Real World E-Commerce and Online Marketing: John C. Dvorak – a newspaper guy? Cripes, you cannot give a speech anymore without a blogger in the audience! If anyone is interested in this scorched earth talk I gave recently, I will have it transcribed and turned into a monograph. It’s pretty harsh on the newspaper business, but accurate.
But now I know John as a newspaper guy. John C. Dvorak was a speaker at a conference that I attended for a family owned newspaper chain.
John is a grouch. Lets get that straight. He doesn’t show up to win friends. I guess he has friends and doesn’t seek more.
His presentation seemed highly critical of the newspaper industry and I don’t think it was received warmly by most in attendance. It should have been. They should have been on the edge of their seats taking notes.
Perhaps nobody was taking notes, but they sure weren’t sneaking out.
Found by Aric Mackey.
So its difficult to adjust your business model…what a crybaby.
I would in deed be interested in reading this.
Anyone who has gone to j-school knows “cranky.” What’s the deal? We’re cranky cuz we actually care.
Hope the rest of the world gets it. Can’t wait to read the transcript, John.
I get zero information from newspapers anymore. I may pick one up on a weekend to read during breakfast but that is it. Paper newspapers are so last century.
Brendal,
What is “j-school”?
Thanks!
>>What is “j-school”?
You’re obviously not hip and happening if you don’t know what J-school is. Gosh! Think about where Lois Lane got her training….
My problem with the daily newspaper is it’s just a hash of the news you’ve already seen on the internet and TV news stations the night before. Why not release a newspaper later in the day with that day’s breaking news? You have a newspaper for the morning commute, you have a newspaper for the evening commute.
Cripes, I had to look and see if the poor bugger was a mate of mine.
I hang out – mostly online, I admit – with a few folks handling Web content for traditional media. One of them even did an internship at TechTV.
This tale is exactly what I hear from them any time we have a “state of the gig” discussion about what’s going on in “modern” American journalism.
The saddest part is – as I think we all would recognize – it doesn’t have to be bass-ackwards.
I’d be interested in reading a transcript of your talk, John… very interesting stuff!
I quit buying papers 3 years ago.I read one occasionally in a restaurant.They are dead for me because they are such a tremendous waste of paper.Newspaper and radio guys don’t get it and never will.
I also would like to read this. As with #4, Improbus I also don’t read the printed paper anymore. Most of the national and international news is off the AP wire, same as yahoo except yahoo is free and more timely.
So, why newspapers? Except for boring news from a small town and coupons, I don’t see the reason for most of them anymore.
A while back I ran into Lawrence (Kansas) – an excellent newspaper website. They post more images online, audio, video etc. An excellent example of what can be done with a newspaper online. ljworld.com – their traditional news stuff and their entertainment type website lawrence.com .
The tech department spawned django – the web dev platform.
Egon said print was dead in 1984. Everyone else is just catching up.
And JCD, you have a whole blog full of friends. The fact that hack didn’t even mention dvorak.org/blog should tell you something.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Major butt kisser.
To add a little extra, if I were a major newspaper today, I would seriously consider moving most of my reporting from current events to commentary and editorializing.
So, if I owned the NY Times, I would be quick to realize that reprinting what can be had for free from the internet is a loosing strategy. I would capitalize on what I have which is wanted but not free, international and local editorials and scoops on the local scene.
This guy’s full of shit. I met Mr. Dvorak some years back at the San Francisco Hilton. He was a speaker at the ONEBBSCON and I was attending. One night after a long day I headed back to the hotel and went to the bar where I saw him and bunch of others shootin the breeze so I sat in. WE lost the hours discussing the demise of BBS’s and the bright future of the internet (Internet Explorer was still known as Mosaic). I found him to be quite amicable, but he sure as hell wasn’t one to mince words.
The newspaper industry as a whole will likely be dead within 20 years. It’s been dying a slow, agonizing death for a while now and honestly, I don’t know anyone who sits down to read the paper anymore.
I get my news via the internet or tv, when I can see what’s actually happening as it’s happening. I don’t want to sit down for an hour and skip over ad after ad in the newspaper when I can skim headlines for 10 minutes on a website, or listen to as I eat dinner.
