Unbungling Newspapers
NEWSPAPERS are losing out. Nwspapers are dying out:
Nicholas Carr, The Great Unbundling, April 2008
The nature of a newspaper, both as a medium for information and as a business, changes when it loses its physical form and shifts to the Internet. It gets read in a different way, and it makes money in a different way.
A print newspaper provides an array of content—local stories, national and international reports, news analyses, editorials and opinion columns, photographs, sports scores, stock tables, TV listings, cartoons, and a variety of classified and display advertising—all bundled together into a single product.
People subscribe to the bundle, or buy it at a newsstand, and advertisers pay to catch readers’ eyes as they thumb through the pages. The publisher’s goal is to make the entire package as attractive as possible to a broad set of readers and advertisers. The newspaper as a whole is what matters, and as a product it’s worth more than the sum of its parts.
When a newspaper moves online, the bundle falls apart.
Posted: 15th, December 2008 | In: Reviews Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
