Huh, ain't that something ... Should newspapers abandon digital?

Hate to be a dick, but nobody is clicking on high school podcasts. Check your traffic. Nobody's clicking on that bullshit even if it's the best podcasts in history. The higher ups fell for all this glitz and glamour. Anything besides traditional hard copy was embraced. And guess what. Nobody's interested in listening to the sports guys talk about high school and small college. Ask anybody who tracks this stuff. Nobody watches video; nobody listens to podcasts. This was another consultants thing to become digital. Papers should have stuck to what they did best: DOMINATE the news gathering market! Now you tweet the breaking news and 30 seconds later it's old news. Thanks to idiot consultants.

 

Newspaper executives gutted the industry when they started giving away content for free in the first place. They were slow to adapt to the internet, and then when they finally made that push, they didn't set up a subscription format.

You had an entire generation grow up getting news content for free from every major web site. You can't recover from that completely. Now you have to prioritize, and that requires planning and vision within your company. Not every paper has that.

 

How do you know this? What consultants got to you? The moment the Internet was embraced by moronic publishers ... that's when greedy managing editors who salivated at saving money on newsprint used the Internet as an excuse to cut pages, cut content, get rid of veteran reporters. Oh baby the process of cutting took off. People are not dumb. Why pay for the rags that are called newspapers today? The Chicago Tribune for instance used to be a magestic read EVERY SINGLE DAY. Now it's a fricking small rag worth nothing. LOL at publishers who thought the Internet was the answer.

 

You can't speak in generalities. There is no such thing as a universal method here.

You say high school podcasts and videos don't work because nobody is clicking. That may be true in D.C. or NYC or LA. May even be true in Tuscaloosa. But for the community papers in Western Pennsylvania or the smaller papers in Ohio or the cities in Texas like Midland, high school sports is a huge draw. Maybe in Columbus, Pittsburgh and Fort Worth your thoughts hold true. But in Odessa, Lima and the remaining small towns in Pennsylvania, a different approach works.

 

What were they going to do? Stop progress? I agree they shouldn't have given it away for free so enthusiastically, but the newspaper industry wasn't going to stop people from flocking to the Internet for their information.

You're just talking about re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

 

See you and I differ on one important aspect. I assume you are an editor and sorry, sir, editors devalue their staff's work. Editors devalue the reporters' expertise. Talk radio reporters? LOL. Internet site reporters (ESPN, CBS, Fox, etc., granted they are good, but they all are former newspaper employees, who never would have left their papers had they not been laid off, worked to death, LOL)? Nobody out there could break a story or cover a team or write opinion pieces like the newspaper guys/gals. If newspapers had put their efforts into actually hiring salespeople with a clue and not the dregs of sales society they hire today and kept the people that own the beats, they would CONTROL the industry. See, Dick, with all due respect, you are one of those people I believe who think anybody can cover a team. No, newspapers had the monopoly on "Must have" coverage, but of course it's changed now and too late to get it back. All the newspaper guys worth a shit work for the national websites now, and yes, that content is free. I never said we could survive NOW, not after the consultants got their way and turned newspapers into 20 page rags and let all their good people go to the Website world of ESPN, FOX, etc. I challenge you to tell me newspaper editors EVER valued their own people and the work they produced.

p.s. Mr Whitman, with all sincerity, forgive me if you are in the 1 percent of management types who actually valued your sports staff. I truly believe the percentage I've quoted is accurate.

 

You seem to be making these arguments as if newspaper editors and publishers invented the internet but didn't think it through well enough. The publishers didn't land on the internet; the internet landed on them.

The internet makes the print newspaper completely obsolete. You can pretend it doesn't if that helps you feel better about blaming someone, but the reality is newspapers were screwed royally as soon as the Web became ubiquitous.

The ability to spread a message to the entire world instantaneously with negligible production cost is better than cutting down a tree, turning it into paper, printing a story on that paper and having it in someone's driveway 10 hours later. That is a fight you cannot win.

The only hope for newspapers was to find a way to maintain the advertising revenue while shifting to a digital format. They largely failed, so newspapers are screwed. The sad reality is, there very likely was no scenario that preserved that revenue.

And seriously, it's incredibly weak to keep blaming the sales people. You know why newspapers don't hire better sales people? Because no good sales person would ever take a job selling advertising in newspapers. Your pool of candidates is limited to people who can't get a job selling anything else.

 

Nailed it. And there was simply no way to maintain the classified ad revenue once sites like ebay and craigslist and the like took over. Sales people seem to do OK selling retail ads, but that isn't nearly enough to pay the bills.

 

This is dead on. Sorry Frederick, you're obviously an idealist. I wish I could live in your ideal little world but you have no clue what you're saying here. Newspapers are the vinyl album of the 40-50-60s, the cassette tape of the 80s and the CD of the 90s. They NEVER stood a chance.

Hell, a freaking text message gets me information light years faster than a newspaper. Why the hell would I ever want to subscribe when I can get it for free? I don't.

 

And as I said on another thread, call up and check the prices on obituaries nowadays. Why are the prices so outrageous? It's the only place to make up some of the lost revenue from classifieds.

 

With all sincerity, a lot of the statements you make are tainted by anger and vindictiveness. He's just making a cool presentation of facts.

 

And I'm sure this is the cash cow that will save newspapers everywhere.

This is a major issue with newspapers today. You have the equivalent of a few bums sitting around a campfire, eating beans, gassing the air around them, and saying: "You know, this lifestyle works for us. Thus, it should work EVERYWHERE!"