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

You're not going to get an argument about wages. That's an industry wide problem.

Was there any point in this business where people just got into it because the pay was great? Seems to me most people knew you'd only get paid well if you were good enough - or knew someone well enough - to land at a major metro or mag.

 

Or all the damn Facebook posts!

 

Does that even cover the cost of labor (by the participants, by the person selling the spot), equipment, and data used by streaming? I'd bet you a box of doughnuts that it doesn't.

 

EXACT positions? So what happens when it's only 98.632 percent of your position?

 

My exact statement: "It won't keep the lights on." I never once said the profit from a HS sports podcast would do enough on its own to keep things afloat. I did say it can turn out to not be a total failure. That was my original point, made to someone who tested the idea and didn't seem to get much of an audience and considered it a failure.

Read the entire thread.

 

Isn't that how things got here in the first place people with the attitude, "It won't be a total failure." Sounds really uplifting and something people can really get behind. Could make a great post game speech: Hey guys we lost 49-6, but we didn't get goose-egged so it's not a total failure. Same attitude the people that make the decisions had probably, thinking it doesn't matter how the website looks or how it is to navigate, people will go there because well they got too! Not so much.

 

The last management role I served was at the college newspaper 17 years ago.

Once the Internet arrived, the print newspaper wasn't going to be salvaged as a dominant source of news and information, not any more than sticking headlights on horse and carriages would have staved off the auto industry.

 

Then why does the recent study say the main reason people dumped their newspaper subscriptions was the fact the product reeks compared to the product of the past? People aren't stupid. Publishers and managing editors (who write those ridiculous stories after pages get cut, telling the reader we did it for you) think readers are very very stupid and they are not. Of course the print edition isn't worth the cost of a subscription anymore. It's truly fish wrap. It's worthless.

 

I always find it fascinating when two people read the same thing and come away with wildly different takes on the piece.

Also worth noting, the same crowd who says bylines don't matter and readers don't care who wrote the story are usually the ones most likely to say that readers aren't stupid as they know about newspapers

 

JC Penney's issue wasn't that they dropped inserts. That was a side effect of what they did to screw themselves up big time: dropping limited-time sales in favor of CarMax-esque pricing (what they called the "square deal" because their logo is a square). Problem was, everyone is so conditioned to weekend sales that when Penney dropped out of that race, people didn't think "hey, Penney's is giving us the same great price every day of the year," they thought, "Penney's isn't in the Sunday circular, let's go to Macy's instead." Then the limited-time sales came back, as did the inserts, and their sales figures rebounded accordingly.

The problem is that print works great for ads, but digital works far better for delivering most forms of news, and reconciling the two is going to be tricky.