Jun 8 2009, 12:21PM
Is the Huffington Post Killing the New York Times and the Washington Post?
Isaac Chotiner's 6000-word TNR takedown of the collected works of Arianna Huffington came out last week, but, late as always, I didn't get around to reading it till over the weekend. It's packed to the gills with good stuff. That said, I don't think I can sign on to Isaac's most pointed paragraph:
The truth is that The Huffington Post is not just supplementing a print media that has long been dominated by newspapers. It is also helping to destroy newspapers. The trials of print media have been explored at length recently in a number of settings, both print and digital, and for good reason. But some tough questions must be asked also about the powerful digital interlopers. For the blogosphere and the news aggregators that dominate cyberspace are completely reliant--completely parasitic--on the very institutions they are driving to bankruptcy. [The Huffington Post] is thoroughly dependent on the reporting that Huffington has spent three decades bashing. Fire up the site on your computer some evening, and see how many of its main stories are from The New York Times or The Washington Post.
I wouldn't go so far as to say HuffPo is "completely parasitic" on the big newspapers (the Huffington Post employs plenty of full-time journalists and as far as I know is looking for more), but the bigger question here is: Why should we assume that the Huffington Post's reliance/dependence/symbiosis/parasitism (take your pick) is what's destroying newspapers?
My sense from friends at the Times and Post is that they're thrilled whenever Huffington Post links to a story. (The publisher of the Washington Post, Katharine Weymouth, admitted as much two weeks ago: "I think Arianna has built an amazing site and drives a lot of traffic to us, so thank you!") And if you compare the traffic of, say, the New York Times to that of the Huffington Post, the story is one of the two rising and falling together -- not the meteoric rise of HuffPo and the stagnation and decline of the Times.
With the exception of March and April of this year (did anything change?), each month in which the Times traffic (unique readers) rises is one in which the Huffington Post's traffic rises. And each month in which the Times' traffic falls or stays flat is a month in the which Huffington's traffic rises or stays flat:
I'll cheerfully admit this doesn't prove much, largely because we can't know what the counterfactual universe in which the Huffington Post never existed would look like. (Short of imaging a scenario along the lines of the Terminator movies.) But the broader point is that competition for newspaper readership isn't a zero-sum game: It's not like there's a fixed quantity of eyeballs, and each pair that turns to the Huffington Post means one less for the New York Times.
Image via Wikimedia Commons
I am one of the few 20-somethings I know to actually subscribe to a print newspaper. I enjoy having a newspaper that I can read while I am on the exercise bike or elliptical. At some point though, I will stop the subscriptions. The WSJ just went up in price for me by 150%, and the Washington Post has been going up on a monthly basis, while the quantity of the paper has been going down.
I place the fault for the print declines solely on the newspaper industry. Why would anyone pay for their product when they give it away for free? In their thirst for ad revenue, they forget the business principle that you should not cannibalize your core product.
In my mind, the greatest value-add for great newspapers like the Post and Journal is that they provide excellent, objective, well-written news reporting that no one else does as well. Why not charge for these sorts of articles, while keeping the op-ed section that competes with the blogoshere as free?
I think it's the case that the money saved via distribtuion online exceeds the price most papers charged for their print copies when the internet came along. On net, it should have been a money saver!
To the best of my knowledge (which isn't very extensive) the big problems are getting advertisers interested in the internet (no one likes advertising on blogs) and the rather dry science of making the ads effective. There seems to be this sense in the industry that print ads always work better. Maybe it's true.
Conor
"...they forget the business principle that you should not cannibalize your core product."
That's not a basic principle if without exception, or at least not a good one. What's taught at business schools is that often it's best to cannibalize your product if the likely alternative is a competitor doing it, which it often is. That's why Proctor and Gamble which made a very large profit with Tide also came out with Cheer, Gain, etc.
With regard to the cost of physical print, Michael Kinsley agrees with Conor, in a very interesting February 9th New York Times Op-Ed:
Dellis,
Well, look at what you just said. The WSJ raises its prices and you drop it. Why encourage the Post to charge for articles when you've already set a limit on how much you're willing to pay for hard news?
Agreed with your counter argument - until or unless I see some data that actually supports that conclusion.
Interestingly, you mention that HuffPo is apparently hiring more journalists, more reporters, what seems to be a move to become MORE like the organizations they so often criticize.
Please, say it ain't so! The irony would simply be too much!
Anal_yst
http://1-2knockout.typepad.com
I think they are hiring for this big investigative research project they have on the economy ... I believe they got some grant from somewhere.
Should have clarified now that I re-read my comment: I agree with you, and those who argue that places like HuffPo are destroying the Newspaper industry need to back up their rhetoric with data and show causation.
Also, color me cynical, but I'm skeptical on HuffPo's ability to take-on a project of that nature/scope/subject matter.
More importantly though, isn't it just a wee bit hypocritical for "new media" critics of MSM to build-out infrastructure and cost base similar (less print distribution) to said MSM, or am I missing something here?
Criticism of the MSM is not based on the process, it's based on their laziness or willingness to forego hard questions in favor of the "get" interview. If HuffPo thinks it can build a news gathering organization that can avoid falling into these traps, then it would be hypocritical for them not to try.
You're probably right to be skeptical, but don't condemn their reporting based on infrastructure and cost base.
There is some truth to the quote by Chotiner. There is some free riding off of the investigative journalistic work of the traditional media. It's one example among many of the great positive externalities of good serious investigative journalism.
If an activity has large positive externalities, economics has shown, all other things equal, that it's efficient and beneficial to subsidize it, but surprisingly we hear little talk in the economics community about subsidizing good serious investigative journalism (Actually, I've never heard any, except coming from me.)
For more on this see a comment of mine in Economist's View.