Sign #203,467 That Newspapers Are Doomed

8:42 am EST December 23rd, 2008 | Media | 7 Comments

The Washington Post is hawking $10 classified ads to welcome the Obama presidency.

If they spent even 1/10th of that effort into making the Washington Post website even semi usable (I dare you to glance at the front page and find the daily chat sessions the Post does – unfindable!) they would make up the likely meager revenue they’re going to rake in for this little trick.

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7 Responses to “Sign #203,467 That Newspapers Are Doomed”

  1. Tim Fuller says:
    December 23, 2008 at 12:56 pm

    I love the smell of media desperation in the morning.

    Enjoy.

  2. joaquin says:
    December 23, 2008 at 1:38 pm

    I can’t imagine newspapers being around in 15 years. (Well maybe the USAToday outside your hotel door)
    When you have papers like the WSJ pushing their online edition, you know they can see what’s coming.

  3. Quaker in a Basement says:
    December 23, 2008 at 5:26 pm

    Any newspaper executive who thinks he or she is in the “newspaper business” needs to retire. Newspaper companies are in the news business and the advertising business. There’s really not much point in trying to find ways to keep delivering the product on sheets of paper.

    If I was working for a newspaper company, I’d be looking for a merger with a television station. (Of course, that raises all sorts of regulatory issues, but them’s the breaks.) If you look five or ten years down the road, news in text form is going to be an adjunct to news in video form and both are going to be delivered over cable or HD digital over-the-air signals into a user-controlled interface.

    TV stations and TV networks are going to resist–initially–the challenge to provide supplementary content. However, as Jeri Ryan has told us, resistance is futile. Cable and TIVO and whatever-comes-next will begin by allowing two open windows–one for video, one for internet. If TV news management is smart, they’ll capitalize on giving viewers the capability to select content rather than have it pushed at them.

    Once that happens, there’s no separating TV, internet, and text.

  4. Parthenon says:
    December 23, 2008 at 6:25 pm

    Too bad. TV news is garbage, and blogs conform to the ethical standards only of the blogger. The best scenario is newspapers converting to all digital format.

  5. Quaker in a Basement says:
    December 23, 2008 at 6:50 pm

    The best scenario is newspapers converting to all digital format.

    Revenue is a problem.

    Newspapers haven’t been able to generate a significant revenue stream from online products. Television is going great guns through cable. If you’re going to pay good reporters and writers, you gotta sell either ads or subscriptions.

  6. ncsenior says:
    December 23, 2008 at 7:43 pm

    What, I’m going to have to take my laptop to the John with me?

  7. Jaim says:
    December 23, 2008 at 10:45 pm

    Unfindable? That’s unpossible!