Why are established newspapers crashing faster than expected?

[Musicat]

Just my opinion, but newspapers are charging too much for too little. Even the Wall Street Journal is now $2 per copy, enough to make me think twice about picking up a newstand copy (and they no longer distribute many copies in my neighborhood stores anyway; none at all for 6 months of the year).

I need advertising for real estate sales, but I just placed a one-day, text-only ad in the Chicago Tribune for a property. It cost me $350. In contrast, I can blanket the Internet with an entire web page – full color, detailed descriptions, lavish illustrations that last for longer than a day – for less than that one-day cost per year. The web page gets hundreds of responses; the Trib ad? Absolutely none. No contest.

What use do I have for newspapers anymore? Their day is gone. I used to buy a newspaper to read at lunch. Now I just take my laptop, since many restaurants have free Wi-Fi. Cheaper and a lot more flexible.

[Kent_Clark]

@An_Gadai

I’m curious, is there any correlation between the decline of newspapers and the rise of private transit? I read a newspaper on my several times a week bus journey to and from work as do many others.

Yes, there was a real cause-and-effect relationship with the decline of afternoon newspapers in the 1950s.

Afternoon newspapers were primarily sold to bus and subway commuters in the central city. After World War 2 the rise of the suburbs and the growing use of automobile commuting drastically cut the core audience. Some afterrnoon newspapers tried home delivery, but the time involved in distributing the newspapers from a central plant to suburban homes meant they had to go to press earlier in the day, which eliminated late-breaking news. Once they ceded that to the evening TV newscasts, the death spiral began.

Here’s a story that lays it outbetter than I can explain it.

[Obsidian]

@suranyi

What I wonder is – all those people who don’t read newspapers and instead rely on “the Internet” to get the news. Where do they think the news on the Internet comes from? Most of the time it eventually leads back to some newspaper or wire service story. So if newspapers go away, what happens to all the reporters to bring the news in the first place?

Second, I’ve not yet found a good substitute for a newspaper for local news.

Ed

For what it’s worth, I read a couple papers a day, all on the net. I would happily pay a subscription to them, but it’s free. Hell, I wish they would let me. I just don’t want the print editions. This morning, I would have had to get dressed to go out in the rain, to the end of the drive, run back in, and unfold a damp and awkward paper to squint at and get ink all over my fingers, and then dispose of the stupid thing. Or, I could read SFGate and the NYT in my bathrobe without leaving my bed. I once told a telemarketer hawking Chronicle subscriptions that I was a regular reader and would pay for a subscription if they promised not to actually deliver a paper to my house. Turns out you can’t do that and I don’t want to deal with all that wasted paper.

[drachillix]

@t-bonham@scc.net

Here in Minnesota, the laid-off reporters from the newspaper created their own website, and write stories for that. They often seem to have better local news stories than the newspapers they once worked for. Sometimes you will see those online stories picked up by the newspapers a day or two later.

But I have no idea how those reporters make money from this.

Any site that can generate traffic can make money. My sad little site for my computer biz gets around 100 hits a day, I make about $30/month from google ads. If you are Yahoo, make that 50 million hits a day and scale up accordingly.

[Markxxx]

Also remember newspapers were being bought up in the 90s and media consolidated. In the 90s the concept of maximum profit, through programs like Six Sigma, were implimented.

No longer was it enough to make money, you have to make the MOST money.

So let’s say in the past you spent $1,000 and made $1, 100. So your company made $100. This is profit.

But more and more companies are not vertical, mean only one line of business. They may be newspapers, TV, computers, railroads, whatever all in one company. So the stockholders don’t say “fine we made $100.” They say “why didn’t we make $101”?

The the CEO and board says “you’re right,” let’s fold the paper and invest in something else, like Dollar Stores selling cheap junk. And they make $101 profit next year.

In the 90s businesses stopped being about things and started being bottom line.

This is reflected in companies like Google, which make NOTHING tangible. Google is simply an algorithm, it’s an idea. So it’s hard to quantify.

