How long before Newspapers die?

This, WFW. Small-town paper will always have their place, I think. And Fredrick, while I don't dispute any of what you say (with the exception of your final sentence), it's not really lazy ad salesmen that did in newspapers. It was sites like ebay and craigslist. Classified ads brought in buckets of cash. Take a look at your classified section today (if you can find it). Nobody is advertising that stuff in the paper anymore. But at least we still have obits (for now)!

 

Once businesses perfect the art of sending ads and coupons to smart phones, daily newspapers will drop like flies.

As it is, business owners should never advertise in a newspaper anymore unless their customers' average age is 60-plus. As we've discussed many times on this site, print edition readers younger than the Baby Boom generation just aren't there.

 

Same here, although my timeline is a bit faster. If my current employer made a guarantee to keep me five more years (getting me into my early 60s) with the stipulation that I'd have to take a hike after that, I'd accept.

After voting for 10 years, I think that may be an average or median instead of a hard-and-fast number. I'd give some newspapers five years or less in print. Some will hold on 10 years or more. The paper based down the road from me (which isn't my employer) still gets considerably more than 75 percent of its revenue from print, according to people I know who have seen the numbers. The percentage from digital isn't expected to grow anytime soon, even though the paper has made a "digital-first" commitment with only a skeleton crew devoted to print. In a case like that, I'd expect print to hold out 10 years -- although it's scary to think what the print edition might look like toward the end of that period.

 

I'll take that. Get me to 60, so there's no penalty for dipping into my 401(k). I'll find something to do for a couple of years that will pay most of the bills, then hang it up at 62 and live off Social Security. Tribune pension and savings. Still work if I feel like it, but won't have to.

 

From Ken Doctor earlier this year on Digital First Media auction:

Though C.E.O. John Paton’s outspoken digital-first, print-last theories didn’t win many friends among his peers, he forced the bedraggled, post-bankrupt Journal Register company into the new millennium. Taking over in 2010, he issued digital video cameras to reporters and cut numerous legacy print costs.


“Stop listening to newspaper people,” he told his staff. “If print dollars are becoming Digital Dimes, then we better start chasing the Dimes.”


Cerberus, Apollo bidding for Digital First Media | Capital New York

 

Let's cut to the chase:

What could a [private equity] purchase mean for the papers—and their “digital-first” operations—themselves? By standard practice, Apollo and Cerberus quickly apply reorganizations to find cost-cutting efficiencies. Layers of management and staffing are taken out, centralization of processes are put in place and technology is used to cut the costs of pesky humans.

 

Private equity buyer: "We plan to reorganize the newspaper."
Newspaper: "Yeah, well, we've already reorganized. We're cut to the bone here."
Private equity buyer: "We plan to reorganize the newspaper."

 

Livin' the life, brotha!

 

I've said this before. I'd love to see a major newspaper completely eliminate its Web site. Kill it dead. Let the chips fall.

 

I worked for one of those 60,000-80,000 regional papers mentioned earlier in this thread, in the suburbs, like many of them are. We zoned pretty aggressively back then. I subscribe to it now. A lot of what passes for news is so specific to the town being covered, in each instance, that it's hard for me to find it relevant. Some of these places ought to commission a consultant to look into whether it would be more profitable just to split the product into 5-10 community dailies.

There was another thread here about hyper-local sports coverage, and how expensive it actually is compared to the number of people who actually care. And I'm talking about this particular type of newspaper, not the small town paradigm where the town shuts down on Friday nights in the fall. That's intriguing to think about, although I don't know that being the 35th person shoving a tape recorder in Matt Harvey's face after a game is the answer, either.

 

I've yet to hear a really solid reason why news should continue to be delivered in the least efficient, least cost-effective way possible.

I mean this in the nicest way possible: Some of you are drastically underestimating the disdain with which companies look at print products these days. And, in the modern age, that disdain is pretty well earned, IMO.

Journalism can survive in at least a dozen better forms.

 

Do you think people will get tired of staring at screens all the time? That's the only thing I can think of.

Personally, I love the New York Times' "Today's Paper" tablet app. It's delivered by 3 or 4 a.m. It doesn't change on me during the day, which I consider a positive. No bells or whistles. Just what happened the day before, portable and on-time. If I were taking over a newspaper, I would try to copy it. I tried to subscribe to the Chicago Tribune and Indianapolis Star daily paper apps, but they were just PDFs of the print edition and not user-friendly at all.