The Economist: “Who killed the newspaper?”
August 30th, 2006 Zeid Nasser (Admin)
The front cover of the latest issue of The Economist says “Who Killed the Newspaper”.
Imagine that, newspapers being pronounced dead already!
Obviously, it’s too early, but it could be gradually happening as newspapers in the US and Europe are firing staff, reducing costs and accepting advertising deals at lower rates!
Apparently, newspapers who don’t successfully migrate to the Internet are losing readers, and those who do are getting more readers on the online edition than they ever did on the print edition!
The only problem is that they don’t make a decent amount of money online yet.
Time to change everything in the newspaper business, don’t you think?
And here’s a very expressive graphic image.
Read The Economist story here.
Entry Filed under: International, Magazine, Newspaper
Add to:
1 Comment Add your own
1. Daniel Morris | November 10th, 2006 at 7:40 am
A great article indeed! My family owned a newspaper, and my father sold it five years ago. The newspaper was thriving with balanced reporting and balanced editorials.
The internet hasn’t really hurt papers as much as you may think. One thing that you may want to research further is how the content and quality of the papers has lead to their decline more than anything. The internet is an easy excuse. Remember how people said television would kill radio? The internet isn’t killing newspapers. They are killing themselves.
Many of the failing papers throughout America take very clear political sides. Many take liberal stances, and some take very conservative stances. The American public doesn’t like this approach. Take the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review for instance. It has lost over 30% of its circulation in two years! Its headlines after that election in Pennsylvania stunk of sour grapes because the conservatives it so dearly loves were defeated. It’s rival, the Pittsburgh Post Gazette leans heavily liberal, and it is losing circulation about as fast.
This problem isn’t isolated to print. Fox is eating CNN for lunch. CNN is a mouthpiece for liberals, and Americans don’t like their media or politics to go to far one way or the other. Americans wanted balance in government. Hence the outcome of the recent election.
Like casting votes, people are “voting” not to read many newspapers. I have been around many newspaper executives, and they are too egotistical to ever admit that they are the problem.
Leave a Comment
Some HTML allowed:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>
Trackback this post | Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed