Newspapers are the organizations who spend money and pay all those reporters that create the content that certain other sites (not mentioning any names) find useful to repost fo “free” on their ad laden sites. Without those newspapers, those other sites would be nothing but ads.

If you’re looking for market speak quotes, you don’t have to look any further than the very ad-bugs you place on all the pages in your site..

Here’s the one from MediaPlex:

“Mediaplex provides cross-channel advertising technology solutions and services that enable marketers to achieve one-to-one messaging, greater efficiencies and a competitive edge through insightful reporting and analytics. Our team of industry experts focuses on putting the customer first, providing advanced technology solutions alongside consulting services for the greatest return on their marketing spend.”

Now, who’s the “customer” mentioned in this little market spiel above who’s getting “the greatest return on their marketing spend.”?

Between zero revenue from millions of “consumers” and charging zero dollars to zero revenue from zero “consumers” and charging exorbitant dollars, there is a price that generates the maximum revenue.  Of course advertisers offsetting the direct revenue complicates the picture. 

Personally, I don’t like to see this type of thinking applied to journalism, but I can sort of understand what they think they’re doing.

What it means is that the advertisers are no longer getting the returns that they seek, so the papers have to make up the difference by pandering directly to the readership for money instead of indirectly through ads.

When you look at everything as a product, to be gotten to market as quickly and cheaply as possible, the whole world starts turning into an open-air WalMart. Lots of cheap, poorly made crap that people buy because they really don’t know any better. Competing distinctive products are either crushed by volume or co-opted & bought up.

The publishers in question here stand to benefit from being prescriptive about what kind of stuff they want you to view/read/absorb. That’s where “content” becomes symbolic for pure consumption which making money is the teleological aim rather than dissemination of information.

SoundCloud, for example, refer to uploads there as “sound”. I am sure there are plenty of musicians who would like to be clear that they make music, rather than merely “sound” (like a journalist might write news rather than “content”), but it’s plainly sensible to use a more generic term because not everything uploaded there is music, nor do they want it to be.

I used to work in educatinal publishing (hence the handle), and one of the big reasons I changed careers was what I can only think to describe as the “corporatization” of the company I worked for, as well as many others in the field.  The company was bought and merged several times, and a big part of all the “strategic initiatives” was bringing in a lot of people at the top who were corporate-raider types, with expertise in “business,” not “the book business.”  As a result, we ended up with lots of meetings about “leveraging content,” and the discussion of how to make good books stopped completely.  The marketing strategy and the strategy to make good content don’t have to be mutually exclusive, but lately they certainly seem to be.

Struggling newspaper hikes up its subscription rates, because it leads to more revenue.

It then raises them again, losing even more subscribers, but hey, no problem, net revenue is still rising.

Repeat ad absurdum, until the last frame, where the newspaper has just one really rich subscriber, who also happens to still be paying for AOL dial-up.