*Brilliant Analysis Of The Reasons For Newspapers' Decline: * From the
business columnist of a newspaper that just dropped its print edition,
the Seattle PI <http://www.seattlepi.com/virgin/403824_virgin17.html>.
Three samples:
It has become fashionable to attribute this industry's woes entirely
to external forces including: the Internet and its components
draining away advertisers and readers; those darn kids who won't pay
for information and won't sit still for information that takes
longer than five seconds to consume; and most recently a recession
that has clobbered what few advertisers the industry still has.
To put all the blame, or even the bulk of it, on those factors is
not only too convenient, but also downright deceptive. It obscures
a long-standing truth about this business: American newspapers have
been and continue to be, as a sector, the worst-run of any industry
in this country.
. . .
What sorts of mistakes did the industry make? Its reaction to the
Internet is a mother lode. Instead of using the Internet as a
complement to its print product, the industry went chasing after the
Web and offering its most valuable property -- the news it so
carefully and expensively gathered -- for free, while chasing the
chimera that online advertising would support the whole thing.
. . .
Those were hardly the only blunders made by the industry. The
strategy of going after younger readers with pandering and
condescending content managed to both drive away older, loyal
readers, while also alienating younger demographics who
understandably weren't buying what papers were selling. Newspapers
treated conservatives with a mixture of revulsion, contempt,
indifference and puzzlement, and there went another potentially
loyal segment of the reading audience.
You'll want to read the entire Bill Virgin column; in fact, you will
want to /study/ the entire column.
If you have any doubt that Virgin is right in his analysis, consider
this fact: He has been, for years, the best journalist at either
Seattle newspaper --- and, as far as I can tell, the PI did not keep him
for their new, online version.
Cross posted at Sound Politics <http://soundpolitics.com/>. (Thanks, by
the way, to the commenters there who pointed me to this column.)
- 3:22 PM, 23 March 2009
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