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Newspaper Failures |
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Every week now newspapers either fail or seek bankruptcy protection. What's happening? When TV made it's first impact in North America there was doom and gloom predicted for Radio. Radio managed to make a transition, but it had to change drastically to a news, talk and music format with specialization. It is still doing pretty well. It's easy to adapt to the Internet too. Remember it was free and sold ads to make profits. The well loved radio drama almost disappeared, the soaps went to TV and the big budgets of the big radio stations which broadcast at 50,000 watts not only had to compete with each other, but with new FM stations. They could not longer have orchestras and had to rely on the news feeds from larger organiazations. These were tough times for Radio, but they survived. TV became King and still is. Newsprint is going to have a much harder road to travel. They just don't appeal to the vast majority of young adults. If you have grown up in the Internet age, you get almost all of your readable news from the Internet. You can get TV, Movies and Sports too. Anybody from 20 to 50 understands. The kids below 20 really understand. Newspapers have huge infrastructure problems. They have become giant conglomerates. They are teetering. They are not nimble. They try to do both Internet and Print. That's hard to manage. It requires huge staffs and the story depth and multi-media aspects are different with the big plus to the Internet side. The BIG FISH bought the little fish and they vertically integrated their process over the last 20 years. Some papers even bought pulp paper mills to control their costs. What a mistake. They put up huge printing facilities and had far flung bureaus in world capitals. They are dying because of brick and mortar. They have brick and mortar and their competition has electrons that are free. The capital budgets and salary and benefit programs are just too much for the 'bean counters' that own them. They've taken old time standard papers, trimmed staffs and put their employees on a quarterly profit schedules that cannot be maintained. The advertising is too little, too murky and too expensive. TV is better, Radio is Better, Internet is better. Many have joined forces with TV like Rupert Murdoch's giant empire. It takes a giant cheque book to keep them afloat. The merger of AOL Time Warner and CNN, was according to Ted Turner, the biggest mistake he ever made. AOL was just a shell game and has faded and faded badly. They just get in the way of the Internet, Radio and TV. AOL was a paper tiger and not even a good browser. Most of the small community newspapers in North America are owned by a very few companies. Few still of them are getting by and most are worried sick. So what is the future of newsprint? It's really hard to tell. Like any other revered passion, they will find their home, but it will be downsized and be run by other people. Large papers like the Globe and Mail will make their way, but with far less emphasis on print. The news just comes at people too fast now. The Saugeen Times and Kincardine Times have a world news outlet called CCNews. We get every story worth reading from feeds from the big news sources. At last count we have 250 stories feeding into us. Most of those are moment to moment. We add to this all the time. The subscription cost? Nothing! We have radio feeds galore too and we can watch from our site broadcasts that we missed or live broadcasts. We missed a Frontline broadcast, but we'll catch it later tonight right on the screen I'm looking at now. If anyone doubts that people are turning away from print, look at how most people are paying their bills. They use the Internet. People who we thought would never do it, now do it for all their bills. It's quicker, easier and does not cost us anything.
In the month of February, the Saugeen Times, Kincardine Times and It's really fun to see the growth. Today, we were looking up something on Google and 'behold', we ran into a story that was written on the Saugeen Times 6 months ago? We never get rid of anything. So it's time to predict what will happen to print news. It's difficult to see how it can survive in 10 years. By that time 98 percent of news, flyers and sale information will be on the Internet. You have to be a researcher of high skill to find something in a newspaper written 20 years ago, but right now you can find most anything using Google. The Google of the future will be amazing. In order to reach the future, we don't need any new technology, but it will come anyway. The Blackberry's will get better, cheaper and easier to use. I like my laptop and it will get better too. Of course, if you are reading this, we are preaching to the choir. 01/03/2009 08:33 PM
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