From Innovation in College Media a pointer, with the scary & mdash; for some — title Potts on the first daily newspaper death.
Potts is Mark Potts, a former newspaper worker, who predicts that at least one American city will be without a daily within the next few years. The result:
The gap will quickly be filled by local suburban papers, hyperlocal online sites, alternative papers, local blogs, a rightly scaled urban startup paper, online directory sites, craigslist and yes, even TV news. Not to mention the Daily Bugle’s own Web site, which may survive in some form. In fact, all of those exist right now and are already eating away at the Daily Bugle’s traditional hegemony. That’s one of the factors that argues for this doomsday scenario: newspapers are facing competition from all directions, and readers are happily switching to these alternatives.
Interesting stuff, and it’s possible, if not probable. One thing: it may take something like the loss of a daily to truly shake up the newspaper industry. Yeah, it’s still wildly profitable, but the cost of putting all that ink on all that paper and distributing it isn’t going away, while the readers and advertisers are.
TAGS: NEWSPAPERS, BUSINESS, FUTURE
