State of the business is dismal, as we know, and yet ...

Yes, the changing habits that led newspapers to rely on stupid people as vital employees. You cannot have this discussion without including that concept.

 

Recently returned for the first time to the town in which I was night metro editor for a few years and was shocked (maybe I shouldn't have been) to discover that you can't even buy the paper in supermarkets, convenience stores, etc. Saw only one newsrack -- it's outside the newspaper's headquarters and has been there forever. And this is in an area with a lot of seniors and higher-than-average print readership. I asked a former co-worker (who left the paper recently) what was going on, and she said this has been the deal for about a year -- though of course the newspaper did not publicize it. Wasn't so long ago that the two competing papers near my home not only had newsracks everywhere, but also employed street vendors at busy intersections -- and sued when muncipalities tried to ban them.

 

You're absolutely right. I will never understand how and why newspapers decided to create free websites in the earliest days of the Internet rather than waiting and developing a business model. They always charged for the printed product. Why not for the online version? The decision that killed the industry.

 

That's the image some newspaper people give off. Lack of paywalls did not kill newspapers. Advances in technology, more content choices, and migration did a lot more to kill newspapers than some newspaper trying to compete with free news sources.

 

Best place to buy single-copy newspapers anymore is the airport. Not to read, but to use as a blanket on the plane, since airlines have cut back, too.

 

I've long been in the camp of giving stuff away for free online hurt newspapers, but this is a great point. If papers had the paywalls up from the start and places like Yahoo came along shortly after with free stories (whether it be AP or Yahoo original work), would that have only hastened the decline of papers? Or would there have been enough "value" in the newspaper coverage by having to pay for it that newspapers would have been fine?
That's also a good point about the marketing. One problem I see is a lack of a unified, national voice. You can get a national name phone, cable or internet provider almost anywhere. If you move from Washington D.C. to Washington state, you'll still see the ads for those national providers. But you won't see the Washington Post ad message about subscribing, and the Seattle Times name doesn't mean much because you just moved to the Seattle area. Unless all the newspapers 20 years ago went in together on a national campaign (same ad, just insert local name) to drive up subscription numbers.

 

As a diehard newspaper guy, I'd love to agree with you that fans by and large go to newspaper websites first. But as others have said, I would like to see numbers showing that to be the case. If you broadened the scope to say sports media in general produces a product in more demand than ever, I'd agree. I would say it's a pretty safe guess newspapers as a whole produce as much if not more sports content now than before (factoring in videos, blogs, social media updates, online photo galleries, etc. vs. just stories/columns and photos in the past) but that's just part of the increased amount of content for sports fans.
Also, it wasn't just the cable giants that raided newspaper staffs. Teams and schools have been doing that. Guess where the University of Oregon got its in-house football beat writer? The local paper. Guess where the Seattle Seahawks official team photographer worked previously? Here's a clue: it rhymes with Beattle Limes. I'm sure plenty of people here can give many other such high-profile examples in their respective areas.
After a Seahawk game, I know the Seattle Times will have excellent coverage. But it's not my top place to go. I'll go to Yahoo or my Facebook feed and find plenty of links. Rod Mar (the excellent team photographer I referenced above) will post some great shots during and shortly after the game. Maybe if I lived in Seattle it would be different, but I get plenty of team news without needing to see what the Seattle Times has up. Like I said, I know they'll have excellent coverage and from time to time I'll go there, but it's not where I typically go first. Just anecdotal evidence I realize, but if my Facebook feed is any indication plenty of others are like me.

 

Here's some backing up then. I go to the St. Louis Post Dispatch daily to read about the Cardinals before going to any other website. They smoke the national websites.

 

And that really shows up on their bottom line.

Newspapers chose the dumbest fucking path possible with the Internet, and then many of them couldn't even execute that game plan.

 

Oh, so YOU'RE the one.

 

Actually, I know a lot of people who do this. You get better, more personalized coverage by reading the daily metro beat writers. Heck, the national websites just steal their stuff and rework or retweet it.

 

You do.

But you just almost never get the BIG story first there (coach hired/fired, big free agent coming, monster recruit commit, etc.).