Cathy has a wonderful post today from the perspective of a reader of newspapers. The whole post is very thoughtful and direct.
The newspaper professionals know that things have changed. I started predicting who subscribes and who doesn’t to the advertising woman standing in the booth. She knew the data because of the “reader surveys.” Are newspapers doing “non-reader” surveys? People were very willing to share their opinions yesterday. “By the time I am able to sit and read it, it’s already old news.” I’m not a subscriber, but I do visit the newspaper’s website. I visit it to read about local news and read the comments that people make on each article. I read the editorials and the letters people have written to the newspaper. I don’t read the newspaper for news. I read it for reactions. I just don’t know how print newspapers are going to survive once the computer-phobic generation is gone.
There is so much more over there. Go now.
on Mar 15th, 2008 at 12:49 pm
Topless women, is my guess. That’s how the newspapers will survive after the Netpocalypse.
on Mar 15th, 2008 at 1:35 pm
Our publisher is in the process of ordering us a video camera. Our web site now allows us to post locally-generated video, and we’re going to start experimenting with that. Of course, if we were a larger paper, in a market with a TV station, that wouldn’t be too impressive. We’re trying to make our web site more interactive, and getting some good response to it, but it’s hard so far to shift the advertising revenue from the print model to the web model, and so you worry what’s going to happen at some point when we have to actually leap the chasm.
on Mar 15th, 2008 at 1:50 pm
Well said, John.
We are going through much of the same thing and you are right. For those of us who are completely hyperlocal for our areas, the advertising revenues here, at least, have stayed very much with the print edition.
But you are so right about the leap.