MediaVidea

Newspapers, go Digg yourself

A Cover story in the Economist was titled, "Who Killed the Newspapers?"
No one did. The papers killed themselves.

Like Ostriches with their heads stuck in stuck in sand, they see nothing but darkness brought out by Google News, in other words the newspapers CEOs are too lazy to put on their thinking hats.It wouldn't be a bad idea to outsource the newspapers' CEO's jobs to India, China, Philipines, Eastern Europre and what have you.

The recent deal done by 4 wire services with Google News is a stab in the back for the papers. The wire services get some money from Google for displaying news and are promised ad revenue from resulting traffic as well - the fee part is okay, but no one is making big Google ad money except some enterprising bloggers and blog networks.

Now, newspapers will be stuck with 'second hand' news wire stories and with huge salaries budgets to boot.

The only out is to be creative about generating advertising from online services:

For starters, they can form an AP-like cooperative again and create something like 'Digg for the best News Writing for the day' - having the best of both worlds, Digg-like user freedom (free to vote, free to comment) free to submit their own content and Newspaper like editorial curation - this can be a contender in the face of Google news. the stories are better and the aggregation (& story piling) is meaningful.

Despite its weaknesses, Digg is popular because it sends traffic to submitters, provided the stories are good (some Gaming doesn't harm at all)

It is another matter that the traffic seldom results in ad revenue and so the papers will have to find creative ways to generate advertising - the Guardian model of 'Dailycandy Style Special Offer from the paper' are a way to start.

If you need more validation: Recently, British Papers were reported to have increased their American readership.

The reason?: A big part of the traffic was sent by DrudgeReport.com, which is one of the pioneering aggregators.

News Indexing is hot and newspapers ought to get in it.
Digg, Drudge Report, Guardian - there is a solution in there somewhere.

Related MediaVidea Stories
Bloggers' Page as the new Op-Ed page
Digg Bashing: A Roundup
What if Top Digg Users were all Journalists

Labels: Digg, news 2.0, news aggregators, social news

posted by Pramit Singh @ 1:55 PM