Courtesy Photo/engineeringhistory.tumblr.com: Edwin Armstrong, the inventor of frequency modulation (FM) radio, demonstrating a radio set to W.R.G. Baker, manager of General Electric’s radio and television division, 1939.
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In 1934, David Sarnoff, the head of Radio Corporation of America, offered a laboratory on the 85th floor of the Empire State Building to Edwin Armstrong, the inventor of FM radio, so he could conduct field tests of the new technology. For the year or so that he worked there, Armstrong discovered innovative uses of FM that are still largely unexploited. For instance, in a famous demonstration, Armstrong sent a facsimile reproduction of the front page of The New York Times using FM technology.
Technological advances like these allowed RCA to eventually become NBC. However, innovations of this kind have been lacking in the print end of the journalism industry. About a century after Armstrong’s experiments, the newspapers of today are struggling to transition from print to digital models, a feat which doesn’t require new inventions to accomplish. Rather, in order for newspapers to successfully transition to the internet, the industry needs to break longstanding business and journalistic traditions.
For one, the subscription model needs to go.
When there are news aggregators such as news.google.com, most people don’t need to purchase a subscription to a newspaper to get a specific story. That’s because virtually every iteration of the local, national and international news of the day appears in the aggregate online. Compounding this problem is the fact that subscriptions prevent potential readers from deciding if they want to invest in a news organization’s content, they also cut down on unique website visitors.
Furthermore, the way that news is presented and created needs to change. Local news content has value, but the internet has a much broader reach than a given hometown. Media news organizations, therefore, shouldn’t decide on a niche based on locality alone, they should also take into consideration the way readers access articles online, drawing the line between traditional news, usability, SEO, and the search results of popular queries asked on Google, Quora and Reddit.
Fed up, I put these theories into practice with the launch of my own new site, News Link Live, last Valentine’s Day. It’s an avant-garde news site with a special emphasis on North Central Massachusetts that covers everything from international news, to dating and relationships, political analysis, and sports. In lieu of subscriptions, I’m selling merchandise with print on demand companies, with the ultimate goal of attracting enough people to the site to partner with Google AdSense and Amazon affiliate marketing.
Since launch, I’ve had 49,954 unique visitors on my site, 90,616 site sessions (i.e., total site visits including returning readers) and an abnormally high average session duration of 6 minutes and 32 seconds, the latter of which should appeal to advertisers.
Why?
Well, in 2015, Nielsen found that while terrestrial radio reaches 93% of the American population, the average number of people who listened to the radio for at least five minutes during a 15-minute period was between two to thirteen depending on the time of day. This means that the amount of time people actually spend listening to the radio, is really low, and though slowly becoming obsolete, radio remains a much more successful medium for news than print.
For a better idea of my business model, please subscribe to News Link Live at newslinklive.com. Also, feel free to send me story ideas and suggestions through the contact form on the website.
