Quote:
Originally Posted by spudcon
Newspapers, TV news, and news magazines are all suffering from declining users, and the reason is simple. They now have competition from the internet, and surfers can now get different perspectives on the news, instead of the cookie cutter clones the media have been offering for decades. They are dinosaurs, and they can't figure out why.
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Not exactly. Most of the newspapers and web sites get their news from the same places -- take a look at how many web sites take feeds from the Associated Press. Same content, different addresses. Way back when, that model worked. People in Detroit didn't often get to read the Miami Herald, for instance, so it didn't make a difference.
If you want to know what really went wrong, it went like this: The business types looked at us reporters, declared that we silly bachelor-of-arts types don't understand how business really works and condescendingly informed us that the Internet would never supplant the daily dead-tree product because ... well, the daily newspaper is a tradition and nothing could
ever break that tradition.
Actually, those folks couldn't figure out how to make money on it. In a good business environment, most businesses turn a profit of six or seven percent. Traditionally, newspapers' profit margins have run 20 percent or more --- an enormous return on investment, almost a license to print money. Circulation revenues are just a drop in the bucket compared to what the advertisements bring in.
We-the-journalists were ready a decade and more ago to explore paid online methods of distribution. Unfortunately, the bean counters weren't ready to accept a lower profit margin than what they had grown used to, so they declared online product secondary to what they consider the
real product --- the daily printed newspaper. The idea that people would get used to the online product, and that younger people who never knew any other way would abandon the print product ... the bean counters never really considered that possibility until about four or five years ago, which was at least four or five years too late.
Thus endeth my rant.
(And if I sound bitter about that ... well, that's because I was one of the journalists rather than one of the bean counters.)