Jason Levine
Premium
join:2001-07-13
USA
| reply to TKJunkMail
Re: RE:FCC Considers Propping Up Old School Journalism
The Internet may have exacerbated newspapers' decline, but it wasn't really the cause of it. A few decades back, newspapers decided to do less of their own investigative reporting and rely more on AP-type stories. This let them cut staff, reducing costs and increasing profits in the short term.
The problem now is that people see (via the Internet) that the same news story appears in many different papers across the country. So why buy a bunch of papers when one will have all the stories?
Sales go down and when they do, newspapers have been responding by cutting staff and relying even more on AP content. This, of course, makes less people buy the newspapers and the cycle continues on and on and on.
Toss in the immediacy of the Internet (you don't need to wait till "press time" to get a story out) and you have a recipe for disaster for newspapers. Free content online wasn't what killed them. Their own bad business decisions killed them. Free content online just helped speed it up a bit.
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-Jason Levine
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