When it comes to industry bailouts, the U.S. has different priorities than France. So far, American tax dollars are going most notably to the financial and auto industries, but could the newspaper industry be next? Could we follow the footsteps of our neighbor across the Atlantic, France, which bailed out its newspapers? It's unlikely, but a Commerce subcommittee led by Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., met Wednesday to discuss the future of newspapers and journalism.
Kerry is all too familiar with struggling newspapers as his home state's Boston Globe averted a shutdown when unions gave in to management demands at the last minute before the paper's parent company, the New York Times Co. (NYSE:NYT), would have shut it down.
When asked about the precarious situation of the Boston Globe on Monday, U.S. press secretary Robert Gibbs said:
" 'Obviously, the President believes there has to be a strong free press. I think there's a certain concern and a certain sadness when you see cities losing their newspapers or regions of the country losing their newspapers. So it's certainly of concern. I don't know what, in all honesty, government can do about it. I would note that looking at some of the balance sheets, I wondered how you guys didn't think $100 million meant a lot a few weeks ago, but looking at some of the balance sheets $100 million seems to me a lot.' "
Newspaper companies are in a sorry state, as The Deal's David Elman noted that the parade of newspaper Chapter 11 filings have no end in sight, so putting money in the newspaper industry at this point would be like throwing cash into a huge black hole.
France, on the other hand, is willing to risk its money and try to save its newspaper industry, reportedly putting in €600 million ($800 million) as well as doubling its annual print advertising spending.
But will that money really help, or is it just a temporary band aid? Some argue the French government is just taking away ad space from private companies while French newspapers would be less likely to write anything negative about the government because of the bailout money. There seems to be no right answer on how to save newspapers. What do you think? Should the U.S. government emulate France and use its tax dollars to save newspapers? - Gerald Magpily
See Whitehouse press release
Dealscape: No papering over troubles at publishers
See WNYC.org: Underreported: French newspaper bailout
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The future of media will not be anything that looks like the current structures...
A lesson worth remembering is that at the turn of the 20th century, people had a transportation problem...and the solution turned out not to be a "faster horse"...but a Ford.
And one should note that the Ford didn't arise out of the "horse industry's" R&D efforts, nor the "Horse Industry Revitalization Act" nor the horse industry's attempts to experiment with new Business Models.
I think the future of the media business will look as different as Ford and Toyota's operations look from horse traders and blacksmiths.
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What's historically given value to editorial content is the relative scarcity of distribution versus readers (not the Kindle kind). Newspapers have historically enjoyed natural localized economic monopolies that allowed each of them to exercise monopoly control over the amount of content (and advertising) they allowed into their local marketplace.
Monopoly constraint of distribution and supply will always lead to prices (and profits) significantly above open market rates. Newspapers then built costly organizational structures commensurate with that stream of monopoly profits (think AT&T in the 1970's).
Unfortunately the Internet came along and changed all the rules!
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The dynamics of content replication and distribution on the Internet destroys this artificial constraint of distribution and re-aligns advertising (and subscription) prices back down to competitive open market rates. The often heard complaint of Internet ad rates being "too low" is inverted...the real issue is that traditional ad rates have been artificially boosted for enough decades for participants to assume this represents the long-term norm.
An individual reader now has access to essentially an infinite amount of content on any given topic or story. All those silos of isolated editorial content have been dumped into the giant Internet bucket. Once there, any given piece of content can be infinitely replicated and re-distributed to thousands of sites at zero marginal costs. This breaks the back of old media's monopoly control of distribution and supply.
To paraphrase Nietzsche, "God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him with the Internet..."
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The core problem for the newspapers is that in a world of infinite supply, the ability to monetize the value in any piece of editorial content will be driven to zero...infinite supply pushes price levels to zero!
What this implies is that no one can marshal enough market power to monetize the value of content in the face of such an infinite supply and such massively fragmented distribution. Pay-walls, lawsuits and ill conceived legislation won't allow the monopoly conditions to be re-constructed because only ONE VERSION each story has to leak out to start the cycle all over again.
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Another way to think about this is that once data becomes publicly visible on the Internet, its monetizable value rapidly dissipates to zero.
This is at the core of why Google can extract $25B a year from the economy without creating ANY content...what they create is meta-data about content (which CAN be monetized)...and all that meta-data remains non-visible. Only the results of decisions based on that meta-data by their search and advertising platforms is made publicly visible.
The lesson is that Google DOES NOT monetize other people's content...it monetizes its OWN meta-data. This is certainly one path to making the news profitable...not search per se...but various other approaches to the monetization of meta-data that's within the reach of publishers.
So the exquisite irony is this:
In the future, the only content that will have monetizable value is content that no one is ever allowed to read! (i.e. the meta-data)
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There are certainly ways to make online news profitable...and many of us are working to develop such approaches...but I can assure you they don't involve inventing a "faster horse"...
Dale Harrison
dale.harrison@inforda.com