The continuing fall in sales and advertising income for almost all newspapers means that content will become even more one-sided in an attempt to hold on to reader loyalty. Loyalty, in this case, means a profiled audience that advertisers use in their media planning. (An audience profile is a detailed analysis of spending habits and other behaviour - a quite surprising amount of statistical information BTW)
But, in the end, the costs of content production, printing and distribution are not met by sales of the paper. The bulk of these costs (and any minor profit) are met by advertising.
There is still relatively low income from online ads (in the case of the Telegraph, it's a premium banner and sponsored features). But for online media the business model has yet to be worked out. There are many of them. The most likely model to succeed, imho, is the "pay for no ads", where the online version is free, but loaded with ads placed within the content. You pay a period subscription to have content delivered without ads. It won't be much - and if you offer up some details about yourself, it will be almost free. Online will be a high volume, low margin business for the big media channels.
But the real way in which readers' views will be manipulated, and by which a media channel is already able run both a print and online edition without doubling costs, is CMS - content management. This means raw content can be automatically repackaged to appear in any programmed print or online layout - simultaneously.
When you hook this up with site visitor monitoring, other purchase behaviour databases and statistical tools, and combine them with <rules> for presenting content based on visitor information, the viewer will have a customized page of both advertising and content. I have not yet thought through the effects this will have, but I am ready to guess that it will allow both greater editorial freedom and a more complex calculation for the media planners.
You, the end user, will have a totally `personalized' edition in the future - whether it is the personalized edition you would have wanted or not. Most people are too lazy to set up their own parameters for content. If they feel they belong in the right `gang', they will accept what they are given (as has always been the case). You can't be me, I'm taken
Additionally, you'll have to have a "default" website anyway, that you can display to "virgin" users - that is, users about whom you have insufficient records to generate a custom site (the only identification you get, after all, is an IP - and they change every once in a while).
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
What I meant by "not so simple" came after those words. Commercial forces and technology don't explain everything. Whatever destiny holds in store for them (da-dum!), newspapers right now are still fairly influential in creating and sustaining conventional wisdom.
Yes, owners (outright like the Barclays thru Press Holdings, or publicly traded like Murdoch) do choose editors, and thus editorials (and more) - but the slant of the paper has to have an audience. I don't think content is a wrapper for delivering editorials, it's a wrapper for advertising products and services. The 'conventional wisdom' is marketing ;-)
But I know we'll have to agree to disagree on this one. You can't be me, I'm taken
But I still don't see (in your picture) why wealthy businessfolk like to own newspapers if it's such a constraining and unprofitable deal - unless there's another side to this, which is influence in the political debate.
I see most of the major media owners as engaged in a charade of influence. You can't be me, I'm taken
