NP Refugee

Newspapers Can't Compete with 'Us'

Think about this: the newspaper's content, most of which they don't own nor create is available in lots of places. The newspaper is under siege from all sorts of directions. I can get comics from comics.com; I can't get that on the newspaper's web site. I can get stocks from-what-1,000 different places? I can get the syndicated national stories from just about anywhere. Obits are available numerous places. I don't have any problem finding puzzles online from numerous sources. A great number of the published editorials are available on the commentators' web sites. All of that content used to be the NP franchise. So it's not just about Google, it's the cumulative effects of having commoditization of what the newspaper used to monopolize in a local market. Going from monopoly to commodity is a giant killer. I agree that the small town newspapers will be the ones that last. If you consider the papers closing shop thus far, most are in 2-newspaper towns (Seattle, Denver). But the small local papers seem to understand the need to drill down into the communities they serve--because they can, while big metros seem intent on being a national newspaper. Unless the big metros bust up their newsrooms and start small suburban bureaus that can go deep in communities while having a "most important" fill the main section, I'm pretty sure the erosion will not subside.

Think about this too: NPs don't put the local box scores and the other fine print online. To a local market, that's valuable.

I, for one, believe that Murdoch knows exactly what he's doing. If you've been following the latest moves by the NP industry, there's a bit of interesting news where most have signed on to work with a search engine directly. If I were Murdoch, I would start a news search engine and sign on all the NPs as true partners. I would add some things the SEs don't currently do. I would have wild cards in search strings, so if you don't know some characters, you can use *, I would also allow searchers to index the search results according the date the article was published. Then I would cut off the Google and Yahoo! spiders. Goodness knows, promotion wouldn't be a problem.

News flash. Only 20% of most newspapers' visits come through search engines. Most NPs are bookmarked.

It would take a giant to make it happen, no doubt. Goodness knows, the NP companies can't get along to make it happen.

And I could almost argue that the suburbanization has had almost as profound an effect as the Internet on the precipitous drop in circulation. Publishing the latest antics about which councilperson is taking a bribe in a large market? Most people in the suburbs are embarrassed and think it's pathetic, but beyond that, they really don't care. It may as well be 500 miles away.

My prescription for survival is what everyone keeps telling the NPs: start digging deep into the communities and quit trying to cover the world. My fear is that they cannot get out of their own way to do that and the new NP model will be reinvented by those outside of the NP industry today with a fresh perspective and no ties to legacy systems and processes that are outdated.