What If the Newspaper Industry Made a Colossal Mistake?

I'm a young guy, and I get multiple newspapers, and a few news magazines delivered. I don't like new media like reddit and "social news aggregators", because you're replacing professional editors w/ unpaid volunteers and "votes".

Having worked for a newspaper and, later, it's larger media conglomerate (late aughts), I can say that newspapers have intentionally created a terrible web presence. It's tough to tell whether the company thought it was a fad that would die off and not worth the investment, or if they believed that a terrible web site would drive people back to the physical paper. Either way, the move from print to online was a failure driven by upper management.

As one anecdote, the paper ran an advertising campaign telling people not to use the website on Sundays. Ironically, the commercial ended with a URL for a website with a coupon for the Sunday paper.

A colossal mistake... from which point of view? Never had we available such a huge source of fresh news. Maybe that's not the best for newspaper industry, but as far at it lasts (and no serious signs of disruptions have shown up), let's enjoy it!

It looks a bit like software development: Microsoft educated users to ship crap (people think that having to reboot is fine!) and we ended up having to maintain crap.

"Online editions offer a 'less-than-satisfactory' reading experience, she writes, cluttered with intrusive ads and hampered by poor design."

Our local newspaper's Web site is terrible. It's not just lack of investment; they rolled out a new HTML5 Web site that demonstrates to me that bad HTML5 is the worst-yet flavor of bad HTML.

But this doesn't mean that the strategic error was digital news; it means the strategic error was making a terrible Web site.

The conclusion that a drop in readership is proof that moving to the web was a mistake is extraordinarily shallow.

"Readers continue to leave print newspapers, but they’re not migrating to the online editions."

Because they have more options.

Print products were often monopolies, especially in the early to mid 90s, a hey day for newspapers. There was often a single publication per DMA.

What happened then is newspaper readers increasingly became web users throughout the 90s and 00s and left the print product. In 2000, if you wanted semi-local or regional news on the web, you went to ... your newspaper web site! In 2016, you have a plethora of choices, many of them unsaddled by the constraints of a typical newspaper organizational structure (for better or worse). So you have web sites and publications producing/sharing/clickbaiting 10x the content than your local newspaper does. This leads to a spreading of readership.

What's happened is a diaspora. Sticking with the print product over the web would not have prevented this. It may have slowed the decline of print circulation, but I have serious doubts about that. The challenge newspapers have is competing with decidedly non-journalistic approaches to news; ones that give readers what they want even if it isn't done "right." Competing with platforms and sites that can churn out "content" at an unfettered rate means fundamentally changing what a newspaper does.

There's no easy answer - newspapers can accept that people will largely go to other sites to get less reliable information faster, or that their content will be repurposed on other platforms without any compensation. That will likely mean a slow constriction or demise. Alternately, they can compete in that space, which a lot are doing now. That means sacrificing the ideals of journalism.