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Death of newspapers, failure to emphasize key advantage, the internet, failure to brand, core customers are dying off, Wall Street Journal, real estate ads, Craigslist
The lifeblood of newspapers is advertising. The amount of news they run is driven by the amount of advertising they have to pay for printing. Subsriptions, news stand sales are important only because ad rates are based on number of readers.
This isn't a cynical statement but is based on 20 years of experience working for daily papers, including some of the biggest, reporting, editing, going to daily editorial meetings and doing layouts.
Newspapers didn't jump on the Internet bandwagon until they could make it pay with advertising.
They've been predicting the death of newspapers since the day of the linotype machines. They're still around. And as long as they've got advertising, they'll survive.
They aren't healthy, but they're hanging on.
Check out Editor and Publisher for an indepth look at the industry.
EditorandPublisher.com - Information Authority for the Newspaper Industry (http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/index.jsp - broken link)
They are hanging on by their toenails. All you have to do is compare circulation numbers from 30 years ago. And as the numbers drop like a paralyzed falcon, so does their appeal to advertisers, particularly those trying to reach a consumer market under age 50. So that pretty much leaves hospitals, retirement communities, and Buick dealerships. What's more, if you realize that classified advertising has almost vanished as a revenue stream, the future looks bleaker by the month.
Newspapers didn't jump on the Internet bandwagon until they could make it pay with advertising.
Well, just speaking from personal experience, my SO and I haven't bought or subscribed to a newspaper in over ten years. We get all our news from radio, tv, and online news sources such as CNN.com . We don't happen to like our local newspaper (Newsday) very much ... never have, in fact, which is why we dropped taking it even before hooking up to the internet! I do check the local sports page in the online version but it's bookmarked to go directly to that page and nowhere else.
As for advertising, I'm happy to say that through the use of a combination of Firefox's Adblock addon, plus a good firewall with script, animation, and popup blockers, we manage to avoid being bothered by ads included in news (and other!) sites. It would be interesting to see a study showing how many people take steps to avoid ads, versus how many simply ignore them, versus how many actually click on any.
Local, state, and national politics and social agendas are completely one sided with most newspapers. They are firmly behind one political and social idiology and in doing so, they've gone against nearly half their potential readers, especially the older customers who prefer paper over internet. Then there's consolidation of local papers resulting them in becoming USA Today Lite and offer less local news coverage, if any at all.
Local, state, and national politics and social agendas are completely one sided with most newspapers. They are firmly behind one political and social idiology and in doing so, they've gone against nearly half their potential readers, especially the older customers who prefer paper over internet.
That's exactly why I never liked Newsday. Unfortunately, until the advent of online news sources, they were the only "local" game in town. The New York Times barely acknowledges that Long Island exists, LOL! To be honest, the only reason I kept buying Newsday even as long as I did (until the mid 1990s) was that the pages came in handy for freshly lining the birds' cage. But when the canaries went, so did the newspaper....
Oh and just as a completely irrelevant aside, I always disliked the smell of newsprint/paper. Yuck.
Interesting article today about how 30 major American dailies are on the block, none with any apparent buyers on the horizon.
What are your theories on the death spiral of newspapers? Before you say, "Well, the Internet, you dummy," I would agree with that partially. At the same time, I think the biggest problem has been that newspapers have utterly failed to adapt over the past 35-40 years to a rapidly changing media environment. It's no coincidence that the circulation of daily newspapers peaked the same year that CNN went on air.
Having experiencing trying to market newspapers, let me offer my list.
1) The Internet, Of Course. Today, you don't have to wait 24 hours for the day's headlines to be delivered to your door. You can have it on your computer within milliseconds of the first bulletin. Yet, there are other problems with newspapers....
2) Failure To Emphasize Its Key Advantage. For national and international news, the Internet clobbers the local newspaper. For opinions and editorials, the same is true. However, newspapers have been utterly blind to the one area where no other news source comes remotely close: Local news. As in what goes on in one's own city, and how important that is to the readers.
3) Failure to Brand. Even now, newspapers continue to use the same tactics over and over again: Promote, promote, promote with their $13.99 subscription offer. The problem is that you could sell a year's subscription to the newspaper for a nickel and you wouldn't get many takers, because newspapers have failed to invest in branding their product--instead treating themselves as if they were a public utility. It says something about the industry that they're still talking about branding as a radical new development in marketing, even though Coca Cola has been doing it for the past 130 years.
4) Failure to Understand The Business They're Really In. Are newspapers in the business of delivering a rolled up bundle of papers to a subscribers' door, or are they in the business of delivering important information to the customer? Instead of making their internet sites the core off their business, newspapers have instead treated internet as an added convenience for their readers--never thinking that it could be a powerful vehicle for advertising and classified advertising. Instead, most newspaper web sites function as if it were still 1995, rather than 2008.
