Newspaper Future: Online Business
I have been following for some time the impact that the Internet has had in the newspaper industry: their circulation, classifieds and “print” ad earnings are dramatically decreasing … newspapers are facing the biggest “crisis” (or opportunity?) in their history and they will need to change their paradigm to survive in an age of “blogs”, “communities”, “news aggregators” and “mobile Internet”.

The truth is that newspapers have lost many opportunities to take advantage of the Internet: In the beginning, they built sites with the “exact” same information than their printed version, they updated it only once per day. Some of them even made their online version only accessible to “subscribers”, strategy that demonstrated they didn’t have any idea of what the Internet meant as a news “carrier”: users could read any news from any other source at any time from anywhere around the world… why they would pay if they could get the exact same news for free?

When they saw that this strategy was catastrophic and some of the “industry leaders and visionaries” were already getting a decent amount of revenue because of their “online version” ad sales they started to realize that they should focus on getting a lot of traffic, so they re-opened their webs to everybody and began to update their news more frequently and sometime later in “real time”. Some newspapers also started to feature videos and multimedia content along with their news.

By this time “free” classifieds sites like craigslist and Kijiji were already born but for some reason these didn’t make newspapers think that maybe it was a good idea to do something like that, stop charging for a service that was already free online and attract more traffic to their sites.

Then a new “phase” started on the Internet: The Web 2.0, with the interaction among users in online communities, writing reviews, giving advise to others, uploading their own photos and videos, writing blogs about their favorite topics, events, sharing their favorite online content, etc.

This new phase was also possible thanks to new technologies, like RSS feeds -a new way to distribute content directly to users, who could now read only new, updated information from their selected sites through one desktop or web “interface” without actually visiting them-.

News communities, like Digg and Menéame where everybody could submit their favorite news and stories -from any website- and vote for them, started to emerge and get a lot of attention, traffic and influence on the Internet. Also, platforms like NowPublic, Newsvine and Bottup where every user could become a journalist, and write about their favorite content on their own “web space” without needing any web development or design knowledge became popular.

And this was only beginning: Now that Internet users can also read the news wherever they want through their mobile phones… why would they need to buy a printed newspaper copy?

Wouldn’t have been easier for, let’s say, the NY Times, who already had a highly visited news site to develop a “news community” like NowPublic? Or with a highly read Travel section, to develop a travel community like Tripadvisor? Why “online newspapers” with an already “strong” infraestructure and audience, who had a lot to lose, weren’t able to see this opportunity when they saw that people loved to comment on news and build their own blogs? Maybe because these actions weren’t part of their “main business” but the truth is that if they want to “stay in business” they will need to be flexible and adapt themselves to a new type of needs, identify the opportunities that the Internet is enabling and embrace new paradigms otherwise they will end up losing their businesses… what has already started to happen.

There are a lot of opinions and suggestions about the future of the industry: some say that the most effective strategy will be that the “printed newspaper version” should become some sort of “magazine” with special stories so they can give more than “everyday news” and their sites need to empower their users to interact more, become web 2.0 platforms; others say that they also need to focus more on local news, as it is easier for users to get “global” news from a lot of other sources…

Here are some of the best articles that I have read about this topic, with excellent analysis about newspapers situation and suggestions for their future:

Who has the answer? We will see in the forthcoming years.

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