Posted on 02/22/2009 4:29:10 PM PST by Bill Dupray
This is a fascinating, wide-ranging interview with Marc Andreessen, who has some advice for the newspaper giants: stop the print editions and take one year of acute pain, rather than suffer through years of chronic pain, bleeding the companies dry. He notes that papers like the New York Times are 90% focused on the dying print edition and only 10% on the web editions and though management is thrashing around trying to save a dead business model, their investors have already discounted the price of the stock to the 10% of the company that has any value.
(Excerpt) Read more at patriotroom.com ...
I second that.
Actually, it would be cool if the sickest of papers would stop their print business. I know they are sick because of the dying business model, but there is also a bias component to it. So, if the sickest (read: most liberally biased) of the papers go first, then the slightly healthier papers (which may be less biased) can pick up the die-hard paper fans.
Even tho’ I *really like* reading print editions, I gotta agree. Both Frank Ogden and Nicholas Negroponte predicted the demise of print news back in the early 1990’s, and they were dead right, for all the reasons that they gave.
Whatever happened to Netscape?
You can get instant electronic subscriptions to almost all of the major newspapers on Amazon’s Kindle for less than $10 per month and not kill any trees.
Apparently the irony is lost on this guy.
What irony?
He’s a 38-year-old billionaire.
Good one!
bfl
You know what answer you'll get? Someone hemming and hawing to check the rate card, ask you a zillion questions about re-insertion, and maybe someone will be able to call you back about what formats they accept and the image size, but wouldn't you rather they do the graphics?
Go look at your local newspaper's website. Check out the rentals classified section. Is there even a key to explain some of the archaic symbols used in those tiny little ads? Nope. Why not more details - after all, it costs them almost nothing to put it on the web?
The newspaper, after bowing to the corporate advertising giants for so long, has yet to adapt to any rational pricing scheme which any human can understand. If you had a restaurant and wanted to place an ad for a special, it would take over two hours of talking to a sales person to get a single ad done. It's insane. Most newspapers used to handle their own finances, but now, getting an advertising account is virtually impossible without a very long term contract, and loads of money up front.
And so long as retail advertising continues to operate under this insanity, the rest of the paper will continue to shrink in size as they don't have the income to pay for content.
Want to spend a couple more minutes? Go pick up the local throw-a-way newspaper, open it up, and see what's not in the newsstand newspaper - advertising, from a wide variety of local businesses. They're having a great time, because they were never burdened with the insane rate card system that their ‘big brothers’ have to deal with, they have simple, no nonsense advertising sizes, pre-priced, and typically will float an advertiser's bill for monthly billing. Their actual problem right now is /too/ much advertising, and not enough content.
I wish i invented Netscape.
Darn.
Isn’t Netscape now Firefox...both Mozilla?
AOL purchased a vastly weakened Netscape after IE started eating its lunch.
Andreesen made his fortune from this acquisition but did not get out at the peak of Netscape’s market value. Far from it, it was practically firesaled from its potential high.
AOL continued the Netscape browser until just a year or two ago when it completely abandoned the browser to the ash heap of history.
Compare this to Mark Cuban who sold broadcast.com at the height of the internet frenzy in the late 90’s to Yahoo who has since completely buried the domain and the format that made it worth billions to begin with. Interesting what the parallels of two early developers of the period.
That his browser faded into obscurity.
This guy must be George Soros of the Net, wanting to tank his opposition in the name of creating a monopoly.
My local dino media tells me that the problem is that their customers are well-versed (100 years of practice) in buying 4-color ads for “X” number of column inches. The customers cannot get their heads around this Web thing, especially grocery stores who still use printed coupons.
In the same vein, the sales staff of the DTE’s (Dead Tree Editions) simply don’t know how to sell web ads.
Finally, the newspapers are still in the mindset of “We report, you read”. The Web brings about the ability to have interactions (hopefully moderated or solicited) between readers and writers. It also means that it content can expand as it virtually has no limit, unlike the very real constraints of DTE’s.
I have press credentials to sporting events. It used to be that the print guys sneered at us Web guys. Now, they all are either unemployed, or moonlighting doing Web content, or outright hired by a dot-com somewhere.
Ever try teaching your parents to use a computer?
I think newspapers are going to hold on for another few generations.
I think it evolved into Firefox.
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