papers do it at once. That’s currently illegal under laws barring collusion and price-fixing.

OK. So your plan is to have every single newspaper start charging? I cannot wait for that to happen. Then I’ll open a free news site and make a million bucks.

This is wrong for so many reasons it makes my head spin, but the simple and obvious one is: There are now tens of millions of ways to get news and information on the Internet. Most of the are not from newspapers. Most of those are much more useful than newspapers for some reason (depth, level of entertainment, immediacy, etc.) So making your newspaper content more difficult to get to is not the path to profitability.