Fredrick said:
All the internet did for newspapers was hurry the extinction of newspapers. By thinking it was the way to go and would be ultimately profitable, the internet hurried the slashings of newspaper staffs and crucified the newsprint product. Bye bye newspaper business thanks to said internet.
Consider, if you will, the words of Warren Buffett in
his 2006 letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders:
<blockquote>As long ago as my 1991 letter to shareholders, I nonetheless asserted that this insulated world was changing, writing that “the media businesses . . . will prove considerably less marvelous than I, the industry, or lenders thought would be the case only a few years ago.” Some publishers took umbrage at both this remark and other warnings from me that followed. Newspaper properties, moreover, continued to sell as if they were indestructible slot machines. In fact, many intelligent newspaper executives who regularly chronicled and analyzed important worldwide events were either blind or indifferent to what was going on under their noses.
Now, however, almost all newspaper owners realize that they are constantly losing ground in the battle for eyeballs. Simply put, if cable and satellite broadcasting, as well as the internet, had come along first, newspapers as we know them probably would never have existed. . . .
However, the economic potential of a newspaper internet site – given the many alternative sources of information and entertainment that are free and only a click away – is at best a small fraction of that existing in the past for a print newspaper facing no competition.</blockquote>
It wasn't
just the Internet. Even if you could make the Internet go away, it wouldn't make things better. Newspapers transitioning to online have to learn to compete, which they didn't have to do before.
