TheWayoftheWeb

Lumping together so many disaprate businesses into one homogeneous ‘newspapers’ group is always going to result in a bit of schizophrenia, but when you’re attempting to discuss an industry, it’s a bit unavoidable.

Still, a few recent bits of information point to an industry that as a whole are still running around pointing fingers without working out their own gameplan.

There’s been a lot of discussion about the position Google occupies by providing the discovery and aggregation mechanism for news content – While I disagree with some of his points, Nick Carr compiles a lot of the views in an interesting post, which is immediately countered by Nieman Labs Matthew Ingram (Whose name seems to be coming up a lot in the Nieman posts I’m enjoying the most).

Meanwhile Trinity Mirror’s Sly Bailey has talked about “Superdominant players like Google and the death of journalism as we know it.”at the Digital Britain Summit.

“We’ve become dependent on pats on the back from new kids on the block who tell us what the rules are.” – lots more via PaidContent.

However:

I don’t know whether it was Nick Carr or Danny Sullivan who first pointed out that by editing the robots.txt file, newspapers can cut their search traffic off to spit their face.

Obviously the drop in traffic isn’t an option if you’re still selling display advertising based on scale, but there are options.

Besides picking an alternative search engine to work with (Hmmmm)…

How about using more social media to minimise search – after all, there are reports it’s driving more traffic than Google in some niche areas already.

Or instead of introducing Facebook and Twitter as middlemen, why not play around with open APIs (Hello, The Guardian) or install your own newspaper Laconi.ca?

But here’s where it gets really confused:

‘Newspaper publishers will no longer be required to supply newsagents with the newspapers they order under a shake-up of the regulations governing newspaper distribution. ‘ from Brand Republic.

Now this comes from Government Business Secretary Peter Mandelson, but I would allege that a rule change generally doesn’t happen without at least some consultation or consideration of the big players involved.

‘Small newspaper retailers are concerned that they risk becoming dependent on the larger retail wholesalers’

Hang on – small newspaper retailers are worried that they’ll be stuck with hugely dominant middlemen – doesn’t this ring a bell?

At a time when local is seen as a newspaper saviour, is it right that small newsagents are likely to suffer, and get the blame when people who might not be able to easily travel to a large supermarket on a daily basis can’t find their paper?

And incidentally, if local newsagents disappear, then newspapers and magazines (which I work on/with), are then left with large supermarkets as the dominant distributors. (I hear the sound of a bell ringing again)

And despite my questioning of it, the small percentage of online newspaper readers compared to print shown by both Martin Lengeveld and Ian Duncan, and now followed up with a great comparison by Rob Weir at the Columbia Missourian, does indicate that people migrating online can completely bypass the newspaper site they might read offline.

Is anyone else’s head hurting?

Some clarity:

There have been some well documented cases of newspaper businesses doing things rather than just talking about them.  The Guardian and the New York Times being about the biggest and best known examples.

Watch what they do, rather than just what people are suggesting. And please share other examples of innovation and change in all forms of journalism/digital publishing.

See what happens to those emerging from the wreckage.

And keep a close eye on the results, but also consider the other factors. A Finnish online-only daily might have suffered since losing the print edition, but is that down to the editorial proposition, staff cuts, tech adoption in the region, broadband access, alternative news sources, etc? Nobody knows yet.

Somehow we need to cut through the confusion.