More Newspaper Woes Looming, Circulation Falling; Nonprofits & Going Online Models are Not Working:By Marc Chamot & Source: Andrew S. Ross
New reports show that newspapers’ circulations are dropping faster than ever, and new models like nonprofits and going online is just not working for them. What’s a newspaper to do?
The Obama administration says no way to the fast collapsing newspaper industries. Carl Shapiro, a member of the Obama administration told congress last week, that they don’t believe that the industry needs new exemptions from anti-trust laws.
But the news is getting bleaker for this industry, and new models for their very own survival don’t seem to be working either.
“The rate of decline in print circulation at the nation’s newspapers has accelerated since last fall, as industry figures released Monday show a more than 7 percent drop compared with the previous year, while another recent analysis showed that newspaper Web site audiences had increased 10.5 percent in the first quarter.”
The Miami Herald is still on the block with no buyers in sight. The McClatchy Bee’s Northern California’s premier newspapers are 2 million dollars in debt and faces delisting from the NYSE their shares are down to .53cents.
The New York Times posting quarterly loses of $74.2 million, their credit ratings has been pushed into junk status by Moody and Standard and Poor. Media News Group, the Bay Area behemoths got its creditors to hold off yanking its papers to cover billion dollar debts. And the San Francisco Chronicle is still using the ax, with new proposals to eliminate all home deliveries outside the city of San Francisco. All delivery routes just beyond San Francisco city and county limits are to be eliminated entirely by the end of the month.
Is nonprofit and going online the answer for these papers? There is also bad karma going against them in both of these regards.
Ideas have been thrown about like making newspapers nonprofits, but that model doesn’t seem to work either. Take the Christian Science Monitor for example; they eliminated all of their print editions after losing $18.5 million in 2008. And another nonprofit, the St Petersburg Times, owned by the nonprofit Poynter Institute is also going broke.
Hearst Corp’s now defunct Seattle Post Intelligencer’s website has fallen by one-third since they stopped printing. And it’s still falling at this moment.
Former staffers of the Rocky Mountain News who started their online newspaper gig, they all thought that they could attract over 50,000 of their former print customers. On Thursday they said that they wouldn’t be able to pursue the original business model, after only getting 3,000 paid subscribers. Now, one of its key investors into this venture wants staff reduced to ten writers. The Boston Globe is also facing imminent death soon.
Take for another example Asian Week. A San Francisco Asian/Chinese newspaper that had been publishing for over thirty years, they stopped printing around the first of the year and stayed online. But, according to Alexa.com, they used to be around the top 100,000 websites, since they stopped publishing, they have dropped well below that and they keep dropping like flies.
It definitely proves one thing, it takes a print publication to constantly advertise their websites, print helps bring in customers to their websites, but when the printing is over, most people forget or just don’t go back, because most of these websites have never fully established themselves on the Web, unlike bloggers who have.
It’s really tough to make it online, it’s a dog eat dog world out there. I will tell you as a blogger, because I know. It takes a whole lot of time and hard work, a lot of patience to build up a reputable blog; it is building up relationships with Google, other bloggers, fans, links, and feeds that net you readers.
I have seen my traffic through Google search engines quadruple, my Google page rank increase and my Alexa ratings climbing through the roof. Just look at this simple logic, good informative blogs always increase in readerships, while newspaper websites drop when they terminate their printing sector, why is that?
Like I had mentioned before in one of my past postings, when newspapers do decide to go online, they have got to use established bloggers on the Net, who can help them bring traffic to their sites. Just starting from scratch is virtually impossible.
Online newspapers and established bloggers are the only way to go. Trying to save your journalist’s jobs is fine and dandy, well deserved and very appreciative, but they don’t get you any traffic into your websites, unlike established bloggers who do.
Bloggers work the Net all of the time, they are established by Google and many other networks. They have thousands, and upon thousands of back links and feed subscribers that they can bring in to the online paper on the spot, whereas online papers don’t have.
That’s the plan that could help make web newspapers more competitive online. The real benefit in having paid bloggers working for you is that they know how to work the search engines, they network, and they can constantly work the web for your online venture.
It’s just plainly wrong to keep on ignoring the wealth of these people’s skills, who are out there just for the taking.
The bottom line, newspaper publishers have got to drop their biases, prejudices, and resentments towards Google and mainly “bloggers” if they want to make it online.
Fall in Newspaper Sales Accelerates to Pass 7%
Of the top 25 newspapers in the United States, all posted declines in circulation except for The Wall Street Journal, which eked out a 0.6 percent gain, according to figures released by the Audit Bureau of Circulations. For the others, the declines ranged from 20.6 percent for The New York Post, to a slight 0.4 percent drop for The Chicago Sun-Times.
