The News Journal Can’t Be Far Behind.
The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News, and the Journal Register, which is a regional network of suburban Philadelphia papers, like the Chester Daily Local News, the Trentonian, and the Phoenixville Phoenix, have all declared for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy.
You knew this was going to happen the minute newspapers began posting their stories online for free. Paper Newspapers are going extinct. Within 5 years or less, there will no longer be daily paper newspapers. Indeed, I suspect a majority of the nation’s papers will not survive this Depression. In their place, local weekly community papers will survive for coverage of purely local news and events, while the big “papers” will go completely digital and completely premium. If you want to read the New York Times and the Inquirer online, you will have to buy a monthly or yearly subscription.
If you want to read the New York Times and the Inquirer online, you will have to buy a monthly or yearly subscription.
… which means I will read them only in their Fair Use excerpts on blogs.
Which also means blogs will have their first necessary expense – fees to read the primary news sources.
Also – if enough local newspapers cancel their news service wires, AP et all will then have an incentive to cut all the outlets out of the loop and build their own pay website.
I think some of this newspapers online is partly their own fault. If you are going to use cookies, then keep track of what I read online. As you do that, you can tailor the page to what I usually look at on your website. That way, instead of getting car advertisements, I may actually get ads that I’m interested in 🙂
Say I’m reading a story about the Phillies. Wouldn’t it make sense to have the ads on the page selling tickets etc? I still see the same auto ads when I’m looking at box scores
But, smarter people than me haven’t figured this out yet, so I’m not sure I can help either 🙂
I think you’re absolutely spot on about what’s going to happen to newspapers. Local papers will continue, with their resources focused on local reporting only and national and international news will be covered by subscription news aggregators, I think.
The News Journal’s situation is not comparable to The Inquirer’s.
The Inquirer is profitable, as is The Chicago Tribune, whose parent has also filed for bankruptcy protection. In each case, the bankruptcy filing is because of debt in connection with the purchase.
That won’t happen here. Gannett bought The News-Journal 30 years ago.
I still contend that there is a demand is this country for a legit left of center newspaper like England’s “Guardian.”
If the PI decided to occupy that market space they could build a decent brand and attract readers and stop tying to put the advertising cart before the horse.
I dunno Jason.
I’d rather advertise to my conservative neighbors who all park their cars outside because the garages — all three bays — are full of Chinese crap. They seem to be consumers. They are only fiscally conservative when it comes to somebody else getting a break.
The liberals I know all seem to be pretty fiscally conservative with their personal expenditures.
So maybe there are studies that show that advertising to the conservatives works better than advertising to the liberals — I’d bet this is true.
Which means, no left-leaning paper.