As of now the Rocky is silent and Denver is a one-newspaper town.
Image of last front page
I used to work at a Scripps Paper. Their technology on the web was pretty good, they were more advanced than others. Course that wouldn't save them. The Rocky had a good reputation too, a handful of Pulitzers, and was in one of the few competitive territories left.
It's a sad day for print journalism. All those voices of good journalists, now silenced. 55 days before the paper's 150th year. Maybe some of the staffers will get get hired in an online-only outlet in Denver. Not much consolation for the families of all those employees.
It's also too bad that the Rocky wasn't the first metro daily to die recently, and it won't be the last.
Hopefully publishers of the remaining newspaper companies will see this as a memento mori, and be spurred into radical innovation and transformation.
We'll see.
February 28, 2009
e-paper at Hearst?
Perhaps the future will come sooner than I thought. Fortune says that Hearst will launch a Kindle-like reading device for periodicals. It'll be larger than a Kindle, the snazzy electronic book reader from Amazon, no mention on the price or a picture of it.
Hearst's plan to make money off its reader is to "sell the e-readers to publishers and to take a cut of the revenue derived from selling magazines and newspapers on these devices."
I guess if Hearst gets every content provider in the U.S. to sign on to use this technology, it could ride the long tail of revenue of licensing it to everyone. But the problem would be, if not everyone joins the bandwagon, will consumers pony up the dough to buy a device that will only work with Hearst content? Will Hearst subsidize the cost of the reader, like computer printer makers do? Printers don't cost the consumer much at all, but those ink cartridges sure do, and that's where the revenue comes in.
But you can't charge that much for access to information, not when there's a glut of it on the Internet, and it's practically all free.
Many unanswered questions. But I believe that the future of newspapers will using a delivery vehicle of e-ink, like in the movie Minority Report when the guy on the subway reads USA Today and the headlines and stories automatically change in real-time. Imagine if Apple does its own take on the Amazon Kindle, like it did with mp3 players and the iPod. The revolution will come.
Hearst's plan to make money off its reader is to "sell the e-readers to publishers and to take a cut of the revenue derived from selling magazines and newspapers on these devices."
I guess if Hearst gets every content provider in the U.S. to sign on to use this technology, it could ride the long tail of revenue of licensing it to everyone. But the problem would be, if not everyone joins the bandwagon, will consumers pony up the dough to buy a device that will only work with Hearst content? Will Hearst subsidize the cost of the reader, like computer printer makers do? Printers don't cost the consumer much at all, but those ink cartridges sure do, and that's where the revenue comes in.
But you can't charge that much for access to information, not when there's a glut of it on the Internet, and it's practically all free.
Many unanswered questions. But I believe that the future of newspapers will using a delivery vehicle of e-ink, like in the movie Minority Report when the guy on the subway reads USA Today and the headlines and stories automatically change in real-time. Imagine if Apple does its own take on the Amazon Kindle, like it did with mp3 players and the iPod. The revolution will come.
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