11–20 of 129 posts
I would encourage anyone interested to read Edward Bernays (nephew, through both parents, of Sigmund Freud). He lays out why journalism is a loss leader for people who want control. It makes a lot of otherwise confusing market dynamics around media make sense. Making money, directly, on journalism is almost never the idea.
> The LA times peak circulation was in 1990 when they delivered 1,225,189 papers daily. Wow, I had no idea that city papers had such robust delivery networks back then. I can almost imagine an alternate timeline where papers might have survived by leveraging that network to deliver books or other items from a catalog before Amazon. I suppose their scale was in part only possible due to their consistently sized produc…
> The LA times peak circulation was in 1990 when they delivered 1,225,189 papers daily. Wow, I had no idea that city papers had such robust delivery networks back then. I can almost imagine an alternate timeline where papers might have survived by leveraging that network to deliver books or other items from a catalog before Amazon. I suppose their scale was in part only possible due to their consistently sized produc…
Interesting thought. Although perhaps the network you build to deliver a million identical papers just looks too different to what you'd need to deliver individual items?
> The LA times peak circulation was in 1990 when they delivered 1,225,189 papers daily. Wow, I had no idea that city papers had such robust delivery networks back then. I can almost imagine an alternate timeline where papers might have survived by leveraging that network to deliver books or other items from a catalog before Amazon. I suppose their scale was in part only possible due to their consistently sized produc…
Newspaper delivery was closer to 'real-time' - it was printed this morning, and arrived for consumption during morning coffee. Many children took paper routes for some cash and delivered on their bikes. You slow down paper delivery when you start sending along multiple shipments, weighing more, for various customers.
> The LA times peak circulation was in 1990 when they delivered 1,225,189 papers daily. Wow, I had no idea that city papers had such robust delivery networks back then. I can almost imagine an alternate timeline where papers might have survived by leveraging that network to deliver books or other items from a catalog before Amazon. I suppose their scale was in part only possible due to their consistently sized produc…
I wanted to address a point that this blog post brings to mind.
There were advertisers then, and there are advertisers now. The advertising market hasn't dried up.
So why was the business model robust then and in shambles now?
Well, one explanation that people often point to is that there are now many more places to advertise. Back then, newspapers were one of the best places to advertise if you wanted to reach a lot of eyeballs. Now you can advertise on Google and other search sites, you can advertise on any number of blogs and other sites through AdSense and other ad delivery networks, you can advertise on social media, you can place classified ads on Craigslist, etc. So newspapers now have to compete against all these other properties in a way they didn't have to do in previous generations.
But there's another consideration that is just as important and doesn't really get talked about as often. With the dawn of digital advertising, where every view, click and conversion is neatly accounted for, advertisers have come to realize that newspaper advertising has always been a low-return-on-investment marketing avenue, even when it was the only game in town. They just didn't have the metrics to prove it.
What we know now is that click-through rates on news sites are really not substantially better than click-through rates on Joe Schmo's random blog -- but they _are_ substantially worse than in certain other business segments, like search.
So the real battle isn't even a battle for advertiser's attention. It's a battle to remain viable even though the advertisers would be better off advertising elsewhere.
> The LA times peak circulation was in 1990 when they delivered 1,225,189 papers daily. Wow, I had no idea that city papers had such robust delivery networks back then. I can almost imagine an alternate timeline where papers might have survived by leveraging that network to deliver books or other items from a catalog before Amazon. I suppose their scale was in part only possible due to their consistently sized produc…
The other major distribution network already visited every addressable location and took packages of varying sizes: the postal service. Newspaper delivery was closer to 'real-time' - it was printed this morning, and arrived for consumption during morning coffee. Many children took paper routes for some cash and delivered on their bikes. You slow down paper delivery when you start sending along multiple shipments, wei…
Really not sure what to make of that. Other than maybe our outrage triggers have been honed to a razor's edge
There was a tweetstorm by some journalism prof I can't recall that was basically saying newspapers killed themselves, by consolidation, mergers and over-reliance on classified ads and news-by-wire. By the time Yahoo! news came along started publishing AP news wire feeds, and Craigslist allowed free listings, they had already cost optimized away local news they'd need to compete against new entrants. Perhaps someone will find that twitter thread for me.