why are newspapers drowning?
could there be reasons other than digital that newspaper reading is declining?
It seems to be fairly common to read or hear about how the newspaper industry is screwed (Murdoch doesn’t seem to agree). The reason most commonly cited to the decline of newspapers is digital technology and the fragmentation of media (a term thrown around with such disregard that I feel slightly ill even typing it out). Lately I’ve been thinking maybe, just maybe, there’s a little more to the decline of newspapers. Specifically, people seem to be spending less time than ever doing nothing. Every moment is filled with phone calls, texting, emailing, mobile web surfing, etc. How many people sit down in the morning for a relaxing cup of coffee? Most people I know drink their cup of coffee at their desk while browsing the web/answering emails.
None of this is to say that newspapers shouldn’t be focusing resources on trying to figure out how to monetize their offering for a digital world, just to say that there might be other things playing into their decline that are worth thinking about.
Not that I have any good answers.
Newspapers are in the same slow death spiral as the evening network news because they are bland. The traditional newspaper audience is dying off and/or going to sources that better mirror their own POV. Most people don’t want to have to consider opinions counter to their own version of truth. Murdoch is savvy enough to understand how to match unmet audience needs, read Fox News, with appropriately flavored and relevant content. The old school model of pushing vanilla to the masses is obsolete; we’re all fairly niched-up in our own world. Newspapers have been reduced to a bland bloggers with a press and deliver boys.
Question. When was the last time you watched the network news? Why?
Umm… I think the last time I watched the evening news was when Katie Couric went to CBS. I wanted to see what she’d do differently, if anything. Answer? She stood up once or twice.
I agree about the “plain vanilla” observation. Which is why I’m interested to watch how newspapers (and newscasts) change in the near future. One thing that seems to be on the immediate horizon is newspapers and wire services becoming facilitators for hyper-local reporting — empowering citizen journalists. And I’m sure there are many other ways to make a newspaper relevant again.
A good example of a newspaper-like publication that is doing very well is The Week — which compiles coverage from newspapers around the world on the news of the day.
They’re doing well because they are addressing the info/cell/email/life -overload feeling we all have.
The Week is an interesting case study. They’re doing great as more people look to top news organizations for little more than a cursory knowledge of many stories. The Week brilliantly compiled those stories in 16 pages.
By contrast, look at the sheer mass of the New York Times, and nothing about it address those needs. It’s big, heavy, and cumbersome — like it’s content.
[…] wrote about this over at the Naked blog last week and I figured I’d mention it here as well. I’ve been thinking that the decline of […]