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Perhaps I'm mistaken, but I thought that local newspapers were doing fine. Most large city and metro papers are hurting, but small community papers are entirel
by jobu 16y ago
Perhaps I'm mistaken, but I thought that local newspapers were doing fine. Most large city and metro papers are hurting, but small community papers are entirely different. Typically they are supported by ads and distributed to everyone in the community (no subscribers). They tend to have truly local news that isn't or can't be covered by major newspapers and rarely makes it into online news.
- lloydarmbrust 16y agoTrue to a degree. Think of small local papers as having a 10-year buffer--they're like looking at large papers in 2001. There are several groups trying to kill small papers (like patch.com). And they will succeed if newspapers do not rise to the challenge. Technology is becoming cheap and accessible enough that makes this scenario possible. But the difference between patch and a local paper is that Patch doesn't really care about the markets they server--if they stop making a enough revenue they could pull out and leave after they've killed the small paper serving that market.
- brandnewlow 16y agoI think Patch will stick around long enough to kill of many, many local papers. Then AOL will have a leadership changeover or will get bored of it not really making much money and shut it down creating a void in many communities.
- lloydarmbrust 16y agoExactly. That's what we're fighting against.
- chc 16y agoSmall local newspapers are in a better place than the big boys — mainly because they don't tend to have as much debt — but they're actually harder hit by things like Craigslist and Yelp murdering previously lucrative ad markets. Incidentally, I blame the newspapers themselves for that. They could have been Craigslist, but instead they were too slow to adapt and got squashed by a better product.
- lloydarmbrust 16y agoAgreed. Newspapers aren't dying, they're slowly committing suicide.
- dasil003 16y agoI don't. Craigslist took over a fat market and slashed several zeroes off the end of it. In no way does it make sense for newspapers to have preempted craigslist.
- lloydarmbrust 16y agoUmm, it took seven years for Craigslist to become "an overnight success". Newspapers knew about it--we did and I was working for a newspaper at the time--but they ignored it. If every newspaper in America would have gone to a free + paid model they could have saved at least half of their revenue and craigslist would still only be in 7 cities. But they wouldn't embrace change a lost big.
- dasil003 16y agoI don't think it's reasonable to expect any business to cut their revenues in half because they see something coming that might hurt their business more in the long term. Especially without any assurances that cutting revenues now will defeat the new threat. It's so easy to sit here now and say "oh the papers should have done x y and z", but even then you don't know if it would have worked. I remain unconvinced.
- lloydarmbrust 16y agoYou sound like a newspaper publisher.
- jamesbritt 16y agoThe Phoenix paper, the Arizona Republic, keeps cutting back and cutting back. They have interesting rationales for this, too. For example, the Monday paper is more of a broadsheet than a newspaper; they claimed "readers told them" they don't want a regular-sized edition after getting the big ad-crammed Sunday paper. Yeah, I'm sure. Didn't come with a corresponding price drop though. Meanwhile, what content they do offer is increasingly from the AP or some other, larger paper, such as the L.A. Times. On some occasions they do offer good, interesting local reports, but their current plan of routinely raising the subscription price while reducing content seems poorly thought-out.