Friday, December 28, 2007
Who knows what tomorrow will bring?
What was rumor is apparently gaining some substance. Rupert Murdoch has stated his intention to make The Wall Street Journal Web site free. Historically, the site has been restricted to subscriber access. The paper's online subscriber base has reportedly topped one million, but Murdoch feels the growth of the online paper will be through increased traffic.
I bring this subject up again because whenever a story like this appears it causes us to reassess our policies in the industry. A newspaper Web site is a unique creature in the Web world. A small daily newspaper's site is even a rarer bird.
We must consider what has been the traditional role of the local/community newspaper. I see the newspaper as being a gathering place where people exchange ideas. It could be on politics, the weather, who has been married, who has died or what the prices are at the local grocery.
These tasks once were performed by the town crier in the small villages of old. But the amount of information provided by a typical local daily or weekly newspaper in the modern age would make the poor fellow go hoarse. The distribution of information is our trade and we deal with it on the local level as no other source has been able to. The Internet has changed all that.
The value of the local newspaper is that it can tap those local assets and transform them into digital information on a Web site. The news gathering capabilities that traditionally have found their way onto the printed page can now be uploaded to a site for all to see.
We cannot command the revenue stream as a local site that a major metropolitan news organization can like The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal. They can draw from an international base. As we serve the Mid-Shore of Maryland's Eastern Shore, there is a limited interest here.
We do have a scattering of readers from around the world. We have soldiers in Iraq and transplants in Florida as well as most other states across the country. But that is not enough to compare to the legions that read the big papers.
How they will deal with local readers who drop their print subscriptions to read the Times or Journal online, remains for the future to tell. We found we couldn't allow for the print readership erosion that occurred when we were totally free. This industry continues to wrestle with the proper way to use the Internet. It is likely there will be no one solution. Technology that does not exist today may influence our decisions in the future just has the Web itself is causing us to constantly reassess our position today.
One advance in technology that may well influence our future took another step forward last week. Two new entries in the electronic book field were unveiled. You may recall I mentioned an effort by Sony last summer to create an ebook device that would make it possible to read books on a tablet-type computer. The screen of that computer supposedly would be able to mimic the visual display of a printed page. You could have a library full of books on a tablet the size of a modest print volume.
Sony now is introducing the second generation of that device. What has pressed this back into the news is that both Amazon and Seiko have announced their own entries into this field. Amazon is of special note. The online business giant says it will have a device that will access the Amazon online store and download ebooks from a current catalogue of 88,000 titles. This is bound to expand.
But what really caught my eye (or ear as I heard it on an Internet podcast), was that Amazon was working out agreements with major newspapers like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post to provide downloads of their daily papers to such a device.
We currently provide a PDF version of our paper on the stardem.com Web site. I have seen our paper displayed on Web-enabled smart cell phones. This delivery system to an ebook device would make such a digital link to our readers much easier.
Right now the cost of the device is prohibitive to the average reader. The ebook costs about $400. I can see that price coming down as service providers help absorb some of the device cost in exchange for a service agreement. This would be similar to how cell phones are handled now.
One of the problems the news industry faces is that is has been difficult to keep up with the pace of technology. There has been a reluctance to acknowledge how quickly advances are taking place.
Who knows what tomorrow will bring?
Thoughts?
As always, you can reach me at rpolk@chespub.com.
I bring this subject up again because whenever a story like this appears it causes us to reassess our policies in the industry. A newspaper Web site is a unique creature in the Web world. A small daily newspaper's site is even a rarer bird.
We must consider what has been the traditional role of the local/community newspaper. I see the newspaper as being a gathering place where people exchange ideas. It could be on politics, the weather, who has been married, who has died or what the prices are at the local grocery.
These tasks once were performed by the town crier in the small villages of old. But the amount of information provided by a typical local daily or weekly newspaper in the modern age would make the poor fellow go hoarse. The distribution of information is our trade and we deal with it on the local level as no other source has been able to. The Internet has changed all that.
The value of the local newspaper is that it can tap those local assets and transform them into digital information on a Web site. The news gathering capabilities that traditionally have found their way onto the printed page can now be uploaded to a site for all to see.
We cannot command the revenue stream as a local site that a major metropolitan news organization can like The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal. They can draw from an international base. As we serve the Mid-Shore of Maryland's Eastern Shore, there is a limited interest here.
We do have a scattering of readers from around the world. We have soldiers in Iraq and transplants in Florida as well as most other states across the country. But that is not enough to compare to the legions that read the big papers.
How they will deal with local readers who drop their print subscriptions to read the Times or Journal online, remains for the future to tell. We found we couldn't allow for the print readership erosion that occurred when we were totally free. This industry continues to wrestle with the proper way to use the Internet. It is likely there will be no one solution. Technology that does not exist today may influence our decisions in the future just has the Web itself is causing us to constantly reassess our position today.
One advance in technology that may well influence our future took another step forward last week. Two new entries in the electronic book field were unveiled. You may recall I mentioned an effort by Sony last summer to create an ebook device that would make it possible to read books on a tablet-type computer. The screen of that computer supposedly would be able to mimic the visual display of a printed page. You could have a library full of books on a tablet the size of a modest print volume.
Sony now is introducing the second generation of that device. What has pressed this back into the news is that both Amazon and Seiko have announced their own entries into this field. Amazon is of special note. The online business giant says it will have a device that will access the Amazon online store and download ebooks from a current catalogue of 88,000 titles. This is bound to expand.
But what really caught my eye (or ear as I heard it on an Internet podcast), was that Amazon was working out agreements with major newspapers like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post to provide downloads of their daily papers to such a device.
We currently provide a PDF version of our paper on the stardem.com Web site. I have seen our paper displayed on Web-enabled smart cell phones. This delivery system to an ebook device would make such a digital link to our readers much easier.
Right now the cost of the device is prohibitive to the average reader. The ebook costs about $400. I can see that price coming down as service providers help absorb some of the device cost in exchange for a service agreement. This would be similar to how cell phones are handled now.
One of the problems the news industry faces is that is has been difficult to keep up with the pace of technology. There has been a reluctance to acknowledge how quickly advances are taking place.
Who knows what tomorrow will bring?
Thoughts?
As always, you can reach me at rpolk@chespub.com.
# posted by Richard Polk @ 4:55 AM 
