Posted on 06/11/2012 8:53:11 AM PDT by DeaconBenjamin
The print media will go the way of the buggy whip. 89% of the newspapers’ revenue comes from advertisement. The sale of newspapers brings in very little income. Is it worth even charging for the newspapers?
this article is just a thinly disguised call for government subsidies and regulations to hobble online competition.
Local news is the only thing it offers.
Small town and community newspapers are doing OK and some are even growing. The problem with big metro dailies is their big metro base, which has either bailed to the suburbs or doesn’t know how to read.
In fact, the Washington Examiner, a very good conservative paper, offers free Thursday and Sunday delivery. The Washington City Paper, a generally lefty weekly but with good, old-school reporting on local politics and crime, has always been free.
The cost of air fare to Wasilla must have really increased.
FYI
ping
By a British newspaper?
Agreed, and therein lies the genius of Rodger Ailes. The neglected masses found their voice with FOX a few years ago and it is highly successful.
“...these battles are being fought out between the quasi-academic likes of the Columbia Journalism Review and Professor Clay Shirky of New York University, the supreme guru of internet ideology. But first catch up with some facts.”
**********************************************************************************
Clay Shirky? What a jerk... check this out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBFOmUXR080
Public Service? You gotta be kidding me. The only 'service' the Post offers is help for Democrats and lame crumbs for token Republicans. If a company put out toasters - and half of them caught fire - the company would go under - as it should. Same with the Post.
The most ironic part of this is the fact that Wash DC and NoVa are the only two metro areas that are booming due to the massive spending of the fedgov.
I visited there in April, it looks NOTHING like the midwest.
WaPo is dying in the most favorable market, LOL.
LOL - good point. If they can't make it there, they can't make it anywhere... could be a song if it had a catchy tune...
THAT is the reason why newspapers are dying. Why wait for "stale" news once a day on print when I can get the latest news on my iPad from Facebook, Twitter, the iOS iPad apps for BBC News, CNN, Fox News, and USA Today, many different news websites, and conservative web sites like Townhall.com? (It should be noted I read Free Republic on a real computer, since its interactivity works best that way.)
——Why wait for “stale” news once a day——
Exactly. To survive they need to offer something different AND worthwhile, like astute, insightful analysis.
That is what Glenn Beck offers much of the time, and why GBTV is thriving.
Later
He's right. Look at the financial problems of the Washington Times. Same market, conservative politics, but similar financial problems.
I could say a lot more about the technological challenges, and the problems caused by losing the classified ad market, and the inherent problems of delivering news that is half a day old at best, and that fact that Facebook ads and company websites are an effective means to communicate one’s product in small-town America (though not as much for national branding campaigns which still require aggressive ad sales) but others have said much of what I would have said.
Here's the bottom line. The internet is destroying print newspapers in ways that pose a completely different technological challenge than what has previously been faced by print media.
Radio didn't kill newspapers because even though radio could deliver the news more quickly, it had no visuals, no persistency (i.e., you couldn't read it later like a newspaper), and there are severe limits on the amount of content. Thirty seconds is a HUGE amount of time to dedicate to a single news story. Television didn't kill newspapers, even though it added visuals to the speed of radio delivery, because it still couldn't deliver in-depth news or provide persistency.
The internet allows news to be available 24-7 and archived forever, which is something even print newspapers can't really provide since most people don't store old newspapers, and even then they usually aren't indexed and searchable. The internet allows stories to be as long as a writer and editor thinks are needed; electrons are cheap today in the era of massive bandwidth. Plus there is the visual advantage of television and the immediacy of both TV and radio.
How can print media compete against that? It can't.
The problem is that ad revenue generated by internet ads today isn't even close to what it takes to run a major newspaper. That will probably change with time, but it may never be where things were in the 1950s and 1960s with print ad revenue since it's now possible for an advertiser to contact potential customers through other forms of very cheap internet direct marketing.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.