David Andrew Johnson

Newspapers: Reinvent Yourselves... Or Else

Jay Small is correct, and Mark Riddix original premise is revealed as shallow and uniformed in the additional context he provides. This doesn't mean that the newspaper industry is not in trouble or in need of re-invention, but the few suggestions posed by Riddix are not at the crux of the issue. If they were, the industry, which has been doing all of these things for years, would not be in the state it is.

The main mistake that most casual analysts of the industry make is focusing only on the news content of the newspapers. News content costs the paper, and per-copy price of the paper only offsets the production and distribution costs of the product. Newspapers make money from advertising, either display or classified. During the good times, classified advertising was nearly half of the newspaper industry's revenue.

Unfortunately, newspaper classified advertising as a money maker is a business that is rapidly becoming obsolete and it will never come back in the way needed to support news gathering and reporting as it did. Just like yellow pages, large databases of information are more usable online than in cumbersome print products that evolved prior to data-driven Web products.

The situation is more similar to radio theater's demise when faced with the rise of television. People stopped listening to radio theater when they started watching television, because it offered a better user experience for the content.

The newspaper industry must meet the new challenge, but the challenge is not in news content, but advertising content, and the challenger is google adwords and online advertising networks that have built a better platform than the classified pages.