Stop blaming the internet for the death of newspapers

Tuesday, March 17, 2009, 11:22 PM
Business by John (Article #238)

Stop it. Here's what really killed newspapers:

AP Copy. Every newspaper on earth is about 60-80% frickin AP copy. It sucks, because people want more local content. Instead, they can expect their local newspaper to resemble every other newspaper on earth, which in turn are all running stories 24 hours later than every website on earth that also runs AP wire copy.
Costs. Printing presses are expensive.
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Pay. Writers at all but the top tier papers work for nothing. I've known people who were years into the newspaper biz who were making barely better than minimum wage. If you're gonna make crappy pay, disappearing to some other medium (blogs) or some other occupation (fry cook) seems like a winning proposition.
Respect. When was the last time anyone said anything nice about any newspaper.
USA Today and the New York Times. The big, essentially national newspapers, were already pushing down other newspapers for a looong time before the internet came along.
Quality. Read the Washington Post. It is the nasty bit of political bootlicking know to humankind. It's a joke! Why would anyone want to read some politician's BS when they can just turn on CNN or C-SPAN, or better yet, just log on to the internet and look at cat pictures?

I'm not a big fan of all the boo-hooing we're supposed to project toward the demise of the newspaper. Of all victims along the internet's bloody trail of success, the one with the most warning was the frakkin newspaper business!! They knew in the mid-1990s that they had to swim or die on the internet.

But what did they do?

Well, many bought expensive printing operations and diversified further into print! Many started churning out piss-poor local features magazines that do nothing but grab advertisers by the ankles and shake more money from them.

And this is minding you that advertising does not work. Advertising, especially in certain mediums such as newspapers, is a flat-out waste of cash.

Big surprise! Advertisers have stopped forking over cash to a dying industry that never was helping them.

But, let me dwell a bit more on printing presses. I mention it because presses don't come cheap, and they're not cheap to operate. They need daily love and real skill to run.

It sure seems to me that about the time a newspaper is coming up to replace its printing press would have been a good time to go all internet. Then you're talking about a stop-loss. You've stopped the financial losses incurred by the damned printing press.

But, newspapers are, at the heart of it, PAPER. Maybe it's too fundamental to their identity. Maybe it was too much to ask them to abandon their giant papyrus scrolls and go all digital. Maybe paste-up is endemic that to ask a newspaper to think of web page layout is asking too much.

After all, you take the big scary job of Newspaper Editor and reduce it to assignment editor, since its a fair bet that the web editor would get more say on layout.

You can fire any paste-up people you have. Classifieds can easily be rolled into sales. Night editor can probably be given to the senior editor, since he now has free time not committed to paste-up. Section editors are only meaningful at big newspapers. Pretty much you're all local at this point.

And all local is where the real hurt occurs.

You see, newspapers have been peddling a fraud to local advertisers forever. That fraud is selling a localized product that is littered with nationally syndicated content. A huge number of paid ads plop right down on pages that have zero local appeal.

And advertisers pay for it because advertising is a lie that people want to here: marketing is easy! Just pay us a ridiculous fee, and you'll never have to think about sales and marketing ever again.

And that's the problem.

The internet has exposed all of the underlying frauds about newspapers. They're not really local. Worse, half the local content goes on pages with little or not local advertisements. They don't convert readers into sales. They don't do much of anything.

So, print journalism will be burned to the ground. And good writers will reconstitute local journalism on the web, with lower costs and less BS and no debt burden left over from winding down poisonous print operations.

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Wonder where to start with your web design business?

This blog follows along with my efforts to build and grow a website design business, Pro Content and Design.

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Thank you,
John Crawford
Pro Content and Design