A Passion for Papers

Today marks the first official date that Now and Then Reader's Kindle e-single "Why American Newspapers Gave Away the Future" is available for sale and download yet already there's quite a buzz with people on both sides of the fence passionately discussing the issue.

Jim Romenesko broke the story with his post "How Newspapers Blew It In the mid-1990s"and immediately the comments flooded in.

From reader Kirk Caraway :

If newspapers had started out by charging for content, they would have sank even faster, and bloggers would have been eating their lunches even earlier. That's because the real reason for this downfall was that the Internet lowered the barriers to entry and unbundled the product. Independent publishers would have seized on opportunity of newspaper paywalls and built up free news websites even faster than they have now.  

From reader Michael Romaner

To suggest that we killed the newspaper industry back in the 90s because we gave away our content ignores the history of media. Newspapers themselves began their decline long before the WWW was born. It began when content started proliferating on multiple channels (TV, radio, cable, etc.) and showed up to the general populace as way more entertaining than the content in a daily newspaper. The Internet only exasperated matters by becoming yet another channel with far, far more content - all of which was much more interactive than that in print. 

And of course from our esteemed author himself...

Richard Tofel · Works at ProPublica

Kirk, Having been there as well, I think it's important to say that the large papers certainly could have mastered the technology of a paywall. The WSJ, the NYT did for readers overseas, others spent enough, for instance, on New Century Network and other ventures to have paid for paywalls instead had they wanted to. Moreover, paywalls are far from the only issue here. 

And in today's BuzzMachine, Jeff Jarvis posts:

I could argue that newspapers were doomed to lose their monopolies and thus their pricing power over both content and advertising and that continuing to execute a business model based on controlling a scarcity would lose to those able to exploit the economics of abundance created by the net — read: Google. But I won’t argue that now because this has been argued so much before.

I could argue that all newspapers pricing in concert would have been antitrust and that it would have taken only one to ruin the game. But I needn’t argue that because that’s just what happened (I lived through the industry’s disastrous attempt at conspiratorial collusion, the New Century Network).

I will argue in a piece in the Guardian on Monday that it might also prove to be a mistake to see ourselves in the content business when others use content, including our content, as a tool to generate signals about people so they can extract much greater value out of that knowledge — read: Facebook. But I’ll save that argument for next week.

Instead what interests me about Tofel’s thesis is his cultural contention that newspapers fell victim to West Coast vs. East Coast thinking — a variant of the SOPA/PIPA worldview of Northern California vs. Southern California. Read: Silicon Valley vs. Hollywood; Silicon Valley vs. Sixth Avenue; technology vs. intellectual property; platform vs. content....

Read the full "Sin or Sense?" post here.

And while you're at it read the essay itself.  Links to purchase or download "Why American Newspapers Gave Away the Future" can be found at www.nowandthenreader.com