5) The core customer is dying off. I'm 46 and I read two newspapers a day, my local paper and the Wall Street Journal. However, I am the exception in my age group. Until the newspapers start marketing their content (Which, again, is not the rolled up bundle of papers that gets tossed into the driveway daily) to the under-45 crowd, the lights will start going off in newspaper offices around the country in the next 5-10 years. So, this Sunday, you should buy a copy and put it in a vacuum sealed bag, so your children and grandchildren will know exactly what a newspaper was like.
And that makes me sad, for the local newspaper still has an important role to place, particularly in understanding the workings of local government. Yet, because of newspapers' own innate stupidity it will soon go the way of the dodo.
The major newspapers are stuck in a timewarp of 1950's Leave it to Beaver. When the Beaver would go out and pick up the paper in 50's suburbia.
-Lack of relavancy to most people living in a city.
Take the business section of a major city like LA, Chicago. It's all propaganda by govt, treasury, realty associations. In big cities, something like, 30-40-50% of people rent? Yet there's never anything on renting. It's all home buying propaganda. That's astonishing in 2008.
And alot of other issues. Too many to go into. But a large section of the paper isn't relevant for a large percentage of the population in a city.
-Lack of real press or real journalism. Someone would make alot of money if they drew a line in the sand....and leave angelina jolie, brad pitt, etc in one corner, and on the other corner, get into some real stories, real reporting.
How much of what they report on do people care about?
The front page of the LA Times right now, OJ. Does anyone want to see OJ again?
-Different population than 20 or 30 years ago. Different lifestyle than dad coming home at 6, and mom is waiting there. Like the nightly newscast. Outdated.
-Lack of internet coverage. If you only relied on newspapers, you wouldn't know much about the web. Like the top sites, top youtube videos, etc. Lack of integration of media. They still view the media as "Big 3", and cable. But that's not how many potential subscribers view media.
-Sports they do a really good job. I'd rather read sports in a paper than online. More convenient. And you can trust it. Most papers still have good sports section.
If the rest of the paper was like that, and got peoples enthusiasm, then maybe things could turn around.
But the big negatives...too ideological, one sided. Lack of relevancy. And fragmented lifestyles and interests.
The single reason we MIGHT continue with some sort of newspaper subscription is the Sunday coupons and fliers.
Newspaper tv listings? a joke.
Newspaper national news? seen it on the net already.
Local news? very mildly interesting, but the important stuff is on tv.
Local ads? Generally the same all the time. Lack of creativity. See 'em once, and you're done.
Format? Newspaper format still socks. You can't spread it out on a breakfast table and have room for your eggs 'n grits. You can't read 'em in bed because they are to big and the light coming through the back washes out the print.
Cartoons? A while back, the cartoons were taken over. They now get printed out of chronological sequence, often have "suggested" themes that are the same from cartoon to cartoon, and the big strips are now into "classics." I can't think of a more effective way to kill readership.
Use in mulch and other "green" projects? Sorry, the use of color is so spotted throughout the papers that they are no longer useful for this.
There are some other factors that haven't been discussed yet.
1) People have gotten progressively lazier and more impatient about everything in life. Unlike websites that a full of every different type of media and can be searched with a few clicks, newspapers require that people actually read and physically turn pages. Newspapers also have to be disposed of (thrown out or recycled). Why go to all that trouble when a laptop or iPhone can pull up so much more information, so much faster, and far cheaper?
2) Environment culture - probably not a big factor, but there are plenty of people out there who might be wondering why they should pay for a paper product when everything can be had digitally? Why waste the tree and the gas/diesel fuel to transport it?
Our local paper, owned by Gannett, has become a joke. The paper from a neighboring city has more indepth local and state articles with key details left out from our paper,...possibly by choice based upon their political and social beliefs. To give you an example of how bad things have gotten for our local paper, our Monday edition has only two sections. First section is local, state, national, entertainment, and opinion sections. Second section is sports, business, and classifieds. To add insult to this petty little rag, they increased their purchase price to 75 cents,...same price as the USA Today which is also owned by the Gannett.
I've been an avid newspaper reader since the age of 11. I will not be giving up newspapers anytime soon.
I tend to think that my generation (and younger) tend to not read the printed word as often as the older generation (I could be wrong, I'm speculating). It's not just about the internet but the lack of concern over what's beyond our immediate area. Why take the time to read world news when you don't care? Also, the news is often really negative and who wants to read stories that leave in the gory details of murder? I think we are all bombarded with negative news and many chose to ignore it all together.
My biggest complaint in regard to newspapers is the lack of fact based, interesting, USEFUL, information. Newspaper IMO tend to vary based upon the demographic - it can be biased, misleading, and pointless. I really want a newspaper that is educational and not just "entertainment" so to speak. Those are hard to come by (especially in my area - Los Angeles).
I won't give up my newspaper - I like to physically flip through it. I get news from other sources also, but I like the "physicality" of reading the paper in the morning (when I have time, otherwise it's after work). I like reading local news, and am a Sudoku fan - GOTTA have that in hand for that to me.
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