That Whining Sound You Hear Is The Death Wheeze Of Newspapers

[Speck Tater]

The newspaper industry is making a lot of noise these days about the Web “stealing” its content and destroying its business. Invariably, the newsmen point their ink-stained fingers at blogs, which are nothing more than “parasites”, or at Google, which is supposedly aiding and abetting in the wholesale theft of the newspaper’s precious words.

...

The worst part about their whining is that it is completely hypocritical. While newspaper chiefs are complaining in public about Google, their editorial departments are sprouting blogs and their technology departments are using every SEO trick in the book to make sure their articles show up in Google searches and Google News. As Danny Sullivan points out in beautiful rant, if they really wanted to, any newspaper could stop its content from showing up on Google with one simple line of code:

...

Done. Do that, you’re outta Google. All your pages will be removed, and you needn’t worry about Google listing the Wall St. Journal at all. Oh, but you won’t do that. You want the traffic, but you also want to be like the AP and hope you can scare Google into paying you. Maybe that will work. Or maybe you’ll be like all those Belgian papers that tried the same thing and watched their traffic sadly dry up.

More at: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/07/that-whining-sound-you-hear-is-the-death-wheeze-of-newspapers/

[lob1]

1. They might do better if they decided not to be corporate shills.

[Kalyke]

5. That is Congress's fault more than any one journalist, though.

Congress relaxed rules that forbade one person or company to own too much media - allowing for the likes of Rupert Murdock - and that's when the shilling began.

Good reporters were driven out, not paid well enough to support their families, whilst ideologues were give the bigger bucks and promotions.

Trust me - been there, done that.

[jody]

2. Agree. Papers long ago lost their reputation for accurate reporting but the internet is rumor

mongering on a global scale.

Governments have full-time propaganda machines spreading lies sprinkled with a few truths to captivate the unwary which in the U.S. must be over 80%.

How in H..* can We the People be informed enough to vote for representatives who will protect our interests under those conditions?

[mitchum]

3. Just as blacksmiths railed against those damn automobiles...evolve or die

[Romulox]

4. 99% of the content of newspaper has little to do with "news"

I'm not going to let Ganett, Knight-Ridder, et al. blackmail me into paying for "Lifestyle", "Food", "Fashion", etc. etc. etc. just so I can read 2 columns of headlines.

[WI_DEM]

6. It's a shame. I know our liberal cap times here in Madison folded up last year

and now we only have the more conservative Wi State Journal. The Cap times put on a web edition, but I think people are on line way too much and for me it hurts my eyes after a while, so I like reading a newspaper.

[KharmaTrain]

7. It's Due To Changes In Advertising...

If a paper could cram 200 page of ads and 3 pages of news, you wouldn't hear anything about their woes. It's a changing world and newspapers are caught up with a 20th century model in the 21st. It long ago stopped making its real money off of subscriptions and street sales, but off of their circulation numbers, advertising agencies and classified ads.

They've become a victim of the "mallization" of America...the corporate attack on local retail bases that saw many of their former big customers bought out by an outside corporate...one who had a different advertising philosophy. It all but destroyed small papers as it drove out the moms and pops that were their bread and butter...and now on the larger scale.

There's also the technology gap...advertisers have more means to reach their targeted audiences and newspapers don't fit the profile. Younger people never eally have gotten into the "newspaper habit" and are more likely to be reached via a website or cable tv.

Then there's the shit economy. Many of the "institutional" advertisers of newspapers like banks, car dealers and large retail stores are fighting for their economic lives. The first thing that goes in hard times is the ad budget...especially on the local level. Losing these big tickets are hard to replace. Then add that to rise of Craigslist and Ebay that all but destroyed the classified cash cow.

While it's a shame to see newspapers go the way of town criers and public notices, these companies helped bring on their own destruction by overextending their reach and getting caught in both bad economic times and a changing information age.

[emulatorloo]

8. Yeah just wait until all info disappears down the "Memory Hole" of the internet

We will miss hardcopy newspapers then.