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Re: If newspapers weren't oldspapers...
Harold Rosado | 
Walter Michot |
said by RadioDoc  :Newspapers have almost never survived on subscription revenue. They are failing due to the dismal economy driving ad spending through the floor. Oh they where failing long before the economy went south. Their problems are many, but most of them stem primarily from managements resistance to progress, for the longest time they acted as though the Internet was a non-existent entity and could never be a threat to their ivory towers. Then as they lost market share rather then admit to their problems and do something about it, they cut losses by cutting staff, laying off a lion’s share of their front line reporters and photographers relying instead on the wires and the “free” images sent in by glory seekers.
The result being they now have high school students, rewriting/ghostwriting for credits, wire stories that may or may not have been proofed by the staff writer whose name appears on the story. Quality is lost and what is being published (excepting sports) is quite often many days old not accurate or incomplete and may often contain bias as it is not being written by a journalist but a student and they still wonder why circulation plummets.
So what do they do? Well down here one of the first tries was to partner with a radio station and that flopped as so called news-radio is going through the same moves and parroting the same wire stories, if not actually reading it from their partner’s newspaper.
Now the latest game is to go head to head against TV utilizing the Internet, oh yea right that’s going to work, they fail to realize the Internet like TV is a visual media that lends it self well to motion, not stills and those TV folks have the production of video down pat,I predict this will also fail as they are getting out of their league and are really not putting their heart in to the effort.
I recently covered an event in Miami »Pro-Israel and Pro-Palestine rallies clash in Miami Florida. where a number of local TV stations had their cameramen/stringers covering the story as well the local fish wrap the Miami herald. Note the contrast in equipment utilized by the cameraman Harold Rosado working for WSVN/Fox and the cameraman Walter Michot for the Herald.
The problem with the Herald and why they will fail is they still are convinced the Internet is a second rate system of distribution, so they see no reason to grab for quality, placing once again what got them to where they are, that being cost over content.
Wayne
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If you cannot fix it with a buttset and some beanies you ain't a technician.
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