quote: Much has been said recently about the newspaper industry collapsing, papers folding, massive layoffs etc because of the effects of the internet. I was recently in Baton Rouge and I passed the relatively new Morning Advocate Building off of I-10 and it struck me that these people that dig up and share information for a living completely missed the ongoing story of their own demise. Sort of like the dream about attending a funeral and walking up to the closed casket, asking "who died?" and someone opens the casket and says "you."
soup, that's damn good ... i like it .. then again i think you could blog on the proper way to cut a tomato for a cobb salad and it would be good, you were born to blog, hoss ..
quote: Newspapers can't monetize their websites correctly after 15 years of trying, but a smart guy like mark cuban easily solves their revenue problem in a blog post without giving it a second thought. We all know craigslist and ebay killed the newspaper's revenues from loss of classified ad sales but craigslist has been around on a large scale since 1999 and ebay is even older than that. Why did it take someone like Cuban, that has no vested interest in anything related to the newspaper industry to come up with an astoundingly simple solution to a 10 YEAR OLD PROBLEM?
So, you made your reader go to a link to find out what this super simple revenue solution was, instead of just summarizing it in the body of your article?
ETA: I finally got to that part at the end. See notes below.
quote: Frankly the old newspaper classified ads sucked arse anyway and it was time for an improvement.
In what do they suck? Examples? If you've ever done much "shopping" on craig's list, you know it's got major problems, too.
quote: Newspapers have tried to monetize their archives and online content with little success.
In what way? Why didn't it work?
quote: They abandoned their website monetization plans and tried to take the internet blogosphere's strengths head on with delivery speed and writer quantity over story quality and it didnt work.
Really? Newspaper websites went for quantity over quality? Compared to blogs? They have less quality than blogs? Again, why didn't the plan work? Don't internet users get a lot of information from primary news sites?
quote: To me the Morning Advocate's decision to combine with WBRZ to create a single website for both entities is a great idea because pairing with a TV station can provide the newspaper with the "speed" angle they crave (but can't provide).
CAN'T provide? Why not?
quote: But there is still one glaring hole in this business plan, INTERACTION WITH THE CONSUMER.
How is their intraction with the consumer any different than other websites? Websites don't provide enough ad revenue to support a t.v medium and/or print medium?
quote: Would someone at the Morning Advocate be smart enough or daring enough to buy/license the exclusive rights to prominently link tigerdroppings.com content all over the 2theadvocate.com probably not. Is it an idea that may be long overdue? we shall see. How easy would it be to dump the newspaper classified section into boards set up like the ticket exchange? How easy would it be to integrate the OT and the Poli Board into the fabric of the 2theadvocate.com's news pages. And how easy would it be to link up blogs from WBRZ and The Morning Advocate personnel into the blog features on td.com? All of this creating a patchwork quilt of information, products and interaction available at the touch of a button and a small fee.
Well, you finally get to the kernel, but you don't take a bite. Has anyone run the numbers on this small fee? Are you so sure that internet consumers will be willing to switch to or stay with a site, when there are free alternatives on the web? I think your proposal still runs into the same problem that traditional news/classified sites runs into. What are consumers getting from your site, for a fee, that they can get from other sources for free?
quote: I think your proposal still runs into the same problem that traditional news/classified sites runs into. What are consumers getting from your site, for a fee, that they can get from other sources for free?
I posted a comment to supa's blog...see the very end...this was my point too...
quote: They suck because it takes a lot more time to search for something in the hardcopy classified section, than online.
Plus, you are limited to the amount of space you can have, thus limiting how much info you can provide...space isn't an issue online.
Good points.
One down side is that for internet classified ads, no one wants to list their phone number, so contacting the seller, or responding to the prospective buyer, becomes more complicated and slower.
There is a tendency for internet exchnages to be more impersonal - the use of shipping services, and payment with paypal, etc. This lends itself to more instances of fraud.
quote: so... you're saying the Advocate should buy TD content right after you say they shouldn't have blown millions of dollars on a new building?
no what I am saying is the advocate is good at generating data, facts and quality writing about what they find
Channel 2 has the instant update with video capabilities
tigerdroppings has the user interface that WBRZ and the morning advocate clearly lack
so IMHO for Cuban's EZPAY idea to work, you have to offer the newspaper's archives, the newspaper's investigative reporting, the TV station's video streaming and live reporting capabilities and the message board's user interface to get people's attention and keep it focused on a specific website all day.
In other words consolidate the three mediums together.
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