Posted on 07/26/2007 2:10:09 PM PDT by abb
Newspapers are dying. At the Washington Post Co., CEO Donald Graham is banking on the Internet to save serious journalism. If he can't figure this out, nobody can.
Barry Svrluga, a 36-year-old baseball writer for TheWashington Post, was on his way to the barber when an e-mail pinged his BlackBerry telling him that the Washington Nationals had sent two struggling pitchers to the minor leagues. Svrluga detoured to Starbucks, wrote a 572-word commentary on his laptop and posted it to his blog, Nationals Journal at washingtonpost.com. After his haircut he swung by the Post's newsroom to do a live question-and-answer session online with fans. That night, after filing a story for the newspaper, which he calls the "$0.35 edition" in his blog, Svrluga recorded a ten-minute podcast for the Web site, with sound bites from team officials and players.
Like most reporters at the Post, Svrluga has become platform-agnostic, which is a nice way of saying that his bosses are no longer big believers in print. Today a small army of bloggers, podcasters, chatroom hosts, radio voices and TV talking heads, as well as a few old-fashioned ink-stained wretches, populates the newsroom at the 131-year-old Post. They understand that Donald E. Graham, the chairman and CEO of the Washington Post Co., is hurrying the paper into the digital future. "If circulation is dropping," Svrluga explains, "and we're trying to figure out how people are going to get their news, who am I to say no to trying out new avenues?"
That's the story of the newspaper business right now. Alarmed by declining circulation, advertising and profits, America's newspaper publishers - as hidebound a collection of businesspeople as you can find - are thrashing about to see whether they can separate the news from the paper and still make money.
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(Excerpt) Read more at money.cnn.com ...
I think your confidence is misplaced. Newspaper publishing is just like any other business - ongoing sustainability is solely dependent on the ability to generate revenues in excess of expenses.
Newspaper publishing has traditionally had two primary sources of revenue (forget purchase price): print & classified ads. Print ads for dept stores, real estate & autos has migrated en masse to the Net. Ditto for classified - does anyone pay/read these anymore when Craigslist is available?
It doesn't matter a whit what they may do about content; the game is over and they know it. There's a lot
Thanks for the ping.
Great post! Your house sounds just like mine - - reading glasses, pens, and puzzles in the bathroom. The rest of the paper gets tossed unrumpled. A dollar-fifty for two decent crosswords is okay with me.
The Tennessean has been calling me for the last three weeks. I finally picked up the phone tonight to see what they had to say. I was tired of the ringing phone.
They were running a special offer. The girl said it would be $3.71 for 7 days. Plus, I wouldn’t have to pay anything for 6 weeks!!
I politely said, no thanks.
I was surprised to hear the price though. They must be desperate.
Hey, great screen name! I wish I’d thought of it!
The Internet won’t save them. They’ve lived for years on blue sky advertising rates, and now that ads can be monitored for effectiveness, and space presence on some blogs can work as well as a sidebar on a news”paper” web page, the writing is on the Internet wall. Good riddance, I’d say.
MSM = Roadkill on the information superhighway.
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