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.
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?