Newsosaur reporting:
...
So, yes,
some newspapers will fail, as they run out of relevance, readers and
revenues. Since the Great Recession, we have lost such titles as the
Rocky Mountain News, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the Tucson Citizen
and the Manassas (VA) News & Messenger. But newspaper failures, as
demonstrated by the demise in 1978 of the estimable Chicago Daily News, are not new news.
So, where does that leave us? Hopeful but worried. Here’s why:
The future
of newspapers – or, more precisely, local news ventures that may or may
not involve putting ink to paper – will depend on whether the people
running them are up to the considerable challenge of creatively
disrupting their businesses before an ever-growing phalanx of digital
competitors destroy what’s left of the still-enviable commercial might
and journalistic value of their enterprises.
Unfortunately,
the industry’s track record is not good. In the two decades since the
Internet burst into common consciousness, the leaders of the newspaper
industry have failed to recognize the need for profound change, much
less manifested the grit to go for it. Rearranging the deck chairs by
shuffling newspapers into free-standing entities won’t, in and of
itself, change the troubling trajectory of the newly liberated
publishing units of News Corp., Tribune, Scripps, Journal Communications
or Gannett.
....
As painstakingly (and painfully) detailed here,
the weekday circulation of newspapers fell by 47% in the last 10 years
to the point that only a quarter of the nation’s households take a daily
newspaper. Print and digital advertising sales fell by 55% in a decade.
In spite of aggressive efforts by most publishers to increase the fees
they collect from print and digital readers to offset the ad decline,
the industry’s total revenues slid 35% in the last 10 years, dropping
the average pre-tax profits of publicly held publishers by 37%.
...http://newsosaur.blogspot.fi/2014/08/are-newspapers-doomed-it-depends.html
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