[Hometownboy]

20-year veteran of a small daily afternoon newspaper here. Yes, revenues are declining. Craigslist is stealing classifieds, a highly profitable area. National ad revenues are declining, though local revenues are up in our case.

We are the only newspaper in a multi-county area, so we feel we have to include a modicum of international, national and regional news. Unfortunately, our only source is the Associated Press, which is widely available online from much larger news sources.
Comics and syndicated columns are available online as well.

So what do we have to offer? Local news and local sports, primarily. There are 10 radio stations in our circulation ares. For the most part, they do not do any serious kind of local news. As a matter of course, we cover the city council, the county commission, the local school district, the community college, the public utility district, the planning commission, the port and other government districts. We publish the daily police, fire and ambulance logs, the grand jury and district court proceedings, death notices and obituaries. We have some popular local columns covering sports, local church and local business stories.

We have a website, but we’re neither fish nor fowl. We post the top three stories of the day, classifieds, editorials and obits, all for free. We have the last three and a half years archived online in a searchable database that gives you the first couple of paragraphs of a story for free, then charges you $2.50 for the rest of an individual story, with unlimited access programs for varying lengths of time for varying fees.

We’re torn between putting too much on the web and killing print sales, and not putting enough on the web and losing further to the younger, we-don’t-read-newspapers generation.

Some papers charge to access their website contents, wifh varying degrees of success.

Frankly, we don’t think anyone in the U.S. really has a handle on how to monetize the Internet, and we’re waiting for someone to develop that newspaper-on-the-web model that really sells.

[CookingWithGas]

@suranyi

What I wonder is – all those people who don’t read newspapers and instead rely on “the Internet” to get the news. Where do they think the news on the Internet comes from? Most of the time it eventually leads back to some newspaper or wire service story. So if newspapers go away, what happens to all the reporters to bring the news in the first place?

I have a similar question. What reliable, prestigious, trustworthy sources of news are on the Internet that don’t trace back to a hard-copy publisher?

[dalej42]

I"ll toss one more possible idea out: A lot of people don’t **care **about local news. We’re in a very mobile society and many of us don’t live in the same city for very long.

[Justin_Bailey]

@drachillix

Any site that can generate traffic can make money. My sad little site for my computer biz gets around 100 hits a day, I make about $30/month from google ads. If you are Yahoo, make that 50 million hits a day and scale up accordingly.

I think your sad little site is smashing the average payout for Google Ads by something like 10x the average.

[Exapno_Mapcase]

@drachillix

Any site that can generate traffic can make money. My sad little site for my computer biz gets around 100 hits a day, I make about $30/month from google ads. If you are Yahoo, make that 50 million hits a day and scale up accordingly.

How many hours of your time does it take to generate $30? If you were doing it as a business would it be worth your while? (If you spend more than 5 hours a month at it, you’re making less than minimum wage, and that’s not counting hosting fees.) Don’t forget that you have to scale up the amount of work necessary to generate those 50 million hits. It’s not how much gross income you make, but how much net income.

Real businesses want to earn real net value from their sites. Real reporters want to earn real annual salaries.

Making money off millions of hits sounds great in theory. In practice it becomes much harder, especially since such a comparatively tiny percentage of the total advertising spending in the U.S. goes to the net.

[muttrox]

@Tuckerfan

The most oft cited reason for American newspapers to be going under is that Craigslist is taking away the highly profitable classified ad revenue. Cite.

That’s part of the story, but remember that Craigslist does not equal classified advertising.

Look at the big classified advertising revneu streams: Jobs, Automotive, and Real Estate. All of them have better options on the internet. I happen to work for one of the companies that is killing newspapers because we are taking the money that used to go to their Automotive listings. (Gotta admit, I have mixed feelings about it.) Every year, more consumers go to the internet to get their info. So every year, more advertisers put more dollars where the consumers are. Whether it’s Monster.com, AutoTrader.com, cars.com, Craigslist, CareerBuilder.com, Realtor.com, etc. etc., all these verticals are getting the money that used to be going into print.

(The same thing is hurting TV and radio just as badly, NPR had a piece on it this morning.)