Alot of folks these days seems to be talking about the inevitable death of newspapers.
It’s a big and complicated subject — and it’s refreshing to come across someone like Steve Baldwin offering perspective that is both insightful and simple.
To understand why newspapers are dying it’s important to highlight some fundamental issues about the information economy:
- Today’s search engines generally use similar algorithms to crawl and index content on the web. Not surprisingly the results that people get are largely similar. Take for example my wife. She has a beautiful iMAC in the kitchen. She loves the web but she is not particularly savvy. She has had (always will have) a My Yahoo home page with a big huge search box right on top. She also uses a Safari browser with a Google search bar in the top right hand corner. When searching the web she goes back and forth between them. I recently asked her which one she liked better. She looked at me and said, “you mean they’re different?”
- The web is a landscape of information. Search engines are like digital cameras. They all take pictures of the same landscape. Some take pictures that are slightly better. But, unless you’re an expert — most people simply can not tell the difference.
The problem for newspapers is that their editorial content has slowly commoditized to the point where it is now “lumped in” with everyone else. I am not saying it’s right or wrong. I am just saying that the search engines index newspaper content much the same way that they do the rest of the web. In other words, newspapers are part of the landscape. They get photographed just like me and my tiny little blog (page rank 5).
At some point in the past, I am sure newspapers simply concluded that they had to be part of the landscape in order to attract enough eyeballs and monetize advertisers? Unfortunately for newspapers it hasn’t quite worked out the way they had planned. As a result they find themselves fighting for survival and paying reporters to create premium editorial content — which search engines and consumers both perceive as part of the commodity landscape.
As Mr. Baldwin rightfully points out, most content publishers (me included) are the equivalent of street musicians performing in the subway for spare change all of whom can be easily bribed. For example, if a specific search engine was willing to pay more for content then every street performer would make their content available only to that search engine.
The problem, of course, is that The New York Times and other top-notch content sources are not street musicians. Indeed, they are world-class concert performers who happen to be working at street-musician rates. Mr. Baldwin asserts that this is precisely why they will fail unless something radical changes in the fundamentals of the information economy.
