An interesting analysis of the death of the American newspaper:
Traditionally, a U.S. newspaper relied upon three revenue
streams, roughly one-third each: subscriptions, commercial advertising, and
classifieds. First, the Internet ate the classifieds (see Craigslist), then
moved on to some of that display stuff. It is this which is blamed for the
decline of the industry and the associated calls that Google and or Facebook
should cough up some money to revive it.
Much more important, though, is geography. The U.S. is a big country. You could drop the average European country into it and not really notice. A result of this is that U.S. newspapers were, largely speaking, a series of regional monopolies. This was down to the same network effects that people use to complain about Facebook today. Once you’re getting the majority of the classifieds in an area, for example, you’ll end up getting almost all of them. People read the section because that’s where the ads are, people advertise there because the readers are there, and so on. And as above, classifieds were a very important part of newspaper financing.
But note my point here about those regional monopolies. Apart from the very largest cities, there was usually only the one major paper. And there was another one of those every ... well, that’s the geography-dependent part. The U.S. rail network has never been very fast at the distribution of either goods or people. It's optimized for bulk commodities like coal, iron ore, and the like. But getting something printed this evening to somewhere 400 miles away before breakfast? Not so much. Thus, each major urban center, perhaps some hundreds of miles from the next, had its own newspaper ecology.
Now along comes the Internet. Our local monopolies created by geography are now broken. It’s that, much more than the loss of one or more revenue streams, which is leading to the change. We simply do not need 50 or 200 major newspapers all trying to tell their readers about everything. It can be, and therefore will be, managed with very much fewer than that.
Much more important, though, is geography. The U.S. is a big country. You could drop the average European country into it and not really notice. A result of this is that U.S. newspapers were, largely speaking, a series of regional monopolies. This was down to the same network effects that people use to complain about Facebook today. Once you’re getting the majority of the classifieds in an area, for example, you’ll end up getting almost all of them. People read the section because that’s where the ads are, people advertise there because the readers are there, and so on. And as above, classifieds were a very important part of newspaper financing.
But note my point here about those regional monopolies. Apart from the very largest cities, there was usually only the one major paper. And there was another one of those every ... well, that’s the geography-dependent part. The U.S. rail network has never been very fast at the distribution of either goods or people. It's optimized for bulk commodities like coal, iron ore, and the like. But getting something printed this evening to somewhere 400 miles away before breakfast? Not so much. Thus, each major urban center, perhaps some hundreds of miles from the next, had its own newspaper ecology.
Now along comes the Internet. Our local monopolies created by geography are now broken. It’s that, much more than the loss of one or more revenue streams, which is leading to the change. We simply do not need 50 or 200 major newspapers all trying to tell their readers about everything. It can be, and therefore will be, managed with very much fewer than that.
In other words, journalists now in the
position of the buggy whip manufacturers they always used to enjoy mocking as
people whining about inevitable progress. And here I thought journalists were
supposed to be progressives!
This means that we're not actually seeing a development of an Alt-Media so much as we're simply seeing the centralization and polarization of the media play out as it has in Britain. Whoever makes the shift to be the national conservative newspaper will survive, almost all of the others will eventually be devoured by the Left Opinion Leader paper (The New York Times), the Establishment Government paper (The Washington Post), and the Establishment Business paper (The Wall Street Journal).
This means that we're not actually seeing a development of an Alt-Media so much as we're simply seeing the centralization and polarization of the media play out as it has in Britain. Whoever makes the shift to be the national conservative newspaper will survive, almost all of the others will eventually be devoured by the Left Opinion Leader paper (The New York Times), the Establishment Government paper (The Washington Post), and the Establishment Business paper (The Wall Street Journal).
