Thanks for the thoughtful analysis of an industry in turmoil. You make great points unfortunately it also goes to show the proof of the old maxim that hindsight is 20/20. I’m not an industry expert but I think that what also happened was the conglomeration of newspapers. They became just another branch office and not the locally owned, locally nurtured, locally invested institution of yesterday but just another corporate outpost – a vehicle to drive revenue through, as you state, an advertising dependent business model. So when a better way came along first with Monster.com and others encroaching on want ads and then craigslist.org and autotrader.com taking their classified ad revenue their model began to crumble.

It’s not that they didn’t have a business model but rather that they didn’t change their business model in the face of rapid change.

Hopefully http://www.InsideDenverTimes.com and the http://www.SeattlePI.com will find a new way to reinvent professional print journalism, digitally.

Thanks,

Tom
@tomjgray

As sad as it is, industrial media killed itself. It is NOT the Internet that killed publishers it is the change of their business model from independent content to advertising.

A publisher used to make money by providing a given audience latest news, well researched and easy to consume. Readers paid for the news and publishers made a profit by balancing cost of news gathering and distribution with newspaper revenue. Rather simple model.

In the 70s a new business model entered the publishing industry. Advertising. While the New York Times once stated that they will never have adds… 20 years later the revenue model for the entire industry was advertising. Charging for the newspaper had nothing to do with revenue but exclusively with the fact that the papers had to report the number of sold circulation to the advertisers.

Then the Internet came to life publishers had a gigantic opportunity: a) The news could reach the subscriber even faster and b) the cost of distribution could go way down at the same time. So if news gathering, journalistic preparation and distribution would be the purpose of a publisher, The Internat would have been a blessing. But at that time publishing wasn’t about news distribution anymore but about advertising distribution. And the new advertising model wasn’t too clear to the printing industry.

And as publishers didn’t really know what their business model is, advertisers went directly to the Internet – not needing print anymore and the chewed out news world is going out of business.Well – almost. There are new magazines and some news papers who get this and they are still somewhat alive.

But our world is more than ever thirsty for news, information and updates. All the publishing industry has to do, is to understand that new world, it’s dynamics and its most likely development in the future. A new model is in the works – happy to help.

@AxelS

Thanks for the plug {grin}