Eric Schmidt of Google had this to say about news papers at a recent NAA conference:
These are ultimately consumer businesses and if you piss off enough of them, you will not have any more, right? Or, if you make them happy, you will grow them quickly. And so we try really hard to think that way.
Newspapers are trying so very hard to equate themselves with journalism. IE if the newspaper goes under we will not have a place to get our news from. That is simply a slight of hand trick that only fools the most gullible of people. In his day and age journalism has been a growing field since the blog was popularized. The newspapers died a long time ago. They are now asking for a hand out when the rest of the country has moved on.
I read the New York Times almost everyday but I have never touched a print edition of their work and wouldn't have if they didn't move online. People now a days get so much of their news from the online editions and beyond that they won't buy a physical paper anymore and combine that with the economic hard times and we get what many papers are calling the apocalypse. Their solution is to shut off access if they don't get paid for content. Nothing will quicken their irrelevance in the mind of americans. What they do not get is that many online only newspapers are filling the void faster the traditional media.
they say their online counterparts cannot produce investigative journalism at the same quality as print newspapers however they online only papers have already surpassed the quality long ago. People do not have to look far to find good online only journalism The Voice of San Diego broke a major news story all on their own that brought down a major person nit eh city government. It's only a matter of time before a online only breaks news about corruption in the Senate or Congress. The papers long ago gave up their investigative journalism for access and they are finally seeing the consequences. The people giving them access only gave them one sided stories and the traditional papers never questioned it. Now they are being trumped by online media and having to catch up.
What should the newspapers do in response? Is to get back their muckrakers and embrace the online digital medium. Their circulations would increase beyond their wildest dreams and lower the cost to publish all of their content. Here;s hoping some of the better ones like the WaPo, NYT and others pick up on it before its too late.
