Newspapers RIP?

Look,if the newspaper industry wants to kill itself through poor management, it won't be my grave they're dancing on. My skills work just as well, perhaps better, in broadcast and online media. Of course, those platforms are suffering, too.

I don't buy that media, as a whole, is dying. There's more media out there than ever before. And maybe that's part of the problem. Oversaturation of the market.

 

I think saturation is a large part of the problem. Print could always charge such high ad rates because it had few competitors. The up front costs were very high to start a print operation and the infrastructure is difficult to maintain. Now anyone can create written, audio and/or video content and distribute it for next to nothing. Even most popular Web sites can't charge print rates because there is too much competition.

I think that Web publishing/journalism is going to have to be a hobby or part-time gig for people with other real bill-paying careers.

 

This is what they call "barriers to entry" in business school. The higher the barriers, the more lucrative a business is likely to be. When you had to buy huge printing presses and fleets of trucks and huge rolls of newsprint and hire staffs of 200-500 hundred, man, those are pretty high barriers to entry.

When you can use a PC and a server and generate a one-man news operation, there is hardly any barrier at all.

We're all journalists now! Well, we're not, but when you keep hearing that long enough, you become unwilling to pay more for one guy's take on something than anyone else's.