pkarnig’s posthaven

The publisher of the New York Times acknowledged Wednesday that the newspaper will go out of print — eventually.

"We will stop printing the New York Times sometime in the future, date TBD," Arthur Sulzberger told an audience at a London media summit Wednesday.

Sulzberger's statement came in response to a prediction that the newspaper would go out-of-print by 2015.

The crazy thing is that most of the traditional (like nytimes) content providers seem to believe that charging for their online content will save the day. I disagree. I believe that a new model for content monetization will evolve through the use of advanced semantic filtering. This could also presage the end of Google's dominance in the market. Check out what we are doing at Grabbit!

Let’s pause and look at trends that have emerged over the last few years: How will they affect the digital newsmedia industry? First, we’ll try and list a few undisputed facts. Then we’ll drift towards conclusions bordering the uncharted territory of predictions. It’s worth the risk.

The web fuel problem. The internet economic engine isn’t firing on all cylinders. For online news, that’s an understatement. The primary source of income, advertising, has proven itself unable to sustain ambitious journalism. There might be exceptions here and there, a few news organizations have found their way to profitability, but they flourish in niche beats. For example, Politico, which covers Washington DC’s arcana — but it relies on hybrid model (web and print).

Others benefits from a powerful mothership such as New York Times Digital’s DealBook on finance: with a 2.5 to 3m unique visitors a month, this eight journalists operation could break even if it were granted a separate P&L. (DealBook also brings intangible but highly valuable status to the NYT in its fight against the Wall Street Journal.) But these are specialized products.

Observers mention the Huffington Post, with its presumed 10m UV/month, as the prototype for a popular internet news success. To me, the HuffPo is not a journalistic product per se. Taking third party content, the HuffPo builds a clever participatory mash-up, with a focus on juicy stuff. The whole thing is staged it in such a way (splashy editing, pictures, headlines) that it triggers loads of prattling — and page views. Fine. But this is not hardcore journalism.

As we speak, a 50-100 people newsroom stands no chance of living by advertising alone.
This state of affairs won’t change anytime soon. Last year, US ad spending fell by 9% and we know the recovery will take a while. As the CEO of Zenith Optimedia (Publicis Group) said last week in Paris: “In terms of revenue, 2012 will be like 2006″. This even though he predicts the money invested on the internet will keep progressing and will end up coinciding with the time people spend online.

That’s fact #1: don’t count on advertising. At least not in full ad-supported mode, not for a while.