A Deeper Dive Into What Really Damaged Newspapers - A Media Operator

The economy is interconnected. There are a lot of reasons newspapers have died off. Some were out of their control. I imagine a future where there are plenty of local publications that serve their communities with smart reporting, structured data sets around important issues and great ad products for marketers.

But it’s also because newspapers were an oligopoly, and they lose that oligopoly online. Newspapers are, yes, a content business, but they were also a light manufacturing business, and it was the replacement of light manufacturing and trucking with bits that removed the barrier to entry and unbundled their attention.

That doesn’t mean they can’t change, but so far, there has been a general unwillingness to look at the real problem. Rather than throwing out audacious claims like Facebook and Google should pay us for the right to send us traffic, we should, instead, be looking at finding ways to deliver value to our readers and ad partners in a way that platforms... See more

The means of distribution changed. It is very easy to generate revenue when you’re the only player in town. That changed with the internet and newspapers took a very long time to fundamentally change.

The internet made it possible for anyone to enter the publishing world. There were considerable fixed costs to getting started 30 years ago, but now, it’s as easy as buying a domain name, hooking up some hosting and writing.