Oh man if the newspaper industry gets a bailout, I will throw a fit. Now don’t get me wrong, I love newspapers, and I love newspaper people, I just don’t respect 99% of the businesses they run. Why don’t I respect their businesses? Well they refuse to adapt and evolve. Its like if I told you your car was stuck on the tracks and a train was coming, and instead of moving your car, you decided to build a cement wall around it…
The latest ridiculousness is the report by the API, highlighted on techcrunch, suggesting that google is to blame and that they need to piece back together their shit to the same structure it was before. If it didn’t work before, why would you waste billions trying to force it to work now? Why not spend millions and make it what people want? The report argues that hyperlinking and other “new” technologies are killing them. Oh wow, people only want to read what they are interested in? They don’t want to pay for all of your day’s content when all they want is one article? I wonder why? (if you are calling the shots at a newspaper, let me clarify, that was sarcasm in case you didn’t understand).
Lets examine the facts a bit. Previously newspapers made money selling you all their content at once in one transaction. This transaction delivered not only all of their content for the issue, but all of the ads at the same time. If you are an advertiser, that isn’t the most effective means of advertising, especially in an age where you can target and track all your ads online. Advertisers had no idea if their ads were ever being read, so its money down the drain. Newspapers profited from this fact that their main revenue stream was an unmeasurable interruption marketing scheme.
Newspapers need to realize that they are in the content business and the ad sales business. You know what, I just realized I’m wasting your time and more importantly MY time writing about this. I think this hits my quota for the quarter on posts about how the newspaper industry is dead. Why bother yammering about a sinking ship if no one on the boat wants to save it. No sense beating a dead horse. I’m gonna go read a blog or watch cnn.
