How long before Newspapers die?

Just wondered what the prevailing feeling is from those of us who work in the business. How long before newspapers are dead and gone? I say five years for many, 10 years for the entire industry.

 

By current format, are we talking printing 6 or 7 days a week?

 

August 24, 2017. ... It's a Thursday, so you'll get an early start to the weekend, which is nice.

 

I'm thinking there will be two more mergers in the next two years, maybe Gannett swallows Digital First or vice-versa. I think Lee will end up in there too. And Advance and McClatchy merge.

 

The big chains all want to kill the print product. The only newspapers that will remain in a year are the small town dailies or weeklies that never got a website to begin with and kept doing what they were doing in terms of keeping good relationsihps with advertisers in their towns. Newspapers main problem was giving away the product for free on the Web and letting their ad salespeople get away with being incompetent. They used the crutch "nobody's buying ads anymore" and publishers let them get away with it instead of hiring better salespeople. Result. One year max for the print product.

 

Nah, the weather's too nice then. It'll be in late November,because holiday sales won't be projected tip be good and they'll want to ruin everyone's holidays.

 

Newspapers, like rock n roll and vinyl records, will never die. But they'll have to be very micro-focused on specific topics or markets.

 

The small-town daily will survive as a print product, the major metro will survive as an aggressive web product.

What's going to go away is the 30-60 circs who don't have the resources of a metro to go mobile, and don't have the small footprint to just do their local great. The regional non-metros that cover sprawling areas or 10 towns or more -- kind of like covers a region-- just don't have the scale. You either have to be huge, or you have to be mico targeted.

 

What do people think of the efforts of Patch? I've seen some pretty good local reporting out of them here in the Baltimore area.

 

Patch had and lost a tremendous growth opportunity when AOL deployed a series of truly unfortunate short-term and poorly conceived strategic initiatives, from changing up audience drivers every few weeks (then dropping them) to putting HuffPo in charge.

Many feet-on-the-ground staffers developed loyal followers. Hale, the new corporate holding company/overlord, pushed too many national stories on an all-site basis, eroding their base. A better business model, imho, would be deploying Patch as a franchise.

Franchising news. Seriously: Every McDonald's serves pretty much the same menu (in a Patch version that would be LOCAL news), with regional and international variations tailored to their customers and periodic corporate-wide promotions to expand the marketshare.

With hyper-local news as a main product, the franchise-buying journalist and an ad-sales partner could operate posting national and local ads on a their site. The journalist could deliver news, with a core set of editorial advisors at a regional and national level to advise and guide the journalist on ethical issues and other best-reporting practices. Same for the ad sales partner, allowing for a traditional church-state news/ad sales separation, navigating the stickier stories.

Done right, the initial investment on the journalist/ad sales team's part could be the cost of a new mid-priced car. The site would be making money inside of two years. Done right being the caveat, imho.

 

I went with 10 years but I'll echo what others have said in terms of the major nationals and hyperlocals hanging on well beyond that. Will the NYT cease publishing a print edition that's roughly the equivalent of what we have today? Very doubtful. A version of USA Today will still be available at airports and chain hotels too, probably. For most of us who knew we'd probably never end up at the NYT and weren't interested in the Podunk Journal but believed we could make a living in a fulfilling career at "daily newspapers as we know them,"it sure feels like that institution you speak of is already dead.

 

I went with 10 years, and I need somebody to keep on printing the dead tree edition for another 10-15 after that so I can stay employed until Social Security payments kick in. Oh, wait ...