While the death knell is sounded several times a day for traditional publishing, including mainstream media, we have yet to see any actual industry sector keel over dead yet. Instead, there are signs that the changes in how people consume everything from news to fiction online are driving changes in the offline industry as well. Some changes will obviously improve the way companies do business, but will the consumer always win?
In an interview with Staci Kramer at PaidContent, the AP's chief revenue officer Tom Brettigen talks about changes to the AP's pricing for member outlets. While he notes that the changes amount to a savings for most of its members, budget constraints are still forcing some very painful decisions, including the choice between licensing the AP's syndicated news and retaining local reporters:
“Clearly, we understand that some papers are facing decisions. I can have you or this many local reporters ... hard decisions are being made."
If the number of local reporters declines, does the news become homogenized from market to market?
The speed of the news cycle online seems to be slowly eroding the ability of traditional media sources to break news. Barack Obama's campaign was forced to announce his candidate choice for vice president after news leaked online, and Google's announcement of Chrome was bumped a day due to the company's oversight in mail service: Google Blogoscoped author Philip Lenssen lives in Germany and had mail service on Monday when the U.S. was celebrating a Federal holiday. However, as Owen Thomas at Valleywag noted, Wired had the details about Chrome weeks ago, and managed to keep the story under wraps until the official announcement. In a print journalism world where everyone from the writer to the copy editor to the print manager has access to stories, it's a monumental task to keep secrets. As Wired's executive editor Bob Cohn noted, keeping the story secret involved a change in how the magazine operates, including keeping most of the staff in the dark about the story, a 180-degree change from the magazine's usual routine of informing all the writing staff of each month's content.
So much Internet news and content is based on being first that the demand for leaked content is enormous, as author Stephanie Meyer discovered. At work on a version of her popular novel Twilight told from another' character's point of view, she discovered that 12 draft chapters of the work-in-progress, called Midnight Sun, were leaked online. Knowing which draft version was given out to any particular person or agency made it simple to discover where the link had occurred, but it didn't reverse the damage from her perspective: 12 unfinished chapters were still out of her control. She finally made the decision to release them herself, publishing them on her own Web site, but she has also indefinitely postponed the novel's completion, having the opposite effect. While the reality of links has created the tracking of drafts such as Meyer's, the reaction may cause some backlash when it comes to demand for leaked content, at least in the publishing world. If the choice is between incomplete content obtained quickly and a completed work, most would probably agree that a completed effort is preferred. If more content providers followed Meyer's lead by scrapping or indefinitely postponing a work's completion after a leak, the demand for leaked content may decrease.
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