Is it any surprise, with so many actual newspapers are losing revenue at an exponential rate, that the site that hosted designers’ news pages for free has finally gone down?
I only discovered the the site went down last night, when Trinity tried to check on his portfolio and got an error message. The only blog post on the darkened site I found via a casual Google search was from Feb. 17. The front page’s message says:
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Don’t be silly, I’m not suggesting that at all. But it still cracks me up how journalists latch on to what they think might be the new thing — i.e. Twitter — when there’s no evidence that it will actually stick around and become something that regular people — you know, ones who don’t spend eight hours a day online or texting on their cell phones — will actually use. Even Twitter’s CEO admits that:
Where Stone will say things like, “We’re here to impact people’s lives; we own up to our leadership position here,” Williams admits that he has trouble getting his mom to figure out his service. He is also wary of all the publicity Twitter has generated, mostly from nervous journalists striving to stay relevant in a free-information age.
You can forgive journalists their Twitter obsession. If you haven’t noticed, we’re in an economic clusterphooey of historic proportions, and many analysts are blaming the media’s failure, in particular, to create information-sharing services like Twitter. But Twitter isn’t making any money yet, either.
It’s a little irritating, to be honest. Right now, journalists are spreading themselves too thin to actually be any good. Learn how to put stuff online? Sure! Twitter? OK! How about blogging tidbits that won’t make it into the paper? Sounds great!
What a load of crap. And FYI, I don’t text, much less Twitter. I do enough in my spare time.
Will 2008 be remembered as the year journalism died? Some say so. If anything, its the year that newspapers downsized, cut beyond the quick and even left print. The bell tolled for at least one more newspaper, Asian Week, probably most famous for the Kenneth Eng debacle.
This news is actually a few weeks late. I wanted to write about it, but didn’t have the time to really articulate my thoughts. From the article in the SF Chronicle:
AsianWeek will continue to publish online, at www.asianweek.com, and produce special editions about Asian American business, professional development, heritage and other issues and will still host events, but the print edition is going away because of economic realities, Ted Fang, editor and publisher, said in an interview Wednesday.
“It was very tough,” Fang said of the decision to shut down the presses. However, he said he believes the printed newspaper is but one of several means of communicating and noted the increasing adaptation to digital formats, particularly by Asian Americans.
Fang said that nearly all of the 11 AsianWeek employees in San Francisco will be let go.
Its a little sad that this paper will be best remembered for the “Why I hate Blacks” debacle perpetrated by Kenneth Eng, who, appropriately enough, had to be examined by psychologists after threatening his Queens neighbor. (But then, later that year, SF Weekly points out that they published a story about Asian men who love Black women. The cartoon, which I swiped from their blog post, looks amusingly like Mr. Eng.)
As with the demise of any newspaper (be it by being relegated just to the web, which is not necessarily a terrible thing, or by decimating its staff, which I think is much worse), I feel a loss. Even though I have always loved online journalism and was part of the first online journaling movement, I still have a love for print newspapers.
This time around, they kicked in really close to home. Trinity had to be at work super early for a newsroom-wide meeting this morning, and I (jokingly) admonished him to not get laid off. Turns out the Ventura County Star laid off 44 people, including 17 editorial positions. Thankfully, Trinity was not one of those laid off.
I’d say you can probably expect a thinner, different-looking newspaper after all this. :-/
I’ve heard it said that you put your money where your heart is, so now that newspapers are beginning to partner up with Google and Yahoo, its apparent to me that they’re getting online heart transplants. Or something like that.
Anyway, the last in a series of “Are Newspapers Dying” stories (registration required to read the rest of the series) details the new partnerships between Google and Yahoo and newspapers — not long after newspapers groused that these very sites and other news aggregators were the enemy.
Newspaper publishers have been working with digital media since the Clinton administration, but their efforts often bore the conflict one sees at car companies trying to get past petroleum. The old ways worked so well for so long; the new ways are difficult to master.
Today, newspapers that don’t figure it out will fail. They are sinking incredibly, faster and faster. The first half saw ad revenue drop 7.1% at local papers, 9.5% at national papers and 11% at Spanish-language papers, according to estimates from TNS Media Intelligence. That makes the declines of 2007 look like boom times, as local papers only gave up 5.7% in the first half, nationals lost 6.4% and Spanish-language slipped 4.4%.
Again — about time this started happening. I mean, can you imagine if newspaper executives had had some foresight and joined together to buy Craigslist, back when it was a secret shared by the techie and in-the-know crowd? They wouldn’t need to approach Google and Yahoo now, hats in hand, asking if they can have some more, please, of all that growing online revenue.
Here’s one sign that promising partnerships are gelling: All 780 daily newspapers participating in Google’s Print Ads program, which lets advertisers bid on print space, renewed their contracts with Google earlier this year. “Not only did they all re-up, we’ve actually been adding inventory since,” said Spencer Spinnell, director of Google Print Ads. New papers are coming in, including Spanish-language, alternative weeklies and 70 college papers. “We’re starting with business and trade publications as well,” he added. “So the network is very healthy.”
Ugh. I hate to kick anyone while they’re down — especially people in news, a group that occupies a special place in my heart — but geez. Have some curiosity about the world and see where the world is headed.
In other news-related news, Slate’s Big Money does a profile of Investor’s Business Daily. I’m mainly a fan of IBD because they hired Michael Ramirez, who I think is a genius with drawing pencils (or pens). But the hyper focus and purpose of the newspaper seems to be an odd success, considering all the branching out into citizen journalism, forums, comments, user-generated content and other stuff that other media is so hyped about now.