- Chapter 3 - Cooperate With Your Competitors
Newspaper nostalgia conjures up images of checker-capped newsboys crowding street corners, shouting the daily headlines, trying to sell more copies than the competition. Alas, those days have passed. Today’s newsboys are on the web in the form of aggregators that list constantly updated headlines on one page. Today’s competition does not come from other local papers, but from online media outlets the world over. Today’s news market has spawned a new dynamic, one shifting towards cooperation.
You need video, but how will your print newsroom produce it?
The advent of online video has thrust newspapers into a new role: film production. Mainstream news outlets are now expected to integrate video into their websites. The problem is, most newsrooms are not equipped to produce video. How have newspapers adapted to the rapidly changing world of online video? One solution: partner up with new media groups to offer the best of both worlds.
Deal of the year: Yahoo partners up with American newspaper publishers
Yahoo News has always been looked upon more kindly than other news aggregators, particularly Google News. This is because it has mastered the art of collaboration, striking deals with some 90-odd publications, including the AP, Reuters, USA Today and the Christian Science Monitor. These deals work to prioritize the offerings of selected publications on the Yahoo News website. This premeditated collaboration has certainly not diluted the success of the project: Yahoo News is the most-visited English-language news site in the world.
Why have news aggregators caused such an uproar
The ease with which text, images, audio and videos can be copied from anywhere and republished by anyone on the Internet has raised serious concerns among traditional media. All of a sudden, where their content used to be safely distributed on paper or audio and video cassettes, in the digital world, multi-billion dollar publishers became subject to flagrant and widespread copyright violations beyond their control.
CONCLUSION When any momentous international event takes place, the world’s major papers rush to get their own exclusive story to print on their front page under a byline from a staff journalist. More often than not, small, regional papers in the Netherlands also print exclusive stories of the same international event with bylines from their own journalists. How is it possible that smaller, regional papers could ever compete with the mammoth journalistic resources of huge news operations? The answer: cooperation.
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