If you’ve been reading in the newspapers about newspapers, you know that there isn’t a whole lot of good news.
If you’ve been reading in the newspapers about newspapers, you know that there isn’t a whole lot of good news.
Yet another annoncement of layoffs at a major daily, this one here in Chicago. Both Chicago dailies are in bankruptcy. In Detroit, daily newspapers are only delivered four days a week. In Denver, the Rocky Mountain News isn’t being delivered at all.
It’s enough to make you wonder if newspapers (I mean the ones actually printed on paper) will go away.
I’m not old enough to remember when radio was the main source of family entertainment. But I’m told that there was a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth when that newfangled contraption called television came along. It was thought that television would just kill radio.
It didn’t. Radio adapted, found out that music would engage listeners as well as the radio serials, and ad dollars kept coming in. Radio kept adapting, formatting, going stereo, creating new formats — all talk, all sports, all ignorant, going satellite — and the dollars still came in.
Television was supposed to soak up all the advertising dollars, crippling newspapers, siphoning the life’s blood from radio. But then videotape and recording technology was going to kill television. Nobody would sit and watch those programs anymore. They’d just tape them for viewing later and skip the advertising.
But television adapted. Cable and satellite brought hundreds of new stations – a channel for everyone. Advertisers could target their message to a special audience and get more bang for their bucks.
Now it is the Internet that is killing newspapers. Sure, there is a whole generation of Americans who don’t go to their newspaper to get their news, or their entertainment or their information.
They can go to the Internet and find all of that information (and keep their quarters in their pockets). And advertisers would flock to the Internet to get their message out. The Internet is simply forcing newspapers to adapt a lot more quickly than they have been able to, like trying to make a sharp turn in one of those super tankers.
Those that have not been able to make those sharp turns have found themselves running around on high printing costs, high labor costs, high distribution costs, with no corresponding hike in revenues.
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