Newspapers Closing While Localization Continues on the Web
If you came here after searching for Why Newspapers Are Closing On The Web you may also want to read the post about Print Media Moving Online.
As has been widely reported lately the old school newspapers continue to lose money and close up shop while online ad spending grows. Today I found an interesting story, ironically, in the paper version of USA Today. How did I find it, well because the paper was sitting outside my hotel room door this morning.
Rather than paging through the cumbersome, too large, flimsy paper copy I went online and read the same story. Hence the problem the newspapers are running headlong into.
Most papers have some online ad component at this point but most were using it to supplement their offline revenue rather than using it as their primary business model. This is catching up with them. As more and more people are going online to check everything from news to classifieds to weather they no longer need 6, 12, 24, 36 hour old info.
As I posted on twitter recently its all about local, local, local, social, social, social....
You can read the story here: USA Today Article
I think for the majority of the newspapers, although their online ad revenue has grown, it is too late to fix their core business models to make it through the era of real time, mashed up, and twitter size news.
I found it extremely disappointing that a group of people laid off from the Denver paper actually were petitioning to get 50,000 subs signed up for a subscription fee to start an online news site. Once again, old school models that just will not work for localized news.
These issues that the newspapers are facing are core to many legacy brick and mortar industries but are also the reason our domain names/web properties will continue to gain value even while the economy fights through this downturn.
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