Newspapers = dodo bird

The demise of the newspaper is widely predicted on the internet and, as I have written before, seems to be inevitable.

Good call, Clay, Degree in journalism…hmmm, maybe I’ll go back to school and train in care and feeding of the passenger pigeon…just to continue a theme.

Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit fame has a column up with some advice to newspapers on how to meet the challenges and survive in this digital Renaissance. He advocates increasing resources dedicated to reporting, multi-tasking reporters as writers and photographers/videographers and relying on the public for expertise and commentary.

This is all well and good, but does not address some of the underlying problems being experienced by newspapers – they are dominated by an old guard of lockstep liberal elitists whose view of the world is skewed from that of its readers. They cling to their belief they are the sole reliable source for news and are loathe to admit mistakes. These are not endearing features on the internet, where liars and data manipulators are pounced on with cheetah speed by armies of fact checkers who have easy access to nearly every word ever written.

In the end, your only draws on the web as a news source are your reputation and the resources you devote to gathering and disseminating information. Up to this point, newspaper resources devoted to reporting have been strangled by old-school publishers with no real interest in content but a very real interest in the profit/loss picture. It would require an act of faith by these publishers that huge increases in resources devoted to reporting would result in profits for the media firm.

I don’t see them “casting bread upon the water” in hopes that it will be returned to them.

And therein lays the biggest obstacle. Newspapers have not yet come up with a viable way to generate their accustomed huge profits through an internet portal. Subscriptions are nice, but they don’t begin to pay the bills. There is nowhere to place the sheer volume of ads that comprises the bulk of a newspaper. There are no in-house advertising printing jobs in the digital age, either, to boost the profits.

If a media enterprise was smart, it would start bringing some of the most popular bloggers into its subscription-only stable, which would also feature extensive resources devoted to original reporting. In this way, the media outlet could gather market share and then charge a commensurate rate for advertisers…they must shift thinking from sheer ad volume to providing the most desirable exposure for advertisers. In that way, the profit thinking must shift from the old paper and ink model to one more closely approximating television.

Sans guaranteed huge profits and market share, I don’t see the established media outlets making the full jump to the internet. And by the time they recognize the inevitability of the change, it will be too late.