Newspapers are in trouble, and things keep getting worse. With circulation dropping and currently at the same level as 1946 (!), papers sold per capita are at a fraction of former levels. The death spiral could become fairly dramatic since newspapers have a lot of fixed costs and many are already losing money. Unlike internet enterprises, papers cannot easily scale back expenses as advertising revenues flow online. This will likely lead to continued consolidation of local papers and probably will become a death knell for many others.
Newsosaur has More»

Labels: Advertising, Newspapers, Online Advertising

Two articles this week suggest how tough it’s becoming to turn a buck in the print media world. Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine and founder of eWeek, notes in “Whither Mags”, that major print efforts require a huge capital outlay before they can even hope to be profitable, and that the current high risk associated with print publications means we probably won’t see nearly as many new big magazine efforts.
Even more ominous for the future of the newspaper industry was the New York Times report showing circulation declines almost across the board for US Newspapers. More»

Labels: Blogs, Newspapers, Online Advertising

There is a great summary at Business Week of the remarkable rise and pending potential fall of Silicon Valley’s newspaper - the San Jose Mercury News. BW notes that in many ways the Mercury News saw it all coming, but still failed to position itself to profit from the migration of offline info to online info.
Although the article does not make this point, I’d suggest that the failure supports the idea that paradigm shifts do not come from old systems evolving into new ones even when the old systems “get it”, rather More»

Labels: companies, Facebook, IBM, Newspapers, San Jose Mercury News, Yahoo