There may also be local considerations.
For example, I firmly believe that there will always be room for a physical newspaper in New York City as long as you can’t access the Internet in the subways.
Zev Steinhardt
Many successful newspapers were killed by greed. They were dumping workers while they were making a lot of money. If they were satisfied with 10 percent profits instead of 20 percent or more, they could have kept reporters and bureaus and kept their standards up. But they kept gutting the staff while paying execs big money and giving great stock returns. Management of a newspaper had no interest in the long term viability of the paper. They were out to drain them .They did a good job.
Competition was killed long ago.
This is my concern as well. It’s fair to say that the internet has ushered in a lot of commentary that some people confuse for news. Before the internet, people got their news through reading the actual news, not through reading a blog post with its own spin on the news. However, actual news sources haven’t disappeared yet. Good objective and intelligent journalism is more available now than ever before. All people have to do is look.
With more freedom of choice there is always the danger that people will choose incorrectly. Time will tell what people end up doing. As for myself, most of my internet news sources exist in the print and TV medium. What the internet has enabled me to do is to consume them at my convenience. I can’t imagine sitting through a whole episode of News Hour on PBS, but online it’s conveniently divided up into video segments so that I can watch what’s interesting.
The news industry has to focus on delivering news through the internet. It’s just a far more superior way of delivering the news than through a daily or weekly paper. I want everything on one screen and I don’t want to deal with stacks of newspaper. If anything is worth saving I can always bookmark it or even print it out. The paper medium can stick around as a way for people to read things on the subway until tablets become cheap enough to take over that area.
The next issue is whether good news organizations can survive on the internet. The problem is that the internet is forcing news organizations and many other businesses to come up with content that’s better than what can be done by amateurs. The porn industry is facing the same problem. The solution in both cases is to create content worth paying for. The porn industry is doing well with premium porn sites, which means that the news industry can do the same thing. This means that a lot of papers will realize that their content is no better than amateur content (e.g. New York Post), and will then go under. But then no one will miss them.
Local papers are another concern. National coverage has so many sources, that if most newspapers go under, there will still be places where people could find good reporting on national news. Local news is a different story. If you only have one local paper that loses money, then your local reporting will suffer.
Everything will depend on what people are willing to pay for. Right now very few news organizations are willing to start charging for content, but as profits continue to decline they will eventually be forced to make that jump. We’ll see what happens then.
Newspapers aren’t likely to be saved in their current printed form, with a few special exceptions (like the NYT). They’re going to have to embrace technology to survive, and they’re going to have to find a way to get people to pay for online services. It shouldn’t be too difficult, actually, assuming they wake up early enough.
People want their news online for free. That doesn’t mean they won’t also pay for it, but you have to give them extra stuff in addition to the free stuff. You have to make them want to pay you. ESPN Insider is a perfect example of how the newspaper industry needs to evolve their online content to entice customers to pay up.
Offer subscriber-only specials, like embedding short podcast debates between two hired commentators on big issues/stories, or offer a subscriber-only forum to discuss each article. Expand from “just” news, and offer that expansion to subscribers too (like fantasy sports articles, or those “Home and Garden” sections in some papers could be offered as subscription-only). Embrace technology like the iPad and offer “newspaper+” services that use that technology to the fullest. It would take a lot of extra content to make that subscription fee reasonable and still make enough money to offset the losses in print readership, but it is by no means an impossible task, either.
There’s a lot of room for growth if these fogeys would stop daydreaming about the “good old days” and start working towards saving their jobs. It’s really important too, we need “objective” “credible” media as a destination for news. I don’t want to have to spend two hours wading through a quagmire of uneducated opinion pieces looking for the rare blogger who actually does some research. If the newspapers fail and that’s my only option, I won’t be alone in shunning the news altogether. Society will be a lot poorer for that. And I’m certainly not going to go out of my way to try to save these relics when they don’t seem to have any interest in saving themselves.
Sure, I can read the paper online, but it’s not the same. I like to linger over an actual newspaper while drinking coffee. There’s something visceral and “just feels right” in doing such. Reading online isn’t the same.
I stopped buying our local paper when the daily version shot up to $1.50. Last I heard its circulation is dropping like a dead weight. Who’s going to spend that much on a paper every single day except Sunday? The Sunday edition is nearing, if it isn’t already, $5. I can’t afford that every week.
This argues that those who settled for 10% profits and good quality should now be doing well, grabbing former readers of the papers that were poorly managed. But it doesn’t seem as if this is actually happening much.
I got hooked on the New York Times when the Chicago Tribune got so dumbed down that it was pathetic.
I was astounded by the depth of the New York Times reporting. It has more content in a few articles than the Tribune has in its whole paper.
I’d give up cable TV before giving up the NYT and I live in Chicagoland.
Providing news, not titillation, should be a public service if countries really want an enlightened population. Why should we have to pay at all for the information we need to make our day-to-day decisions on how the society we are living in is doing?