What also isn’t said is that most, feed the same line politically. Leftist stuff sells only to leftist, and they all have the same take and information.
You need some papers that are leftist leaning, some nationalist leaning, neutral-fact based papers, etc. In other words rather than bi-partisian you need actual fighting and argument. But then again that’s not the Demoncrats overall plan, is it?
Why would you buy a fish wrapper, that says exactly what the TV and internet says. No real background, no additional indepth information and often no information at all, just opion and propaganda. I can waste my money on something else. It’s time for the newspapers to eitehr hire more reporter and finially go after the local dirt in local government, instead of sucking up to every elected offical in hopes of a government position, or face erradication in the face of an internet where freedom of choice and source is abundantly avaliable.
I’m betting that the Marxist in the papers would rather see them go down in flames than give up their soap box and propaganda tool.
But then again whatever, bye bye Maxist propaganda tool. The Muslim Obama might feel like sponsoring a USA Maxist rag to employ the few hundred reporters left in the US.
Maybe they will be outsourced to India also, it’s not like they can’t do the same thing our own reporters do, which amounts to just republishing the memos from the government or whoever is being discussed. I’d bet that even a computer could do the job without any real problem.
Enough of them are foreigners now that it wouldn’t be any real loss anyway, so bye bye propaganda tool – maybe if TV goes away Americans can learn to think for themselves and not just parrot a party line.
Traaxx
#18–amodedoma==you say JCD is amicable and doesn’t mince words. Does that mean friendly and a straight shooter? How does that make him FOS? Lets have a single detail that supports this rather than goes against this? Details==did he allow you to pay for your own drinks or what has your panties in a bunch?
I’m very curious about the picture posted. Looks like the Great Fire of London but based in Russia? But Red Square is no where near a bridge and London does not have Onion Topped Buildings. Constantinople?
Could we have a larger picture please?
Geez, Bobbo, thanks, but even I can follow the logic. He was saying the blogger is full of shit..not me. Actually I thought the blogger was rather complimentary overall as the speech was pretty hard hitting. This is my newest type of talk. It is highly critical of things. I’m not getting hired (I hope) to do motivational speaking. These are designed as wake up calls. The net has been around too long for so many people to still be so disconnected to it.
That pic reflects the burning of Moscow to thwart Napoleon. I have not seen a bigger version.
#21–Thanks John. Yes, it should have been clear from a simple read. Maybe I’m overly interested in the dark side of JCD given that everything here looks so admirable?
I did a quick google with your confirmation and found it:
Moscow on Fire – J. F. A. Clar (1768-1844) – aquatint on paper tinted watercolor, same size as yours. Maybe thats “the back side” of the Kremlin? I was there and all I remember is how unfair it was to get to jump in line to see Lenin’s body, and how empty all the stores were around the square.
I like it. Going to look for a larger one and failing that see if I can find my “fractal based picture enlarging program” and see what it can do on a real example.
I write this as I am laying out my newspaper.
The big city newspapers are losing circulation because a lot of what they print was available the night before on the Internet for free. They are also losing advertisers to the Internet, which costs less. My newspaper costs thousands of dollars to put out per issue. My web site costs a little over a hundred bucks a year.
Many small local papers that have good original and very local coverage are doing fine–especially if they are free.
Content is still the key.
If you walk into a grocery store and there is a free paper sitting there with a few really good original stories about your local neighborhood you will pick it up. Ads are also interesting content if they are very local.
If there is a big regional paper that costs money and has yesterday’s Drudge Report in it then you probably won’t pick it up.
The saddest part of this is that some of these big city papers (The Washington Post in my area for example) have really, really good original content and excellent writing and editing and are getting clobbered and we will eventually lose that breadth and quality of coverage since the revenue on the web simply isn’t there to support it.
A lot of terribly smart people are having one hell of a time trying to figure out how to deal with this. There is no clear answer but lots of good debate about it.
Yeah, I meant the blogger was full of crap. The newspaper industry is in serious trouble, they don’t want to hear the bad news and giving it to them straight might seem harsh. I got 3 kids, who won’t read. I gotta make them read by making it a requisite to playing with the PS3. I haven’t been able to transmit my enthusiasm for reading to them. They just don’t get it. I’m afraid that the love of reading has gone out of fashion. Things are changing and if the newspaper industry doesn’t wise up they’ll end up having bigger problems than Hollywood or the music industry.
