Have a good weekend

One papah town?!?

So, the Star Bulletin is buying out the Advertiser and if approved would leave Honolulu with just 1 daily newspaper.

About 10 years ago, I had strong feelings against it when the Advertiser was looking to buy out the Bulletin. But now - feh.

I believe we still need good journalism and a strong Fourth Estate, but has print medias time past? We don't really telegraph anymore, but I don't think the interwebs is yet up to that task.

Does this concern you? Monopolization of a dead market? Is there already enough democratization and diversity of news sources? Does this matter?

Does this affect Odori?

Discuss.

Omidyar speaks

I can't make this. Let me know what he says if any of you go!

The lecture entitled, "A Discussion with Hawaii's Own Pierre Omidyar," is scheduled for Wednesday, January 27, 2010 from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. in the UH Manoa Campus Center Ballroom. Pierre Omidyar is the founder and chairman of eBay.

Expalnation for non-Hawaii readers of POT: Omidyar is setting up an online news service in Honolulu that will have serious potential to shake up the news business for the better.

Google talks about newspapers

Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt, is speaking quite sensibly about newspapers. I suspect many in print media know he's right but don't want to admit it:

FT: Some people, in their concern about the sorry financial state of a lot of American newspapers, they’ve talked about the idea that some papers should become not for profit. Do you think that’s a good idea? Is that going to be the model for the future?

ES: There’s an old joke about newspapers – that some of them have been not-for-profits for many years. So I think the reality is that news gathering and the profitability model was always an uncomfortable relationship because it’s very difficult to make money from a story about a tragedy or murder or so forth - and yet it’s enormously valuable. So the structure of newspapers that evolved, where the majority of the revenue came from classifieds and these big, untargeted print ads, the content was fascinating but they were not connected to... it was ultimately destined to be challenged by technology and that’s indeed what happened.

...

FT: In their quest for revenues newspapers have started talking about trying to persuade you, Google, and specifically Google News, to share a little bit more of the revenue, specifically from their stories that appear on Google News. Wouldn’t that be a good idea?

ES: We’ve decided that the value we provide to the partners is the traffic. So we want to provide incredible numbers of users going to their sites, their content, which is why we urge them to make it deeper, stronger and use better tools and so forth. From our perspective, that’s where the real source would be. In our model, and what we’re doing today, the vast majority of the revenue that comes directly from reading newspapers, in fact, goes to them through all these mechanisms. The real issue here is that when people are reading the news online, we’re not monetising it in aggregate, so if we were to transfer money we would be taking money from something unrelated to newspapers and just paying them, which doesn’t seem like a good sustainable model for anybody.

A newspaper experiments

The New York Times is brainstorming ways to make more money online and stop the bleeding. Who knows if any of the ideas will work. But at least it's trying to come up with a solution, instead of allowing itself to slowly waste away.

One includes a "meter system," in which the reader can roam freely on the Web site until hitting a predetermined limit of word-count or pageviews, after which a meter will start running and the reader is charged for movement on the site thereafter. ...
Mr. Keller described the second proposal as a "membership" system. In this model, readers pledge money to the site and are invited into a "New York Times community." You write a check, you get a baseball cap or a T-shirt (if it's like Channel Thirteen, a tote bag!), an invite to a Times event, or perhaps, like The Economist, access to specialized content on the Web.

News skimmer

I think the New York Times has figured something out here. I hope it helps them make money.

Newspapers on the computer

This kind of makes me want to cry.




These guys say newspapers should establish endowments to survive. Great idea. Only the best will be worthy, though, which will lead to a brutal culling. But that's going to happen anyway. And newspapers with significant endowments will keep reporting the news, which is what is really important. Save the newspapers!