The Day The Newspapers Shut Down Their Sites

Newspapers/media sites


Bloggers

 

People have children. People drive on the roads. People will always care about local news. They just don't realize it at age 24 when they are snarky bloggers full of piss and vinegar and consider their hometown events far too quaint for their sophisticated tastes.

It's time to stop letting them dictate our business moves.

 

If that's the case than the newspaper's demise is inevitable anyway. My guess is some will realize they can live without it, others will miss it. In most cases that decision has already been made.

 

Part of the beauty of this would be TV reporters having to wait until the paper came out again, rather than just skimming from the newspaper Web site before the 10 pm broadcast.

I think it's a wonderful idea.

 

If I were a reader and my newspaper pulled a childish, pointless stunt like that -- one that flies directly in the face of all the "serving our community" bullshit that we love to preach, and one that is doomed to fail because most of us do not have a monopoly on local news -- I'd shrug and go to any of the TV stations' websites in our market for my local news from that day forward.

 

Call me crazy but I think newspaper's should just use the internet to print old news. Once it's two days old, then we'll put it on the web. Give the print product a shelf life and stop competing with yourself. Just blacking out for a couple weeks does seem a little extreme.

 

Newspapers owe people free news? So for all those decades when we were selling the papers, was that a slap in the face of the communities?

 

It would be a slap in the faces of our local readers and our local businesses who have invested their advertising dollars with us to say, "We don't think you appreciate us enough. Unless you start to love us more, we're just gonna hold our breath until we turn blue." It's ridiculously arrogant and, as I said, doomed to fail miserably because newspapers simply do not have the monopoly on local news that you're pretending to possess.

 

It would be arrogant if newspapers were still ridiculously profitable and not having to cut people left and right. This industry is in a downward spiral to a rapidly approaching death. Trying to save the industry is not arrogant, it's called business. As much as journalists try and be "non-business people" and serve the community, what use to the community will a defunct newspaper be?

I have no idea if this will work, but nothing else is working, so why the hell not?

 

It's called business? Oh, do tell me about that. Because I'd love to know what failing business has ever staged a turnaround not by offering a better product, but instead witholding a product that consumers can, for the most part, get elsewhere.

The public couldn't be more vocal about their disdain for media arrogance. And what is our response to that? Some misguided stunt that's supposed to prove how irreplaceable we are? Jesus tap-dancin' Christ.

 

My newspaper's Website gets 50,000 unique visitors a day.

I guess I oughta just tell that group to go to the local TV stations for their info.

And as for the companies paying us for ads on our site, I assume they'll want their money back, too.

 

Oh, please. Because Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity tell them that? The day we start catering to the looney fringe is the day we're cooked for sure.