Comment by xyst
4 years ago
Nobody else to blame but the newspaper industry themselves. Failure to begin modernizing/digitizing their systems in the 1990s caused them to make very hasty decisions in the mid 2000s and 2010s (such as relying on advertising models created by Google/Facebook).
The local newspapers failed, yes. But that's normal. Had there been a healthy market for local news, they'd have been replaced.
What actually happened is that the revenue available to local news got consolidated. Classifieds and local ads got rolled up by Craigslist/Google/Facebook. None of these companies have an interest in local news.
There's not much of a fix for this. Until we come up with a better way to pay for local news, there's no choice the "newspaper industry" could have made to thrive. Fighting consolidation is a good idea, though, and might help a new model emerge.
Citation needed? How would digitizing their systems have saved the industry from all three of its primary revenue streams being hoovered up by free online classifieds, free debundled online news, and online advertising?
If you're going to blame the industry, it seems weird to claim it's because of strategic mistakes made in the 2 decades after peak circulation and not the moment ad revenue became indispensable?