In 1994, people learned about and began to adopt electronic mail as a primary form of communication. Subsequently, the USPS has suffered greatly, bleeding billions of dollars a year, and I just read today in the online news (thank you for free access, Yahoo!) that the agency is cutting 35,000 more jobs this year.
In 2000, Napster fever had taken over the music industry and people everywhere, from college dorm rooms to DJ studios, were downloading music for free. While copyright laws have been upheld and the content has been given value, that value is still volitile and up for debate. Subsequently, stores like Blockbuster Music, The Wearhouse, and Tower Records closed their doors, unable to adapt to the digital trend.
In 2002, Netflix burst onto the scene and allowed consumers to have movies delivered directly do them through a subscription. Beginning in 2007, Netflix offered a streaming service so that customers could instantly watch content on demand. Last year, Blockbuster was bought out of bankruptcy by Dish Network, which continues to close stores. Hollywood Video is now extinct, and the advent of Redbox as killed almost all of the remaining Mom-n-Pop shops that don't have a porn section.
But print media is different. Print media has been around forever. The newspaper is a staple of daily life, right? There was no room for revolutionizing the news industry.
Since the early 90's, the internet has been a growing behemoth of information, updated evermore frequently, evermore in-depth, and becoming an evermore reliable source of real-time information. I learned of Michael Jackson's death as it happened by reading the news online. I was able to stream the verdict of the Conrad Murray trial.
What print media doesn't seem to realize, is that "new media" has a large advantage over all older forms: the ability to deliver several types of info-tainment through one channel at the users behest. When I read an article about crazy Grammy outfits, I read about Deadmou5 and how he wore a shirt with Skrillex's phone number on it. I then was able to pull up a photo of the shirt. Then, since I had no clue who/what Skrillex was, I looked that up on Wikipedia. Information is at our fingertips to be consumed these days, and we as consumers demand it more and more.
What I didn't have to do, was to pay for a subscription to look at the photo, research the artist, or read about the Grammy recap. The demand for information is great, but the barrier to entry to supply it no longer exists, and supply is growing at a rate much higher than demand.
DEAR LA TIMES: What makes you think that you will have any success in charging for your digital content? I get it, Wall Street big shots drop the NYT ap on their iPad and pay for the subscription. But you should understand why, too, and realize that it is a NYC cultural/status symbol that the LAT no longer commands. The consumer cannot connect the dots, either. Digital news requires no printing press, no delivery trucks or drivers, and no paper, but the advertising space is still there. So in our minds, costs go down but revenue stays relatively the same-- perhaps even grows, as there can be multiple ads per article online where in a physical paper this was not possible.
What makes the Times think that people won't immediately start perusing news sites they hadn't yet, like Patch.com for local news? What makes the times think that Angelenos won't all turn to Yahoo! News and their contributor network for better stories?
In order for print media and the LA Times to survive a journey into the digital age, they must learn how and why the Postal Service, and other brick-and-mortar media companies have failed. Certainly, charging a digital subscription for daily information that could be consumed by any number of competitors free of charge is not learning from the past. Get it together, guys.
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