Shifting from Physical to Digital, Complex to Simple

Two posts have got me thinking about a problem I was all too familiar with for a while with IDG and Primedia...

How do print publications survive in the digital age.

The first post is by Clay Shirky, and is an absolute must read (he talks about TV and Online video):

About 15 years ago, the supply part of media’s supply-and-demand curve went parabolic, with a predictably inverse effect on price. Since then, a battalion of media elites have lined up to declare that exactly the opposite thing will start happening any day now.

To pick a couple of examples more or less at random, last year Barry Diller of IAC said, of content available on the web, “It is not free, and is not going to be,” Steve Brill of Journalism Online said that users “just need to get back into the habit of doing so [paying for content] online”, and Rupert Murdoch of News Corp said “Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use.”

Diller, Brill, and Murdoch seem be stating a simple fact—we will have to pay them—but this fact is not in fact a fact. Instead, it is a choice, one its proponents often decline to spell out in full, because, spelled out in full, it would read something like this:

“Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use, or else we will have to stop making content in the costly and complex way we have grown accustomed to making it. And we don’t know how to do that.”

And then I came across this post by Ken Doctor from The Nieman Journalism Lab (talking about data points related to content costs):

Take this one: 4.1 percent. That’s what Warren Webster, president of AOL’s newly expanding Patch, recently told me it costs his company to match the content production of a “like-sized newspaper.” Meaning that Patch can produce the same volume of content (quality, pro and con, in the eye of the beholder) for 1/25 the cost of the old Big Iron newspaper company, given its centralized technology and finance and zero investment in presses and local office space. (Staffers work out of their homes.)
That’s an astounding number, which even if tripled, gives a legacy publisher or editor pause.

Print will have a place in our world...it will just be a much smaller one. The future is certainly blurry...many blogs make a living off of posting about articles from large publishing companies..so what does the future hold if no one is doing the costly investigative work?

Smaller publishing operations, like Talkingpointsmemo.com, can fill some of the gaps left by a shrinking traditional press by focusing on one topic (politics) and doing it really well with a small team of investigative journalists.  

Maybe the answer will be smaller, less complex operations like TPM..they just need the $$ to flow to them so they can continue to create quality content. The majority of their revenue can go towards content creation (journalists) and not get sucked into a heavy industrial operation (printing and distribution).

We are working on the $$ part over here now :)