The first song ever shown on MTV was a crazy thing by the Buggles, called “Video Killed the Radio Star.” Video actually did not kill the radio star, but radio stars had to adapt to the realities of the video age. Still, both survived, perhaps because they were based on a similar – passive – way of receiving entertainment and stimuli. There wasn’t much new thinking required on the part of those delivering the content to the consumers.
In the last few years, the rise of the Internet began to first wound (think: Craigslist) and now is truly killing the newspaper business. The print media have not adapted to the Net as well as the radio star did to the new realities of the video age. The passivity of the newspaper simply cannot compete with Web, with its greater user controls and niches. As early as 2004, Wired.com announced that newspapers had been admitted to the ICU:
Young people just aren’t interested in reading newspapers and print magazines. In fact, according to Washington City Paper, The Washington Post organized a series of six focus groups in September to determine why the paper was having so much trouble attracting younger readers. You see, daily circulation, which had been holding firm at 770,000 subscribers for the last few years, fell more than 6 percent to about 720,100 by June 2004, with the paper losing 4,000 paying subscribers every month.
Imagine what higher-ups at the Post must have thought when focus-group participants declared they wouldn’t accept a Washington Post subscription even if it were free. The main reason (and I’m not making this up): They didn’t like the idea of old newspapers piling up in their houses.
Don’t think for a minute that young people don’t read. On the contrary, they do, many of them voraciously. But having grown up under the credo that information should be free, they see no reason to pay for news. Instead they access The Washington Post website or surf Google News, where they select from literally thousands of information sources. They receive RSS feeds on their PDAs or visit bloggers whose views mesh with their own. In short, they customize their news-gathering experience in a way a single paper publication could never do. And their hands never get dirty from newsprint.
But if newspapers were in the ICU in 2004, the family has just been called to the bedside to say goodbye:
¶ Two well-known Connecticut papers, The New Britain Herald and The Bristol Press are dying and, because this is 2008, people are looking for a bailout. A former State rep says this is delusional.
¶ An upstart Greenwich blog is making waves, boasting about 2,000 visitors a day and apparently getting actual scoops as the disaffected local citizenry seems to be abandoning the local “real” newspaper. I have a feeling this is happening elsewhere.
¶ The Tribune Company, which publishes Connecticut’s most famous paper, The Courant, has filed for bankruptcy.
¶ The mighty New York Times itself is in big trouble and may be looking to borrow something approaching a quarter of a billion dollars against its real estate.
Where will this end? At present, I’m not sure there’s enough high-quality citizen journalism to fill the gap; not yet enough hyperlocal business portals, etc., to do what newspapers have been doing for 250 years – certainly not at the same level of credibility. Nevertheless, newspapers have precious little time to figure out that most people do not seem to have any problem jettisoning them altogether.
