3 ms·

> there is nothing about newspapers that makes them a natural monopoly While I can't provide theory, in practice they certainly are. Every city has one or two

> there is nothing about newspapers that makes them a natural monopoly While I can't provide theory, in practice they certainly are. Every city has one or two papers of any significance; it's hard to name a new major newspaper that started in the last 50 years. In many places, the leading papers have combined for economic survival, but kept their editorial pages separate, for diversity of voices. Maybe it's due to high barriers to entry? You need a printing press, distribution, and a reputation for reliability - the last probably being a newspaper's most valuable, irreplaceable asset. The Internet provides more competition and lower barriers to entry, but I'll bet the leading Internet news source almost every town is the local newspaper(s).

jack9 9y ago
OC Weekly (orange county, CA) and a host of other zines got plenty of traction in the last 50 years that catapulted them into a stable marketshare.
saalweachter 9y ago
Economy of scale (or rather, too small a scale to be economical) is almost certainly the problem. Producing a newspaper of a certain number of pages of a certain quality requires the same amount of work, regardless of whether it is read by 10 people or 10 million, but your revenue will be proportional to readership; you have a small per-reader additional cost, to print or provide bandwidth, but it's largely a fixed cost, to research and write the articles. I'm not sure how the internet helps or hurts. It will help in that you can start smaller on the internet, with a one or two person operation publishing infrequently, but when you try to scale up you'll run headlong into the "people don't pay for news online" problem. In any case, if you want to run a "real" newspaper, you need a certain minimum number of subscribers to be viable, to hire enough people to research enough articles to provide enough information each day to really be considered a "newspaper". This, in turn, is where you could imagine unfair competition from monopolies. First, your larger newspapers will be able to undercut you, producing better news articles at lower cost per reader, if they have more readers. Second, a large enough conglomerate of regional newspapers can afford to run some at a loss. There are only so many available subscribers, and if you can deny your competitors enough to be viable, they'll also be running at a loss, and your deeper pockets will let you wait them out.

jack9 9y ago

OC Weekly (orange county, CA) and a host of other zines got plenty of traction in the last 50 years that catapulted them into a stable marketshare.

saalweachter 9y ago

Economy of scale (or rather, too small a scale to be economical) is almost certainly the problem. Producing a newspaper of a certain number of pages of a certain quality requires the same amount of work, regardless of whether it is read by 10 people or 10 million, but your revenue will be proportional to readership; you have a small per-reader additional cost, to print or provide bandwidth, but it's largely a fixed cost, to research and write the articles. I'm not sure how the internet helps or hurts. It will help in that you can start smaller on the internet, with a one or two person operation publishing infrequently, but when you try to scale up you'll run headlong into the "people don't pay for news online" problem. In any case, if you want to run a "real" newspaper, you need a certain minimum number of subscribers to be viable, to hire enough people to research enough articles to provide enough information each day to really be considered a "newspaper". This, in turn, is where you could imagine unfair competition from monopolies. First, your larger newspapers will be able to undercut you, producing better news articles at lower cost per reader, if they have more readers. Second, a large enough conglomerate of regional newspapers can afford to run some at a loss. There are only so many available subscribers, and if you can deny your competitors enough to be viable, they'll also be running at a loss, and your deeper pockets will let you wait them out.