Newspapers Find Online Video Niche
Dailies stake out Web territory with broadband newscasts. But can they make money? — In the race to capitalize on the popularity of broadband video, newspapers are continuing to take a page from TV stations' playbooks by producing increasingly sophisticated newscasts and other Web programs.
Context & Ripple Effects
Newspapers have spent the past two years fighting for leverage over their digital distribution: in early 2006 they negotiated a new deal over how their content reaches the web, and by February 2006 publishers were demanding that search engines pay for their content. This piece marks the next move in that campaign — rather than only licensing text, dailies are now building original video, copying the newscast formats that TV stations perfected.
The significance is competitive as much as editorial: local broadcasters' most defensible franchise, the packaged local newscast, is being reproduced by print rivals at broadband scale, even as the article itself flags that nobody has yet proven the economics.
First-order effects
- Local TV stations gain direct print-branded competitors for broadband news video, forcing them to defend a format they previously owned by default.
- Newspaper newsrooms take on video production costs — cameras, editing, on-air talent — before any demonstrated revenue stream covers them.
Second-order effects
- Advertisers weighing local video buys can now play newspapers against stations on price, pressuring the rate card that broadcast spots have long relied on.
- Equipment vendors and production trainers pick up a new customer class as print organizations retrofit for video workflows.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the historical boundary between newspaper and broadcaster erodes into a single local-video market where the winning brand, not the originating medium, captures the audience and ad dollars.
- Unproven monetization across so many simultaneous entrants raises the odds that industry bodies or platforms will need to standardize web-video advertising formats before the niche scales.
The trend: Local news is converging on broadband video, with newspapers importing the TV station playbook and profitability still the open question.