The ongoing slide into the black hole

Here's a point of discussion that I think has not been brought up before ...

<blockquote>"When an offline reader of a paper dies, he or she is not being replaced by a new reader." Jeffrey Cole, director of USC's Center for the Digital Future, <a href="http://adage.com/mediaworks/article?article_id=126685">quoted in Advertising Age</a> Monday.</blockquote>

Other items from the AdAge story ..

• Newspapers' overall ad revenue has been falling too, of course, to $42.2 billion last year from $48.7 billion at the millennium.
• Their paid week-day circulation, which has been beset by 24-hour news on cable and online, has crumbled to 45.4 million in 2006 from a peak of 63.1 million in 1973. That's a 28% plunge.
• the industry has cut at least 3,600 positions this decade, according to the American Society of Newspaper Editors.
• The country has lost 441 dailies since 1940 -- including 43 since 2000.

The rest of the article is more bad news for the suits who got us where we are today, which can be summed up in one phrase: We're long past the event horizon and the end is going to be painfully drawn out.

And there was even more bad news when the ABC numbers came out Monday ...

 

So what does this mean, then?

A little more than a decade ago my newspaper had a daily circulation of about 235,000 and Sunday of about 340,000. We had zero hits on our Web site because, well, there was no Web site.

Today the numbers are 218,000 daily, 304,000 Sunday and 1,290,000 visits to the Web site and 86,000 unique visitors to the Web site EVERY DAY (based on report yesterday that said we had 40 million page views and 2.66 unique visitors to Web site in March, most in the state).

Hard to claim that people are "abandoning" the product with those numbers. But turning that into revenue . . . there's the rub.

 

Yet, instead of canning the fuckwits who can't figure out how to market a product that people obviously want, they're firing the people who provide the content.

Brilliant.

 

F-B,

Richmond was rebuilt. Not sure our industry can be.

 

There'll always be a market a product that will report on local events in a serious manner. So "newspapers" aren't dying. Just have to figure out how to gracefully transition to the Web in a profitable manner.

 

At our place, sports stories constantly lead in page views. And stories on the favorite teams in the market are sure to get big numbers. But no, it's not turning into cold, hard cash. So it means nothing.

 

That was beautiful.

 

I say we start lacing newspapers with nicotine.

 

Our demographic is Viagra.

 

At my first paper, which closed in 2004, they spent a lot of money for some survey or study or something that came to this very conclusion.

Our newsroom had an average age of 26, and this was including a part-timer who was 70-something years old. All the rest of us were young and either going to college, just finished or never went. Of course, no ideas out of the newsroom from people who might have an inkling on how to market to paper to people who are not collecting Social Security ever made it out of the newsroom.

 

Only post the first three inches of a story on the internet. To read the completed story, you need a $5 a month subscription. Sort of like ESPN insider.

To place $5 a month on a credit card in a reoccurring bill is nothing in this day and age.

So if you are in a city of 1,000,000 people and 100,000 subscribe at $10 a month, maybe you will have 200,000 subscribe at $5 a month. It's still $1,000,000 a month.

Plus, you do not have the cost of printing and delivery online.