How long before Newspapers die?

Someone may have done so. Meeting probably went like this in 1994:

"Boss, I have a great idea for our classified advertising."

---- "Cool, let's hear it."

"Let's give people a forum online to buy and sell what they want."

----"Interesting. What would our price structure be? By the word? Would we be able to charge more for bold type? Larger fonts? Color? Photos? Tell me more!"

"Uh, sir, the ads would be free."

----"Get the fuck out of my office."


You cannot compete with free. And there is no point to doing so. Craigslist is good business for Craig because he cornered the market, and the tiny percentage of paying customers makes it worth his while. That money --- spread over the nation's 1,400 daily newspapers --- would be so thin as to be little more than a rounding error in each paper's budget.

Why do we say "newspapers" should have thought of craigslist?

ANYBODY should/could have thought about it.

 

Having great design would mean hiring a creative/talented designer and paying them well rather than laying them all off to go to a centralized design hub that puts out cookie cutter layouts.

We all know that's not going to happen. Newspapers are in survival mode, cutting back and tightening up. The days of expanding, branching out and spending are over.

 

Except for those papers that don't have a centralized design hub...

 

I think newspapers have to. Craigs List is not that good a product. They do not have the search functions that virtually every other similar program has. The typical newspaper has maybe a page of classifed a day now. Give away the on-line classified. Then sell the banner ads at the top to the the car dealers. etc. I realize that the on-line display ads are a glutted market but it would be some additional revenue.

 

Do you understand why economies of scale make eBay impossible for newspapers to implement?

 

#wowrickstainlives

 

Either my shop is atypical or you are horribly wrong. We have anywhere upwards of 6 to 8 pages of classifieds a day.

 

Fredrick should be a consultant; then I'd really make some money. See ... what I say is true. And how bout all the money all the newspapers have spent on consultants, lol.

I'm telling you; the papers that ignored the Internet, the FREE internet are still THRIVING. It's really ridiculous how newspapers got snowed by idiots who know nothing about newspapers. There is a market for local news. There still is. There are still people, even young ones, who like holding a newspaper and reading about people they know or people in their towns. Newspapers laughed at people like Fredrick in favor of the consultants and look where it got them ... on the verge of no newspapers at all. LOL. p.s. To those of you who say people don't read newspapers anymore and young people don't read them ... you are talking about the piece of trash newspapers we're putting out today because of so many cuts in staff. If newspapers still covered their communities beautifully and thoroughly, people would still be buying them and the tire salesman and the car salesman would be advertising in them. You can say I'm wrong but you can't prove it. Nobody in his/her right mind would subscribe to a newspaper today, the stripped to the bone newspapers of today that don't even run box scores anymore.

 

Think back to 2007 or so. And into 2008.

The newspapers were full. The staffs were full. The coverage was about as complete as it had ever been. Most chains had a team of reporters/editors in Beijing for the Olympics.

Quarterly earnings, however, were showing a sharp and shocking decline. Real estate and construction advertising dried up, due to the impending housing crisis. Classified advertising began to wither. Big-box retailers (i.e. Circuit City) went belly-up. Revenue could no longer support this huge payroll, these huge sections and this huge travel budget.

These revenue problems happened BEFORE the monstrous cuts in staff and coverage, not after.

Yes, newspapers would have kept more readers without the massive cuts. But the money gained by keeping these readers never could have made up for the 50%+ dip in retail and classified advertising revenue. Remember, at the time most chains were carrying monstrous debt loads. Tribune's was at more than $4 billion BEFORE the sale to Sam Zell pushed it to $13 billion. McClatchy's debt was at more than $2 billion. You can't meet the obligations on these debts with a full payroll and dwindling ad revenue.

 

Also, the decline in readership -- particularly among young readers -- predates the internet becoming a thing. We were doing "young reader" initiatives (that didn't work, btw) in the late 1980s. Circulation numbers were rising, but much of that was "junk" circulation to way outlying areas, or blatantly and illegally padded. (At one notable large newspaper, The Dallas Morning News, it was both.) The shift of media consumption to online helped accelerate the decline, but the business model was going to change no matter how media companies chose to handle the internet.

If every local newspaper killed its web site tomorrow, there wouldn't be a flock of people wanting to subscribe to read yesterday's news tomorrow on dead trees delivered by vehicles burning fossil fuel. Because there'd still be your neighborhood Facebook pages and TV for local news, there'd still be the national news networks and CNN for national news, any feigned interest in world news would simply go unserved. Sports junkies have innumerable sources for sports news other than the local newspaper. I just look at my own example: I started working for a newspaper at 17 and could not imagine a life without one -- yet I haven't spent my own money to purchase a print newspaper since probably 2008.

For too many years, our argument was, "You can't stop reading the newspaper. You NEED it." The same argument was presented to advertisers. Neither argument is true now, if it ever was.

 

I was recently in Denver and I there were about a page of classifed on weekdays. I was also in Washington and counted about a page of classified in the WP. I did not count legals of which the Washington Post had a lot. I also did not count pages on a day when the weekly auto dealers section was printed.

Perhaps I made too broad a generaliztion when I said "the typical paper" but I was struck by how few there were in both papers. Both papers used to have some of the largest classified sections in the country.

 

Those are major metros, and in my opinion, major metros are hardly "typical" papers representative of the entire industry. Maybe my paper is just in an area that has managed to maintain a fair amount of classified advertising. I would imagine the norm is somewhere in the middle.