21–30 of 46 posts
I know it's not exactly comparing apples to apples, but Private Eye in the UK still sells pretty well. I'm sure that if a newspaper marketed itself as high-brow, intellectual and most of all critical of itself and its own standards a lot of people would flock to it, as well as advertisers.
That is a really dramatic graph. It's hard to imagine an industry coming back from something like that.
So, does this graph show that companies spend the same amount of inflation-adjusted dollars on newspaper advertising as they did in 1950? Were things good back then? What happened before the 50s?
In fact, if you look at the curve from 1950-2000 you see it seems to approximately track the population growth from 1950, with a weird peak in ~1990 and trough a few years later. My hunch is that the previous state of the industry was that it reliably took in ~$130/yr/US resident (again, in current dollars) year after year. Now it takes in less than half that, and it's plummeting.
This often makes me wonder if there is a place in a dying market for a small newspaper that prides itself on world-class journalism and thought-provoking articles. I know it's not exactly comparing apples to apples, but Private Eye in the UK still sells pretty well. I'm sure that if a newspaper marketed itself as high-brow, intellectual and most of all critical of itself and its own standards a lot of people would fl…
http://clubtroppo.com.au/2009/06/02/whats-killing-the-newspa...
The main source of revenue for newspapers isn't cover prices or even display advertising. It's classifieds. Until the internet came along, your local newspaper had a guaranteed cut of thousands of little transactions every single week.
Then craigslist and ebay and real estate websites and car sites and all their ilk proliferated. Now I can, often for free, advertise something small. That sucks the single biggest source of revenue directly out of newspapers.
And yes, I'm still working on that startup.
That is a really dramatic graph. It's hard to imagine an industry coming back from something like that.
There's a successful business in there, just a much smaller one. In many ways, it's a return to the start of newspapers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The really "Holy cow" bit for me is that even if you add the online revenue back in, the graph is virtually identical. If you had asked me this morning about the future of print newspapers, I would have said "Totally toast, of course, but savvy ones will move online." If you ask me now, I'd say "Totally toast. Your children may recognize the names of a couple of them, if they happen to regularly visit one of a handfu…
As somebody actually in the newspaper industry, I've been telling everyone who will listen for years now that the future of news does not look like newspapers, not even online ones. The idea of an "online newspaper" is like a horse-drawn carriage with mechanical horses are powered by gasoline — it obviously should be a car, but that's what you'd end up with if you were too tied to the idea of horses to let it go. The…
That is a really dramatic graph. It's hard to imagine an industry coming back from something like that.
The future of newspapers is more local. Once they divest themselves of expensive presses, unions, and other legacy line items, the actual cost of producing a local news story is low. There's a successful business in there, just a much smaller one. In many ways, it's a return to the start of newspapers.
Well, here in Europe you're empirically being shown wrong. Local newspapers disappear the first; first step is that they're bought by a larger entity, second step is the removal of local news from them (because too expensive to write up), third step is killing them. Then, after a large brand has killed several smaller ones, they get bought by a bigger entity or go bankrupt.
I'm not sure how you can say that producing a local news story is cheap. It's very expensive on a per-reader count (which is all that matter) because there are relatively few readers. If you write a national story, you can sell it to everybody in the country. If you write a local story, you can only sell it to a subset of those people. Writing about a bake off costs the same as writing about a political debate on a national topic. It's quite obvious that writing for a small audience is a lot harder to have a positive ROI than for a large audience.
That is a really dramatic graph. It's hard to imagine an industry coming back from something like that.
The future of newspapers is more local. Once they divest themselves of expensive presses, unions, and other legacy line items, the actual cost of producing a local news story is low. There's a successful business in there, just a much smaller one. In many ways, it's a return to the start of newspapers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The future of newspapers is more local. Once they divest themselves of expensive presses, unions, and other legacy line items, the actual cost of producing a local news story is low. There's a successful business in there, just a much smaller one. In many ways, it's a return to the start of newspapers.
They did that in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The local paper is now annarbor.com. It's terrible. They don't really have any professionals left. Most of the articles are written by interns or kids right out of school with no sense of history or context, and amount to "Theirs[sic] a story here, but can't be bothered to make phone call." Ostensibly they cover my neighboring town as well, but they just run the police crime blot…
Small communities have been poorly served by local papers long before the Internet ate them.