Future ‘Newspapers’ Starting to Emerge
Allan Mutter offers a great capsule analysis of the predicament of newspapers and the historical forces that landed them there: The collapse of the newspaper business most assuredly was aggravated by the downturn in the economy. But it is important to note that the sales decline was well under way before the economy cratered. It is a grave mistake to think, as some industry leaders apparently do, that the industry’s problems will be solved when the economy improves. Without reproducing Mutter’s analysis or my previous discussions on newspapers, I’ll say this about the future . . . Newspapers have basically lost the distribution game, similar to other traditional industries now competing online. Some local news-publisher brands have decent traffic and have built online audiences, but portals, search engines and aggegators of various stripes have won. This is about the scale of the Internet and the better user experience and greater efficiency that these sites can bring to end users. As symbolic evidence of this the NY Times’ Saul Hansell just left to become the head of AOL’s Seed.com unit, managing the company’s more than 2K writers and freelancers. This is the “newspaper” model of the future and Hansell (perhaps wisely) sees that. Time will tell whether he helps maintain and boost quality or if he simply presides over a mountain of mediocre content designed primarily to generate page views for ads. Portals such as MSN, Yahoo! and AOL are also moving aggressively into local news by doing deals with various types of publishers. MSN’s just announced deal with Hearst and NBC Local Media is one of several examples. Big branded news sites such as CNN and MSNBC have moved much more into local content. So this arena — once thought to be the salvation of newspapers (“hyper local”) — is being squeezed by larger online players, with the help of some of the affected entities. But it’s a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” scenario because these larger sites control distribution and audiences. If News Corp. pulls its content from Google, for example, that content simply “won’t exist” for many users. News Corp
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Future ‘Newspapers’ Starting to Emerge
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