Are newspapers making the shift? In my 9 month cross country car trip, I’m looking at local newspapers and see some exhilarating and genuinely grief-inducing reaction to the realities print newspapers now face due to the new realities of the economy, the challenges of web news and web opinion and social media, and the decline in newspaper readership among young people. Only a few years ago I’d buy every newspaper I could find in a news box or at a convenience store and read piles of newspapers at lunch. Now I can’t find as many newspapers, or at times find them, and the ones I find are often thin and almost “shoppers.” I now bring my Kindle to lunch.
And when I read about or talk to or email media types at various levels I see some who still seem to be resentful of change, or want to keep embracing a mega-gatekeeper mentality where you are allowed to express a view or share one, or who dabble in the new media realities in a perfunctory but not sufficient way.
Allen D. Mutter, whose blog Reflections of a Newsosaur should be required reading for media types of those interested in media, has a must read of one of his Editor & Publisher columns. The title: “Four ways newspapers are failing at digital.”
Here’s the intro:
Nearly two decades after the commercial debut of the Internet, most publishers still are applying the anachronistic newspaper model to their digital businesses. This is nuts.
And it has to stop, if publishers have any hope of retaining a semblance of the relevance, readership and revenues that historically made them the influential and commercially successful enterprises they would like to continue to be in the future.
Although readers and advertisers are flocking to the proliferating digital media as fast as they can, the stubborn fact is that most newspapers derive only about 10% of their revenues from digital products. While it is true that the relative digital contribution to newspaper revenues has grown in recent years, the gain has more to do with the 50% plunge in aggregate advertising sales since 2005 than a truly meaningful increase in digital revenues. In other words, the numerator looks bigger because the denominator shrank.
If publishers want to get serious about adopting real digital business models, they have to address four enormous problems:
Go to the link to read the four points.
To be sure, there are publications that fully understand the new media and have taken the ball and effectively run with it. You can find some former print-only newspapers that are huge presences. And some publications are making hires of news-savy,journalistically-solid new-media savy young journalists and editors who can take news content and maximize its effectiveness and presence in the new media age — and do it with gusto.
And then there are those going through the motions or insufficient motions.
And there are those who aren’t considered young who are making the adaption and doing it with gust.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.