Newspapers will be around in something like their current form for at least another decade or two, for one simple reason:
Old people.
Hip, funky youngsters with their iPhones and their Blackberries and their Interwebs and their hippin’ and their’ hoppin and their groovin’ an’ their boppin’ might like to get their news in tiny little bite size chunks as Tweets or Facebook Updates, but Old People like to read the paper.
In fact, I think the average SDMB user overestimates the general level of tech and net-savviness in the general population. Lots of people- I won’t say “most”, but it’s a sizeable minority- just aren’t good with computers and like to get their news from the paper, the TV, and the radio.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: There will, IMHO, always (or at least for the foreseeable future, anyway) be a “Major” newspaper in Really Big Cities. There will also be newspaperettes (as I like to call them) covering rural communities, for the simple reason that people like to know what’s going on in their area and none of it is likely to be important enough to end up in the Really Big City Newspaper.
Recently, I’ve been doing some research into our family history, and it’s incredible how many newspapers there were in the 19th century- every small town(even places that were little more than a hotel, a church, and a telegraph/post office) had their own newspaper, even ones that were only a couple of miles from a larger town or city. What we’ve been seeing since then is an ongoing consolidation, surviving the coming of radio, television, and now the internet.
So you may (and probably will) eventually see the “mid-sized” papers collapse. For example, I suspect in places like Nevada you’ll end up with only (say) the Las Vegas Review-Journal as the state-wide newspaper.
Also, in places like India and Asia, Newspapers are still the primary news source for most of the population, even though many of them have internet access. Point is, the newspaper industry is changing, but it’s not going away just yet.
Isn’t that exactly what the BBC, ABC, CBC, Deutsche Welle, and various other respected National Broadcasters do- for free? 
Okay, I’ll bite: Who do you think should pay for it?
And yet the NYT has by no means been spared the financial difficulties of the industry.
No it didn’t happen. They all turned to profits as the only motive for having a paper. I still get delivery of the Detroit Free Press. It is a shadow of the paper 20 nears ago. They killed the competitors . They killed the unions and drained every dime out of them they could. They have gutted the reporting staff. I have to pay for online now. I read the sports, and comics. I leaf through the rest but it is dated by the time it gets printed. They don’t have "extras’ any more. They don’t even try to keep up. Even online, they are way behind the news sites on the internet. They could hire people to scour the internet and get ideas for whats a hot story. But they are content to toss an old dated rag out even on line. They have no competition.
The NYT is not able to provide the bureaus and reporters it used to. They will not commit that big a portion of their profits to it. The papers are not dying a natural death. They are being killed.
I gotta believe that the aforementioned tendency of many folks to seek their news online has something to do with it.
Quality papers still exists. Okay, they were always a bit scarce and nowadays are more so. But I concur that you can often find very worthwhile content in the NYT* or Washington Post. Yet these two are struggling mightily, along with the rest.
- I think it would be wrong to give this praise and omit a hearty dose of criticism for the Times’ coverage of the Duke Lacrosse case, which easily ranks among the most execrable pieces of reporting ever - a deep and permanent stain on their reputation.
If governments expect us to be savvy about political affairs and what is happening elsewhere in the world, they should use their organisational skills to set up a proper newspaper and sell it to the public at the cheapest price possible.
But that is never going to happen because governments thrive on the people being divided.
Then we’re doomed. The Las Vegas Review-Journal makes Fox News seem like screaming liberals.
You mean a government funded propaganda mouthpiece like Pravda or (to a much lesser extent) the BBC?
Do you really not see the problem with a government funded newspaper?
I am a newspaper editor. Major metropolitan East Coast daily and all that. And a newspaper freelancer, for another major metro daily that’s been mentioned many times in this very thread.
Here’s my $.02: Google has made a trajilliabazillion dollars every hour accessing what is in large part stuff we produce. Google needs to share some of that. Google – and other search engines – eventually will.
If newspapers die, there will be nothing for Google to search, except for maybe porn. TV “news” will have nowhere to turn for story ideas, or in many cases stories, period.
Newspapers will not die. In 2007, very few people could see clearly that the housing bubble would burst, the real estate market would tank, Lehman Brothers would be allowed to die and Barack Obama would be the next president. In 2010, no one can see someday profits will rebound, most of us who are unemployed (and this could very well be me soon) will get jobs, and life will be good again.
Transitions can be hard as hell.
P.S.: Those of you who think newspapers conspire to promote this viewpoint or that one would be really surprised to see how hard it is for us to conspire to get the next day’s newspaper out.
If you don’t want Google linking to your articles, it’s trivial to block them. Here’s Google’s own pageexplaining how.
You won’t, of course, because without Google directing readers to your site, your page views would drop even further. It’s not clear to me why you think that Google should pay you for increasing traffic to your site.