Morning Roundup
May 7th, 2007 by Wayne Garcia in The Morning PapersGreat weather outside. Good day to sneak in a cigar:
- How exactly did the TV crew become part of the story, as the headline asserts? Other than emotionally?
- $250 million for Pinellas County turkeys/worthwhile local projects, your choice of terminology.
- $70 million for Palm Beach County turkeys/worthwhile local projects, your choice of terminology.
- $8 million for Hillsborough … you know the rest.
- $3.2 million in cuts to nonprofits in Tampa.
- “The newspapers are gone forever.”
- World Bank meets on Wolfie Tuesday.
- Does Mitt Romney believe in evolution? Maybe, sort of.
- Oh, and by the way, we’re winning the war in Iraq.
- State of the Democracy: More watched O’Reilly than GOP debate.
- Bob Ross is back; just not at the Tribune.
- The city of Tampa needs to straighten out the West Tampa overlay committee.
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May 7th, 2007 at 12:44 pm
James Boyce post on Huff-Po (”Tthe newspapers are gone forever”) is fairly decent.
He makes this prediction: “The 2008 candidate who invests in talent and new media not television, wins.”
I’m not sure that 2008 will be the year where new media trumps old media. But that day is coming.
The Internet in the next decade will do for politics what precinct walking did in the past decade. The GOP was able to muster more troops and be more effective in their door-to-door campaigns. But the Democrats rule the online media.
Now, consider what I wrote on our Affari Edge blog about the future of television: TVoIP.
(http://www.affariedge.com/blog/2007/05/03/the-future-of-television-change-is-coming-fast/)
It will be interesting to see how changes in the media will affect political communication in the next few election cycles. Will old-guard political consultants and party leaders see the comet crashing to earth? or will they bury their head in the sand?
May 7th, 2007 at 2:34 pm
Ummm … does James Boyce know anything about the newspaper business?
Sure, circulation is down. Guess what, that’s what happens when the market opens up. Circulation and sales went down for newspapers after the advent of radio. And when television was introduced on a large scale, both newspaper and radio numbers were down.
Just like what happened to the Big Three networks with the rise of cable television. When there were just three main channels to watch, and a smattering of regional independents, market share was much larger, and the audience was much larger. But as more options became available, the smaller those audiences became. In fact, even as more things to do surfaced outside of television (video games, Internet, etc.), those audiences shrunk even more.
There is simply more options than there was before, and the market has to adjust for that. I mean, come on, it’s simple economics.
And the whole deal about a newspaper giving away gift cards that are 40 percent of the cost of subscriptions? Chances are, the papers traded out advertising for those cards to either get them gratis, or at a tremendous discount.
Plus everyone knows that the price newspapers charge per issue or for subscribing is not as important to the overall business model than taking a hard number of PAID subscribers — whether they received incentives or not — to advertisers.
Nothing against free papers, they are awesome, and show that free distribution works. But we all know that even with audited readership numbers, many advertisers are willing to pay more for actual paid subscribers — who have a better chance of reading the publication than those who just have it thrown in their driveway, or collecting dust on a newsstand — than who might read it for free, and who may not have necessarily chose to receive the publication in the first place.
Even if a newspaper charged 5 cents per copy, it won’t any more pay to create or distribute the paper any way, and is really there to help serve as an advertising model.
But I don’t need to explain that to you, Wayne. :) This is indirect to James Boyce. =P