The Day The Newspapers Shut Down Their Sites

This is something that all the snarky bloggers out there fail to realize. They all can do the job "better than the MSM!!!" It's a chorus they've been repeating ad nauseum for years. "Who needs the MSM!? Look at the story Politico/Huffington Post/Joe's Wonder Blog broke last week!"

I guess they all think that every journalist is either in the White House press corps, covering the New York Yankees or embedded in Iraq. A lot of this has to do with the youth of a lot of the blogosphere. It's largely people who don't have family or community roots just yet, who couldn't care loss about the proposal to widen the main drag to three lanes or bulldoze three neighborhoods to build the new junior high. It doesn't cross their mind that someone might be covering that, and that someone might care.

 

http://knownewspapers.blogspot.com/

 

Step One: Unplug websites and incur the wrath of our infuriated online advertisers

Step Two: ? ? ? ? ?

Step Three: PROFIT!

 

Step two is offer something similar to ESPN Insider where you pay 6-7 bucks a month for the expanded internet service and maybe a Sunday and Wednesday paper delivered to your house.

Maybe $12-$14 a month will give you full access and a paper every day.

 

I didn't know there were online advertisers much less ones to get infuriated.

 

Step Two hasn't worked anywhere except the Wall Street Journal, which has an enormous audience of well-educated, affluent readers and a unique niche. A lot of us have a unique niche (local news). Practically no one other than the WSJ has the rest of that equation, which is why the NYT pulled the plug on Times Select.

 

Considering how much less online revenue is than the print product still, there isn't really as much to lose as you might think. But even though this would definitely put a shock into the system, there's no guarantee it would work. As bad as it is to give away our product, it would be even worse if people decided they could live without our product.

 

How about audience to CNN.com or Yahoo.com or ESPN.com?

This move will backfire big time.

 

Here's the thing, CNN and ESPN aren't covering my city council and tax rates or the preps, respectively.

 

Again:

This is something that all the snarky bloggers out there fail to realize. They all can do the job "better than the MSM!!!" It's a chorus they've been repeating ad nauseum for years. "Who needs the MSM!? Look at the story Politico/Huffington Post/Joe's Wonder Blog broke last week!"

I guess they all think that every journalist is either in the White House press corps, covering the New York Yankees or embedded in Iraq. A lot of this has to do with the youth of a lot of the blogosphere. It's largely people who don't have family or community roots just yet, who couldn't care loss about the proposal to widen the main drag to three lanes or bulldoze three neighborhoods to build the new junior high. It doesn't cross their mind that someone might be covering that, and that someone might care.

 

This would be much more effective if the industry decided as a whole to participate. As if that could or would ever happen.

 

I agree that's the case, and at first thought I think people would realize that what we do is extremely important. BUT, there's still the chance that they just go on with their lives, watch local television and care more about national news than the local material we provide. Not likely, but there is a risk there.