RK

Subscription Website Datapoint of the Day

No kidding. I used to register at news web sites. Not anymore. I have reached my threshold of mass mailing email from all the sites I have already registered. No single news website is important enough for me to go through registration.

Star Tribune Bankruptcy Further Roils Newspaper Waters

Having at least one newspaper per city in this day and age is not realistic. Newspaper, an anachronism like the telephone dial, can no longer be a standalone profitable enterprise. I see newspaper merging with TV stations (whose business is also on the wane although not as sharply as newspapers'). Also, there should be more mergers of media properties to increase their presence on the internet (assuming the government is not myopic enough to block these mergers). Only the internet matters in the future; dead tree publishing is really dead.

Newspapers and the Internet: Opportunities Lost

What is surprising to me is that the newspaper industry by and large did not try to re-invent themselves by buying their competitors in the advertising space. I know there were small acquisitions on the content side, but very little on the ad delivery side (to my knowledge). Even to this day, why aren't the newspapers buying ad networks? If NYT for instance owns a big ad network, wouldn't that help them to transition to digital faster?