Shift from Paper to Tablet, Publisher to Aggregator

Having delivered the Ann Arbor News on Sundays and Mondays back in early 2009 (temporary job), I saw first hand the decline in subscriptions and remember getting spreadsheets every week detailing the growing number of lost customers that I had to stop delivering to. Listening to NPR on the six hour rural (dirt road) route, I recall one day hearing a story about the rapid decline in newspaper subscribers nationally and thinking that I was seeing the last wave roll into shore. Listening to the other drivers, some that had clearly been delivering for well over a decade, I combined the multiple sections of the paper and bagged them while standing outside the loading docks in the sub-freezing temperatures. The rumors were all grim, sure enough, just a month after quitting the job the Ann Arbor News announced that they were shutting down for good. The spin-off web based paper, annarbor.com, was where only a small portion of the Ann Arbor News writing staff found employment.

Blogger Clay Shirky explains that, "During the wrenching transition to print, experiments were only revealed in retrospect to be turning points." There have been many experimental news sites in recent years, Digg comes to mind as a major turning point in the way news is shared. Content aggregators such as Reddit and Digg will replace large news publishers (The New York Times, The L.A. Times, Chicago Tribune, etc). As Clay Shirky stated in a blog post, "Printing presses are terrifically expensive to set up and to run." With the death of the printed newspaper, comes the enhanced tablet version that will fill the need for a more economic content distribution system. As companies like Digg rush to be the new go-to distribution source, traditional newspaper companies will maintain their presence with virtual versions for devices such as the iPad. NewsCorp just launched The Daily tablet based newspaper, while other companies are right around the corner from creating tablet optimized (interactive) versions. The pay-wall will eventually kill most of these attempts at creating a next generation newspaper.

Digg has already made the transition by offering the option of becoming a preferred content provider. After signing a contract, a preferred content provider receives better ranking (placement) in the news stream. Freelance writers will likely pool together to create small companies that enter agreements (trusted/preferred content providers) with large content aggregators like Digg and Reddit. Instead of routing users to an external website for the news story, preferred content provider submitted stories will instantly appear on the aggregator's site. This will provide a more consistent experience, helping solve the issue of simplicity that still keeps some people from ditching the traditional newspaper. The aggregator will pay preferred content providers using the ad-based revenue. Local newspapers will shift to a smaller staffed web-based version, just like the Ann Arbor News did.