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This is why your newspaper is dying

bradcolbow.com

11–20 of 57 posts

Re: This is why your newspaper is dying

#12
post #3
post #2

Only thing missing in this is the local newspapers lacking local news point. I honestly don't read the St Paul Pioneer Press for reviews on the iPad - there are much more relevant places for me that information from more intelligent sources. I read the local paper to know what's happening locally. Can you imagine a newspaper without any AP stories in it? So clean. So relevant. So free of redundancy from the kind of i…

Except that producing your own stories is more expensive (unless you want to hire middle schoolers), and you need something to put in the space between the advertisements. I agree that a newspaper that actually fills its niche well is desirable, but it's unfortunately a tough business model. Frankly, I kind of suspect that local news will eventually be dominated by passionate bloggers. They don't have the overhead th…

If the kind of local news you enjoy is event coverage then yeah, local bloggers are great. Uncovering government corruption? Not so much.

Re: This is why your newspaper is dying

#16
post #2

Only thing missing in this is the local newspapers lacking local news point. I honestly don't read the St Paul Pioneer Press for reviews on the iPad - there are much more relevant places for me that information from more intelligent sources. I read the local paper to know what's happening locally. Can you imagine a newspaper without any AP stories in it? So clean. So relevant. So free of redundancy from the kind of i…

I know of an example. In East Texas, a local "Who's who" type of magazine completely dominates the slowly failing local newspaper, and it only runs once a month. All the content is unique to the region, and the people here love it (enabling the magazine to charge a ton for advertising)

Re: This is why your newspaper is dying

#17
post #4

This is a red herring. The New York Times is "dying" too, but (other than not linking outside the site, which is of debatable consequence to site revenue), it doesn't do any of these things. This is mainly a list of one person's pet peeves, asserted to be the reason that newspapers are hurting. I have another theory: the advertising market for newsprint is being decimated . The pop-unders and massive ads are probably…

Author has added a note. NYTimes has linked to the external sites but it was Denver post which republished the article who removed the links.

"Quick note: The first panel is taken from the Denver Post, not the New York Times. I didn’t notice the byline in there. The story’s author actually does a very good job of linking out to other sites"

Denver Post - http://www.denverpost.com/business/ci_18451993

NYTimes - http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/07/technology/personaltech/bo...

Re: This is why your newspaper is dying

#19
Wish there was a foursquare for news papers?

I was a long time free subscriber of nytimes.com but now after the pay wall I switched to wsj.com because it clearly states the articles that are locked (removes guessing).

Re: This is why your newspaper is dying

#20
Newspapers are dying because it's expensive to produce content, there's serious downward pricing pressure on advertising, and they've had a really hard time getting their traditional small print advertisers to buy online ads. It's not even a given that an equilibrium price in online ads is enough to pay for content. Assuming a given article gets a $10/cpm and costs $100 to produce, they need 10,000 impressions to break even. It's crazy.

These things lead directly to the quality issues you're seeing. It's difficult to justify high end online content presentation when you can hardly afford to keep writers around. How many newspapers can really compete for engineering talent when there are sexier, better paying jobs at not-a-newspaper, inc?

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