Reviews:
 ·WOW Internet and..
| Local news papers never had a problem until large mega corps took over. I'm from a town where Gannet News took over. All of the local stories now take over 2 weeks to get published in the print edition...other wise the paper is all AP stories an the website is now nothing but ads and people's blogs.
That's not news. |
| And that's what's destroying major newspapers. There are other causes, but when a company like Liberty Media buys the LA Times, a paper that was at the time netting 200million a year in PROFIT btw, and guts the news staff from 200+ to less than 40, fires all the best writers and fills the paper with all the same AP stories you can read on the internet you can guarantee the failure of the paper.
I still read our local paper occasionally, in particular because they still do actual local reporting, but not near at the level they should. Like most they have turned into an AP regurgitator. Any paper that simply reruns the AP or Reuters or any other aggregator is going to go under. All that content is available online for free. Competing in the world of the internet requires that you differentiate yourself from everyone else. You don't do that by running stories off the ticker.
I would wager that all but one newspaper in every city will die. Where once you could have up to 4 major papers in a single large city you will have one paper. It will devolve until only the papers that want to generate content instead of reposting it will succeed. It's not the death of news, it's just changing. Local news can succeed. Once everyone has a Kindle like device digital subscriptions will become common but only those papers that generate content will survive till that point. |
