It's a sad and painful thing, watching the slow-motion train wreck in Minneapolis. And for the passengers on that train, it must be bewildering and humiliating to be the utterly dominant newspaper in a market long considered solid gold, yet declare bankruptcy.
Earlier today I posted a question on Twitter:
Standard site templates: http://tinyurl.com/a9ytm9 says nay, I say yea. How vote ye?
Responses came quickly:
danjohn1234
danjohn1234 @yelvington a resounding yea from me on templates. Content trumps design always. The content should set a mareket apart, not the design.gmarkham
gmarkham @yelvington voting yea with some ifs: if totally customizable and if (the big one) under local control/decision-making.
I know I'm repeating myself, but it bears repeating: The Internet isn't killing newspapers.
The Internet didn't create the conditions that left the Lee Enterprises, the Tribune Company, Journal Register, Gatehouse Media, the Star Tribune and a dozen others hanging off a cliff, dangling from a tree root.
By far and away, it's the economy, the economy, and also the economy, combined with some badly timed financial bets. And the economy is cyclical.
So the New York Times is running display advertising on the front page. And there's a great disturbance in the Twittersphere and an upheaval in the Blogosphere. Either this is a crime against the purity of the newspaper, or it's something that should have been done long ago, depending on who's talking.
Ultimately it makes no difference whatsoever.
What's important is: What money is this? Where's it coming from? Is it new revenue, or just another case of moving money from one pocket to another?
Writing for Slate, Jack Schafer describes "How Newspapers Tried to Invent the Web But Failed." You new kids should read it carefully. Then get off my lawn.
Schafer, who reveals he was offered a job at the Washington Post's first online service but "turned the job down because I had no idea what job was being offered to me," concludes that "From the beginning, newspapers sought to invent the Web in their own image by repurposing the copy, values, and temperament found in their ink-and-paper editions."
Newspapers face three different, but interrelated, economic challenges.
One is the technology-driven restructuring of the news business, in which the Internet is a major force that is disintegrating the traditional product model. That's a very real long-term process. It's not the biggest immediate source of trouble, but it's a factor.
Jeff Jarvis has started a good conversation with a post titled "Bad news, good news" at Buzzmachine. In response to a comment that "The problem with the Good News is that newspapers can’t translate an equal online readership into the same revenue as in print," I posted the note below, which cites the frequency-of-usage failure that I've mentioned on many previous occasions. Once again, I'm concerned that journalists just don't understand their role in creating or solving the underlying problem.