Both The Post and The Journal are owned by the News Corporation, the media conglomerate controlled by Rupert Murdoch.
The New York Times posting quarterly loses of $74.2 million, their credit ratings has been pushed into junk status by Moody and Standard and Poor. Media News Group, the Bay Area behemoths got its creditors to hold off yanking its papers to cover billion dollar debts. And the San Francisco Chronicle is still using the ax, with new proposals to eliminate all home deliveries outside the city of San Francisco. All delivery routes just beyond San Francisco city and county limits are to be eliminated entirely by the end of the month.
Is nonprofit and going online the answer for these papers? There is also bad karma going against them in both of these regards.
Ideas have been thrown about like making newspapers nonprofits, but that model doesn’t seem to work either. Take the Christian Science Monitor for example; they eliminated all of their print editions after losing $18.5 million in 2008. And another nonprofit, the St Petersburg Times, owned by the nonprofit Poynter Institute is also going broke.
Hearst Corp’s now defunct Seattle Post Intelligencer’s website has fallen by one-third since they stopped printing. And it’s still falling at this moment.
Former staffers of the Rocky Mountain News who started their online newspaper gig, they all thought that they could attract over 50,000 of their former print customers. On Thursday they said that they wouldn’t be able to pursue the original business model, after only getting 3,000 paid subscribers. Now, one of its key investors into this venture wants staff reduced to ten writers. The Boston Globe is also facing imminent death soon.
Take for another example Asian Week. A San Francisco Asian/Chinese newspaper that had been publishing for over thirty years, they stopped printing around the first of the year and stayed online. But, according to Alexa.com, they used to be around the top 100,000 websites, since they stopped publishing, they have dropped well below that and they keep dropping like flies.
It definitely proves one thing, it takes a print publication to constantly advertise their websites, print helps bring in customers to their websites, but when the printing is over, most people forget or just don’t go back, because most of these websites have never fully established themselves on the Web, unlike bloggers who have.
It’s really tough to make it online, it’s a dog eat dog world out there. I will tell you as a blogger, because I know. It takes a whole lot of time and hard work, a lot of patience to build up a reputable blog; it is building up relationships with Google, other bloggers, fans, links, and feeds that net you readers.
I have seen my traffic through Google search engines quadruple, my Google page rank increase and my Alexa ratings climbing through the roof. Just look at this simple logic, good informative blogs always increase in readerships, while newspaper websites drop when they terminate their printing sector, why is that?
Like I had mentioned before in one of my past postings, when newspapers do decide to go online, they have got to use established bloggers on the Net, who can help them bring traffic to their sites. Just starting from scratch is virtually impossible.
Online newspapers and established bloggers are the only way to go. Trying to save your journalist’s jobs is fine and dandy, well deserved and very appreciative, but they don’t get you any traffic into your websites, unlike established bloggers who do.
Bloggers work the Net all of the time, they are established by Google and many other networks. They have thousands, and upon thousands of back links and feed subscribers that they can bring in to the online paper on the spot, whereas online papers don’t have.
That’s the plan that could help make web newspapers more competitive online. The real benefit in having paid bloggers working for you is that they know how to work the search engines, they network, and they can constantly work the web for your online venture.
It’s just plainly wrong to keep on ignoring the wealth of these people’s skills, who are out there just for the taking.
The bottom line, newspaper publishers have got to drop their biases, prejudices, and resentments towards Google and mainly “bloggers” if they want to make it online.
Fall in Newspaper Sales Accelerates to Pass 7%
Of the top 25 newspapers in the United States, all posted declines in circulation except for The Wall Street Journal, which eked out a 0.6 percent gain, according to figures released by the Audit Bureau of Circulations. For the others, the declines ranged from 20.6 percent for The New York Post, to a slight 0.4 percent drop for The Chicago Sun-Times.
Both The Post and The Journal are owned by the News Corporation, the media conglomerate controlled by Rupert Murdoch.
The new circulation numbers are “not very good, and probably a little worse than expected,” said Rick Edmonds, media business analyst at the Poynter Institute, a nonprofit organization that owns The St. Petersburg Times in Florida. Mr. Edmonds said he had expected an overall drop of roughly 5.5 percent.
The figures, which are based on reports filed by the individual papers, illustrated the continued migration of readers to the Internet and, in some cases, the effort by papers to shed unprofitable circulation.
“One shouldn’t be in denial that this represents people quitting newspapers to get news from the Web,” Mr. Edmonds said. “
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2 comments:
WSJ is the only one that's doing ok!
lets see, WSJ a conservative newspaper? Making a profit while liberal media going down the tubes..that reinforces the truths as to why liberal radio don't make it...
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