#24–amodedoma–you meaning was clear to anyone who can read. (ouch!-a self inflicted wound). If your kiddies are reading “the news” on line and therefore not reading newspapers, love of reading is established?
I used to be an avid reader of books and magazines==not newspapers at all, ever, just not enough depth to most issues. Now, I read mostly the internet because I love the tangents going off in other areas of interest.
For instance, searching for the posted picture above, I ran into
http://tinyurl.com/53mtn2
which had some interesting opinion pieces on Tolstoy’s War and Peace–a book I have started 2-3 times and can’t make any progress on. Still informative and interesting (to me) to read expert opinions on the subject. Can’t get that tangent from the printed word.
So–newspapers and buggy whips give way to the future.
I’ve been reading newspapers as long as I’ve been able to read (quite a long time now), and I still take the local paper every day. When I was a small-town kid, we always took one daily paper from the larger town next door as well as the weekly local paper and a Sunday edition from one of the larger cities in our state.
Our local paper has a weekly “Neighborhood” supplement. As I was reading it yesterday, it occurred to me that it is the best part of the paper, and I wished I could get all the various editions from around the city. It’s the best-written (usually), with lots of local color and news that borders on gossip. Now that would be a newspaper!
The rest of the paper has gotten smaller, the stories shorter and more poorly structured, the misspellings more common (slightly improved over the last two years or so, mainly because the Associated Press apparently invested in some spell checkers), etc., etc., etc.
Even the Neighborhoods section is now up to half school sports scores and stories.
The decisions of the newspaper higher-ups remind me of 1970s movies, where there is always at least one character devoted to doing the worst possible thing with all their might.
The single biggest contribution to the worsening of this paper was the sale of a formerly family-run business to a national conglomerate. I’m sure this is a familiar story to readers all around the world.
In the end, the thing that will keep newspapers around may be local gossip…
Oh, yeah, and let’s all be sure to watch out for those nasty opions and Maxists!
John, please post transcript or video or audio of the speech, so I can forward it to our local newspapers. My wife used to be managing editor many years ago, now we don’t even take the paper. Ye Gods. And one of ’em fouled their RSS feed so badly that I removed it from G.Reader, it was such a mess! Perhaps one of the bright young ones will read and actually do something about it… like start their own ‘newspaper’ and bury the ones that currently hold that title.
Maybe I read it differently because I see a very serious and positive review here. My interpretation is: Here’s a guy, John C. Dvorak, who isn’t here to sugar coat things. He’s here to give a serious, in-depth look at the newspaper industry. You may not like it, but you better listen and listen good because if you don’t get his point, you’ll be pointless.
I’m typing this in Albuquerque, which until February of this year had two newspapers. Of course the better paper, the one that actually had reporters that got stories somewhere besides the news wires, press releases, and the police report, was the one that closed. The remaining paper hardly ever rocks the boat, and charges readers for its online version. It’s good for wrapping garbage, and keeping paint drips and kitty litter off the floor.
Just wanted to comment on the comments. I’m the blogger that was in the audience when John spoke. I have a fondness for newspapers that hasn’t been totally broken by working for one. The first thing I noticed 9 years ago when I started working for a small regional paper was that circulation was trending down while revenues were remaining relatively positive. This didn’t seem like a trend that could continue and I pounded the table demanding that someone pay attention to the web. It’s a shame that the newspaper business has to begin to implode before anyone takes the net seriously.
As a long time Dvorak fan (I’m an IT guy going back to 1980) I was excited that he was speaking at our media group super-conference. Unfortunately, John wasn’t received well by the members of the print media in attendance. I blogged on his speech (which I still hope John will release on his website) and the rest is all here for you to read.
I’ve enjoyed reading your thoughts on newspapers and my post, both positive and otherwise.
“His presentation seemed highly critical of the newspaper industry …”
The newspaper industry had been losing readership since well before the internet and haven’t answered this new challenge yet. Is there anything good to say about them?