Five Key Reasons Why Newspapers Are Failing

In the end, they're one in the same. Unfortunately.

 

Advertisers who once had almost nowhere to go now have everywhere they can go.

What "business plan" failed?

The world changed. It does that sometimes. The greatest business plan in the world is not going to get someone to hop on a train if there are more convenient ways of getting somewhere.

 

One more time: More people are reading the <i>content</i> of newspapers than ever before. People want the content. Too bad someone decided to give it away and made that plan the standard.

As much as the world changes, this fundamental stays the same: Giving away your product is rarely profitable. It doesn't matter if you're running a newspaper, a lemonade stand or a brothel.

You're talking about the advertising climate like it's still 1968. Major car makers are bankrupt. So are major retailers. It's not just a case of having other options, it's a matter of struggling just to stay in business. It isn't a coincidence that magazines, television stations and radio stations are hurting, too.

 

Outing alert: Bill Wyman is really Oliver Reichenstein; has the same argument that information is this free thing that kinda just materializes, apparently.

 

Couple things. Advertisers were never buying the content, they were buying the audience.
A news website is an entirely different animal than a print newspaper. In a newspaper, people might flip through the entire paper, I am only guessing but I'd say eyeballs maybe reach six or seven stories max on a daily visit.
I do think if newspapers waive or give extensive discounts to readers for their content if they accurately provide information on interests, income and other demographic info to better target advertisers to them it might help - but I don't think people are that interested in giving out a bunch of personal information.

I'll be curious though about the paid content plan - I figure a lot of people will just go elsewhere. I use and do a lot of stuff because stuff is free - my choices would be different if they weren't.

 

In many places, the paper product is still making money, and it's paying for beefing up an Internet that's bleeding money. Adblock is king, and I would rather travel cross country on my hands and knees than book a trip on Orbitz, all because of the damn pop-up on ESPN.

Then again, some places are probably just hanging in without a real plan, judging by the fact that many papers' layoffs/buyouts included Web producers.

 

And why was the audience there?

 

Well in some cases, it was because the paper was put on their doorstep whether they wanted it or not. In most cases it was because it was because it was a primary and perhaps only source of news in the community. That isn't the case any more.

 

Unless it's a shopper and don't get me started on those. I think my paper's shopper is useless. It just annoys most of the public since they have to pick it up and throw it right in the trash.

 

What sources are you referring to that didn't exist 10 years ago? You gotta be talking about blogs, and they're certainly other sources of commentary, but almost certainly not news-gathering sources.

 

Really? Who is doing community news? Yahoo?

 

I'm just wondering how many bloggers cover city council meetings in L.A., New York, San Francisco or Seattle, since those are the "wired" cities, or at least some think so.