“If the newspaper owners could figure out how to market their product electronically, they would be fine.”
The real problem is that newspapers use to own a local market monopoly on daily information exchange. There was a single giant printing press at the center of each distribution area, and ad sellers and ad consumers had only a single place to go. Newspapers could set their ad prices arbitrarily high, and they did.
With the advent of the Internet, that monopoly is dead forever. The cost to buy and sell ads approaches zero, the cost to distribute approaches zero, the pages to place ads approaches infinity, and the readership approaches infinity.
Moving everything online at this point simply means a former newspaper is nothing more than one more of a billion web sites that advertisers can choose from and pay tiny fractions of a cent per ad. No way to make up the monopoly revenue lost through print publishing. Not only that, the online ad train has already left the station over 10 years ago anyway. Why would any advertiser PAY to advertise on some newspaper web site when they can get free ads on craigslist, which has already achieved critical mass among buyers and sellers as the only place to go for hundreds of millions of buyers and sellers. Likewise, who needs local classifies when you can sell your stuff directly to the universe on ebay? And then there is google soaking up the rest of ad revenue.
Print publishers are dead and cannot be resurrected online, at least in terms of their former revenue level. And quite frankly, that’s a good thing as most of them are anti-American, Commie pieces of crap and deserve to die.
This is the key point. Also, ads can be more selectively targeted with online than with "broadcast" - TV, newspapers, radio, etc.
I fondly remember a class trip to our local rag. It was in the middle of town, a four-story building (with wooden floors, IIRC) and a basement that held the tall presses that extended up into a first floor atrium.
They composed most of the text in Linotypes, with open gas flames heating up the lead pots for the type slugs; one of the wonders of the mechanical age.
They'd take a blocked-up page (with text and halftone blocks) and emboss a sheet of heavy paper with it. Then, they'd curve the paper to a radius of about two feet in a molding jig, fill it with hot lead, and get out a curved plate for the giant press cylinders. Of course, they'd make dozens of plates for a single issue, and a single press would print something like 16 pages at a time on the wide paper stock.
And then the presses themselves...mechanical leviathans, running hundreds of copies a minute, the printed paper flying through live flame drying its ink in an instant, and then on the slitting, folding, and collating mechanisms, which were actually the most fascinatingly complex part.
It was geek heaven, in its day.
As my namesake believed, printer's ink was the elixir of the Reformation.
It wasn’t always the case.
Time magazine was once a conservative weekly (back when it cost $.25.)
WSJ still is for the most part.
When we lived in Prior Lake, MN., the PL paper was a straight news daily. Of course anything would be an improvement on the Mpls Strib.