Newspapers and the Internet

When Jeff Bezos, Amazon's founder and CEO, bought the Washington Post, my cousin sent me this analysis by AnantGoenka, of the Indian Express group. Goenka laments:

“The Washington Post brand…once considered priceless, now has a value.”

So price equals value? This reminds me of what Mike Masnick wrote in a recent post titled “There Is No 'True' Price For Anything”:

“Someone doesn't seem to understand the difference between price and value...Price and value are not the same thing. Just because a price is low, it does not mean the value is low.”

Goenka cites the Hindustan Times being valued at Rs 2,250 crores compared to the Post's valuation of Rs 1,550 crore. Is the Hindustan Times more valuable than the Post, he asks?Hello...the Internet has being eating into journalism in the West, not in India...not yet anyway. The pricing reflects the ground realities of the US, not India!

Goenka complains about the price not reflecting the brand value (it just reflects profits):

“World over, news companies weren’t just valued by their business success, but for intangibles such as ability to influence public perception, discussion and political agenda, and the brand recall as well.”

The thing is that such intangibles can be over-valued and under-valued: it is subjective. Was the Post fairly valued on these parameters? I agree with Masnick:

“"Fairly" is what the market will bear.”

Besides, as Goenka himself asks:

“How do you assign a value to that?”

Exactly.That’s a touchy-feely thing. If Goenka can't put a number, and yet feels the acquisition price was too low, then doesn't it stand to reason that the number may sound right to some and even high to others?

Goenka also seems to know little of the West. He applies the Indian behaviour to the West:

“Experiments world over have shown that audiences are sticky to the first medium and don’t transfer across.”

Really? Why then is Google News, an aggregator (not a content producer) so popular? Why did German newspapers that won the legal right to not be shown on Google News without consent then go crawling back to Google and say “We want in”?

Newspapers have changed in the West. As Jeff Jarvis wrote in his blog:

“Just as news publications are being unbundled, so are news articles. The single narrative is being broken up into separate assets: what’s new may come from Twitter; background from Wikipedia; details from a database; quotes from YouTube; explanation from a graphic. This allows each of us to traverse a news event in our own way. Are journalists still storytellers? Only when that’s the best way to impart information.”

Goenka's accuses the Post of throwing in the towel too early:

“proprietors have given up, maybe without trying enough, finding ways to monetize a brand either by innovative brand extensions or franchise operations beyond the core product.”

Not at all true. Western newspapers have been trying to evolve to live in the Internet world for years, without success. Jarvis again:

“We cannot preserve old models in a new reality. Just because we used to sell access to content and had pricing power over advertising, there is nothing to say that is our right to continue.”

As Jarvis says, the world has changed...and unfortunately, Western papers couldn't adapt. And in any case, shouldn’t readers care more about what Jarvis says:

“What matters isn’t newspapers. What matters is news and journalism and how they can help communities organize their knowledge to better organize themselves. That is my definition of journalism.”