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< | ready for review and comments | | | Everything Becomes Commodity: Newspaper Industry | | | Section II Is Newspaper Industry Commoditizing?
As I mentioned earlier, just keeping balance may not be almighty. If one side seems unfairly oppressed, is it the best remedy to save the oppressed under any circumstance? If journalists are suffering from declining newspaper industry, would it be the best to subsidize journalism by the government, such as by bailout of newspaper companies, or employing journalists by the government? Newspaper industry is suffering by the change of business model and by emergence of new media formats. Now, they need to adapt themselves to rules of game in the new digital media era. It might be true that Google is free-riding on newspaper contents. Then, would it be necessary to save the newspaper industry? | |
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< | In a Charles Darwin’s concept, newspaper industry survived a process of “natural selection” by fitting themselves to an advanced form before the Internet became a prevalent media. Newspaper business is an old business. Internet was not the first threat for the newspaper industry, and there were emergence of radio broadcasting and later that of TV broadcasting. Broadcasting has advantage in terms of delivering information much faster in real time compared to newspaper since newspaper involves higher distribution costs and time. On the other hand, newspapers differentiate themselves by providing more detail analysis to various issues, editorials, and giving more advertising information by classified. Thus, newspaper could remain strong media formats until the emergence of the Internet. In addition, in some countries, newspaper companies own broadcasters so that a newspaper company can keep advertising revenue which might otherwise stolen by broadcasters. | >
> | In a Charles Darwin’s concept, newspaper industry survived a process of “natural selection” by fitting themselves to an advanced form before the Internet became a prevalent media. | | | | |
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< | However, newspaper industry may become commodity since people find more value in the new technology. Internet changed the way how people access to news information. Now, a growing number of population stopped reading print newspapers which is a “push” media. Rather, people favor “pull” media where people can access digital news through the Internet or iPhone whenever they want. By technological advancement, people have a customized own home pages of news information set up by individual preference. There is no need to subscribe only to the New York Times or to Wall Street Journal. People have tons of access to information 24/7 at real time. People can pull information they want. As advertiser, there is no need to spend advertising budget only to newspaper companies, rather they are better-off paying to Google and various other media. This fundamental shift of people’s behavior might be analogous to a transition of railway industry in a century ago. After automobile changed the way how people commute or move to one location to another, railway industry severely struggled, also they suffered later by emergence of airline industry. Railway industry became commodity while people paid a lot to automobile and airline transportation. | >
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- When employing this metaphor in an argument, remember that Darwin's natural selection is an unguided process in which acquired characteristics cannot be inherited. Cultural evolution, on the other hand, is Lamarckian—the whole point of culture is the inheritance through sharing of acquired characteristics, and it is guided, in all the ways that cultural power can be used. These points aren't a reason to avoid evolutionary analysis, or even to mention Darwin, but it's important always to keep in mind that cultural evolution is not a Darwinian kind of evolution.
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< | I struggle to find whether newspaper will be commoditized or continue to be strong media force as they survived in the threats from broadcasting. In my original belief in balancing conflicting powers, I may want to think that there should be an optimal point where free riding of content by technology companies may be punished and content providers will be saved. On the other hand, the character of the threat imposed by the Internet is much more severe than the threats by broadcasting. If information in newspapers is really valuable and worthwhile paying a lot of money, I might blame Google or new technology as free-rider. However, the Internet made value of information much cheaper or almost free. Then, as newspaper industry, their differentiation may not be quality of journalistic article, rather, what matters are its technology of distributing content, branding and marketing. I am skeptical whether those cosmetics will keep its strong positioning which newspaper traditionally enjoyed. Google or new Internet media continue to require existence of content provided by newspaper companies. However, content is readily available without paying a lot of cost. Therefore, commoditization of the newspaper industry is likely to be unavoidable. | >
> | Newspaper business is an old business. Internet was not the first threat for the newspaper industry, and there were emergence of radio broadcasting and later that of TV broadcasting. Broadcasting has advantage in terms of delivering information much faster in real time compared to newspaper since newspaper involves higher distribution costs and time. On the other hand, newspapers differentiate themselves by providing more detail analysis to various issues, editorials, and giving more advertising information by classified. Thus, newspaper could remain strong media formats until the emergence of the Internet. In addition, in some countries, newspaper companies own broadcasters so that a newspaper company can keep advertising revenue which might otherwise stolen by broadcasters. | | | | |
