Five Key Reasons Why Newspapers Are Failing

You don't have "the people."

You don't have one single person whose skills translate in a meaningful way to what those web startups needed. Maybe a few sales people, but most of the companies you've talked about weren't making their money on ad sales.

 

Absolutely you do.
In the case of the Sportsline or ESPN concept, you have all the people you'd need.
In the case of other web-type ideas, you have the administrative types, the clerical types to follow the marching orders. And you have really bright people at all levels who might have -- and from I've heard, did -- concoct ideas that could have turned into successful e-businesses.

 

Well, in reality, I don't think many of the web startups had "the people" either.
And even if they did, many of them still failed.
Newspapers are full of smart, creative people who can innovate on the fly.
In most cases, as evidenced by the HuffPost story and in personal experience anecdotes, they weren't allowed to in cases that dealt with web development.
Some of that was by design, I think, because the web is still in flux and I've yet to see a convincing argument that the intertubes as we know it, will be around in a decade.

And, by the way, the mose successful Internet company -- Google -- makes a fortune off ad sales.

 

I've used this analogy many times, Iono:
It would have been like Detroit responding to the automobile crisis by marketing cars that come without wheels.
That's how dumb it's been.
A certain paper that shall remain nameless, once a good solid read for the money, today put out an 8-page sports section -- with one full page of team-by-team baseball stats and a fullpage ad on the back. Tell me why I should spend a buck a day on that?

 

And yet they still won't even admit this mistake, which to me is worse than anything else they have done re: Web development.

We have had a couple rounds of layoffs, but the major paper to the north of us and the major paper to the south of us have gutted their staffs/product much much worse.

We had an opportunity several months ago to create a monster ad campaign, appealing to the readers and advertisers of those papers. "We are not going to be lemmings cutting corners and failing on our vow to be the best news source in the area! We were there for you in good times. We'll be there for you in these difficult times. Come join us and be part of the best newspaper in the state and one of the best in the nation."

Instead, we did what everyone else did, including content sharing from those other gutted newspapers that were once our competitors.

 

Agreed with the above. Newspapers have definitely made some huge mistakes and short-sighted decisions in the last decade.

 

Here's an analogy of the newpaper industry:

Take a hamburger stand that's been in business for many years. They have many loyal customers who enjoy the burgers. The stand is making oodles of money, and they have talented people making the burgers.

But down the street, a pizza stand opens. It's a decent pizza, but some customers, especially the younger ones, decide that eating a hamburger is old-fashioned, and they want pizza.

The hamburger stand owner sees this, and decides to put pizza on the menu. Only, instead of hiring additional people who know how to make pizza, he has his hamburger workers make it, in addition to their hamburger duties. Needless to say, the pizza isn't very good, and because the workers are busy making it, they no longer make good hamburgers.

Sales drop off. The owner panics, and decides to cut costs by reducing the size of the burgers. More people get tired of eating little burgers, and head to the pizza joint. Sales drop further, and people get laid off. Eventually, the burger joint folds.

That, in a nutshell, is what's happening to the newspaper industry.

 

People have not abandoned the content of newspapers. They've changed the delivery system to one that costs them nothing. Web traffic proves that, and so does the fact that MSM content is still the starting point for most "modern" blogs and discussion boards.

 

And this, as has been noted, was a direct result of stockholder/ownership demand that the company keep making the kind of eye-popping profits that rolled in back in the days when they (and local TV, radio, etc.) were indispensable middlemen between local advertisers and readers.

People need news and information, sure. But the specifics of how the newspaper industry operated were not a natural extension of human society. They were a historical accident, appropriate to the circumstances of the 20th century. When society and technology changed, they did nearly nothing to stay relevant.

 

Relevance isn't the issue. Profitability is.

 

It gets back to what I've been screaming about here since the first page -- the business people have royally fucked up on multiple levels.

While we can all do things better and should never be complacent, what's happening generally isn't the fault of the people who produce the words and photos that go in the papers.

 

Slow.Fucking.Clap.