The problem with newspapers

Apparently, I'm killing the industry I work for. I don't read newspapers anymore, at least not the actually "paper" version.

Two papers arrive at my door each morning. I pick them up, scan the headlines, and then pile them up on my kitchen table, where they stay until the maid takes them away. Almost all of my news reading is done online these days.

This type of activity recently prompted Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to say that print media would be dead in 10 years. He says we'll soon be getting all of our news, sports and entertainment digitally.

Ballmer may be right, but so what? Just because there's no "paper" doesn't mean the whole operation comes to a stop. Somebody still has to write the stories that appear online. Also, publishers love to complain about the rising costs of printing. Well, here's your big chance to get rid of the whole printing press.

So why are newspapers still panicking? The simple answer is because the people who control the medium also control the money. For years, newspaper controlled advertising and set its cost. But with the arrival of the internet, the medium has change hands. People no longer pick up the paper or even go to a newspaper's website. They go to news aggregators like Google.

The move hasn't been slow or subtle either. Over the past couple of years, a huge black hole has developed in cyberspace, and is sucking up all the advertising revenues. Many people think the black hole's name is Google, but it's actually a combination of companies, which include Yahoo and Microsoft as well.

Newspapers are not happy about this. Money that used to pay reports has now made Google one of the biggest companies in the world.

But newspapers haven't helped the situation, either. In their rush to get out the "big story" and dominate the internet, news organisations have flooded the internet with redundant information. Let me give you an example. As I write this, there is a story in Google's news section about John McCain's candidacy for the US presidency and his views on the country's economy. There are no less than 3,257 related articles.

What's an advertiser going to do? Any smart company is going to place their ad on the one or two websites to which most of the readers go. Placing that ad on a newspaper's website is a sure way of guaranteeing that almost no one will ever see it.

There is a solution to this, but most of the larger newspapers wouldn't like it. They have to start providing coverage that won't appeal to a mass market, and therefore won't be as likely to get picked up by the major sites like Google or Yahoo. That means less coverage of presidential elections and more well written, local stories that will draw readers back to newspaper homepages. In other words, back to good, exclusive stories that local readers care about.