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> | However, newspaper industry may become commodity since people find more value in the new technology. Internet changed the way how people access to news information. Now, a growing number of population stopped reading print newspapers which is a “push” media. Rather, people favor “pull” media where people can access digital news through the Internet or iPhone whenever they want. By technological advancement, people have a customized own home pages of news information set up by individual preference. There is no need to subscribe only to the New York Times or to Wall Street Journal. People have tons of access to information 24/7 at real time. People can pull information they want. As advertiser, there is no need to spend advertising budget only to newspaper companies, rather they are better-off paying to Google and various other media. This fundamental shift of people’s behavior might be analogous to a transition of railway industry in a century ago. After automobile changed the way how people commute or move to one location to another, railway industry severely struggled, also they suffered later by emergence of airline industry. Railway industry became commodity while people paid a lot to automobile and airline transportation. | | | | |
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- I don't think it makes sense to speak of the decline of railways as a matter of commoditization. Use of railway transportation to carry people rather than freight imposes costs that cannot be paid through competitive pricing of the cost of carriage. In order to have extensive and effective railway passenger service, every human society has so far determined that it can only be provided by socialism, that is by state subsidy to industry at a level that only state ownership or control can justify. In the US, socialism chose instead—for many evident reasons, geographical, political, economy, and military—to build a vast highway network and to subsidize the global exploitation of petroleum reserves. In Japan, equally for evident reasons, the other decision was made. The resulting social dynamics aren't about commoditization of railway transport, it seems to me.
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You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable.
To restrict access to your paper simply delete the "#" on the next line: | >
> | I struggle to find whether newspaper will be commoditized or continue to be strong media force as they survived in the threats from broadcasting. In my original belief in balancing conflicting powers, I may want to think that there should be an optimal point where free riding of content by technology companies may be punished and content providers will be saved. On the other hand, the character of the threat imposed by the Internet is much more severe than the threats by broadcasting. If information in newspapers is really valuable and worthwhile paying a lot of money, I might blame Google or new technology as free-rider. However, the Internet made value of information much cheaper or almost free. Then, as newspaper industry, their differentiation may not be quality of journalistic article, rather, what matters are its technology of distributing content, branding and marketing. I am skeptical whether those cosmetics will keep its strong positioning which newspaper traditionally enjoyed. Google or new Internet media continue to require existence of content provided by newspaper companies. However, content is readily available without paying a lot of cost. Therefore, commoditization of the newspaper industry is likely to be unavoidable. | | | | |
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- I think your problem is that the concept you want to apply here is less commoditization than disintermediation. Newspapers aren't actually the creators of content; they are editors and aggregators of content, famously unable to afford adequate and sufficient reporting, and primarily reliant—except for the world's biggest and richest papers at the height of their power—on content purchased from "press agencies," "wire services," and other aggregators representing creators. To those aggregations of "editorial" matter, they added advertising and some propaganda acceptable both to the leadership of the "content" side and the actual owner or the government, depending on context.
- As aggregators, they are extremely inflexible: they print a few editions a day, at most, on paper which is expensive to make, move and sell. Their content is more or less uniform to all readers, and the advertising must be such as would be effective at the price charged across a broad range of readers. In the current evolution of communications technology, those costs and inflexibilities are fatal. Physical production is no longer cost effective at all. Advertising is being transformed by the transition from push to pull: it is infinitely more effective for advertisements to be aimed at people who already want to buy the product, so the bulk of advertising budgets are shifting to the pull model made possible by Google, and the newspaper is no longer an effective place for the finding of new consumers because young people are growing up without any habit of looking at newspapers. Game over.
- So newspaper businesses are becoming other media businesses, which is problematic only because newspapers had higher standards of accuracy and lower levels of tolerable corruption in the late twentieth century than the businesses built around broadcasting technology with which they competed. But disintermediation changes both the accuracy and corruption problems in deeper, structural ways: when content-making is an activity everybody shares, issues of accuracy, reliability, motive and corruption become systemic and social rather than episodic and internal.
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Dear Ando, |
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