Video Killed the Radio Star: Death of a Paper

GuardianUK internet columnist Roy Greenslade presents an analysis of an analysis of today’s closing of the Seattle Post Intelligencer written by Post Intelligencer columnist Bill Virgin.

Quoting Greenslade citing Virgin:

“He (Virgin, of course) begins by reminding readers that papers have been dying for decades and derides the claim that the internet is the main culprit.

 

“It obscures a long-standing truth about this business,” he writes, “American newspapers have been and continue to be, as a sector, the worst-run of any industry in this country.

 

“Though the net has been a contributory factor and the effects of recession cannot be ignored, he argues that “it was the industry itself that walked out onto a ledge of crumbling shale, and stood waiting for it to collapse.”

 

Here’s his take on the industry’s mistakes:

 

“Instead of using the internet as a complement to its print product, the industry went chasing after the web and offering its most valuable property – the news it so carefully and expensively gathered – for free, while chasing the chimera that online advertising would support the whole thing…

 

“In the process, what newspapers did was devalue their brands and the heritage and legacies built into them, their core products and the value proposition that brought them readers and advertisers in the first place.”

He argues that a newspaper provided “enough elements of interest to enough people (sports scores, local news, the crossword and Sudoku, the weather map and TV listings, letters to the editor, the comics, maybe even a business column or two)” to appeal to readers and, having aggregated enough of them, was then “attractive to advertisers seeking a mass audience.”

 

But papers began “lopping away content and features readers had come to expect. The rationale the industry used was that readers could and would get that information elsewhere, especially online, so why waste valuable print real estate on them?

 

“But the message readers got from the newspapers was they ought to go elsewhere for TV listings, stock quotes and the like. Surprisingly enough, readers took the advice and did.“

He (Greenslade) draws these conclusions:

Will it not be seen eventually as a reaction to a technological advance that was bound to lead to the death of newsprint?

Got that? And video killed the radio star.

I hope you enjoyed this analysis of the analysis of the analysis. Now back to Facebook hijack, where you can read the analysis of the analysis, and click through to the analysis itself:

here.

Or just keep it where it is and read about what Larry Towell is up to.