Nothing would have kept them in the black. The internet (and programmable billboards) came out with more effective advertising for everything from used cars that fed the classifieds to new restaurants to a brand of car wax.
You can’t make newspapers advertisements competitive for reaching customers again, so you can’t make newspapers solvent.
“Nothing would have kept them in the black. The internet (and programmable billboards) came out with more effective advertising for everything from used cars that fed the classifieds to new restaurants to a brand of car wax. You can’t make newspapers advertisements competitive for reaching customers again, so you can’t make newspapers solvent.”
indeed ... the newspaper revenue game was always based on having THE monopoly on the biggest printing press in the region AND being the ONLY cost-effective media for mass distribution of detailed information and advertising ... the information (content)was simply the means to induce subscribers to subscribe, while the advertising was what the newspaper business was really all about ... as a consequence, newspapers could charge tens of thousands of dollars for a single page of advertising, though of course their operational and delivery costs were astronomical as well, plus their reach was mostly constrained by how far a truck could drive a load of newspapers overnight ...
now, along comes the internet where unlimited ads are delivered to the entire world instantly and and at near-zero cost at fractions of a cent per ad page delivered ...
printed newspapers were NEVER going to be able to compete once their monopoly was broken by the above advertising scheme ... all of their claims of converting to digital revenues were always pie-in-sky nonsense because you’re trying to replace millions of dollars of ad revenues and subscription revenues with a few pennies(plus your shiny new digital website just joined a bazillion other already established sites) ...
bankruptcy was always inevitable, and it was just a matter of the time it took for their existing subscribers to literally die off, as for all practical purposes no new subscriptions would be forthcoming and almost all ad revenue fled long ago ...