If Newspapers Die, Local TV News is Next

One of the things blamed for the death of the newspaper in America is the loss of classified ads, but that’s only half the story.  The real reason newspapers are dying is because by the time you pick one up, you’ve already read half the stories online.  Newspapers, in the olden days, payed other newspapers for the right to use their articles (syndication).  In 1978, this made sense because people spent their day at work, came home, and saw fresh news on their doorsteps.

Today, everyone reads the news all day sporadically at work, and were they to come home and read a paper, they’d find that they had already seen virtually all of the syndicated content.  The only “news” is the local news.  Local dailys have always had trouble filling a full paper with their content, and reporters are expensive.

So, the reason classified revenue is down is because readership is down, which is due to the lack of fresh news.  Flip on your local 6 O’Clock news and you’ll likely experience the exact same phenomenon.  I find that my local news is literally reporting 3 day old synidcated news along with fresh local news, and they too cannot fill a full newscast with the stuff I haven’t already seen.  I wonder how long they’ll last.  I’ll miss both newspapers and local TV news but they both are failing to adapt to modern news consumption.

Tags: advertising, business, media, newspapers

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 22nd, 2009 at 6:36 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.