Can Amazon save the Newspaper?

(c) karindalziel

The fact that many newspapers are in serious trouble is hardly new.

The apparent collapse in advertising revenues has caused much wailing and teeth gnashing from the lowest staff reporters to the highest CEOs. Desperate attempts to keep readers buying physical copies are only matched by the mad scrabble for a solution. Recently this search seems to been overtaken by a sort of witch-hunt. First in line for the pitch forks is none other than Google, the friendly “don’t be evil” webgiant. The online arm of Forbes, the Associated Press, and even The Wall St Journal have had a pop at the big G for cashing in on their content.

They claim that when Google News puts up a short blurb about an article and sells an ad, it should share the money made with the papers. This conveniently ignores the fact that the papers could easily stop Google crawling their sites if they wanted. If Google was really stealing their money wouldn’t they stop it?

So is Google innocent? Unfortunately not.

What Google did, was to completely destroy their near monopoly on advertising. Prior to the web, the only way you could advertise anything was by ringing up a paper or magazine and paying them money. Now, if you want to get your message across you just buy a couple of keywords and Google automatically matches your ads with sites that are suitable.

This has created a whole new world where small organizations (like us) are able to bring in money without an entire advertising department.

And therein lies the problem. The reason that it is much harder for the papers to make money online than in the real world is simple supply and demand. At current estimations there are 25 billion webpages available on the internet or roughly three and a half pages for every single human being. No matter how much advertisers spend online, the money will always be spread too thin to fund the huge staffs the papers need.

Which is where Amazon comes in with its brand new product The Kindle DX. The DX is an e-book reader like its predecessor but with a much bigger screen, capable of displaying a newspaper without looking stupid. This has caught the attention of several American papers who are offering subscription deals on the device. Their simple idea is that, perhaps, on the Kindle they will be able to defeat declining circulation and re-establish the monopoly needed to stay alive.

In theory it’s a nice idea but is unlikely to last, after all what would you buy, an e-book reader where you had to pay for a subscription, or one where you could access the whole of the web in its glory (plus the newspaper content for free)? That’s what the manufacturers are thinking.

Good journalism is essential to our democracy. Like it or not the model that funds it is bust. Perhaps it’s time we focused on saving the content rather than protecting the paper its printed on.