The newspaper business is going to die within the next twenty years. Newspaper publishing will continue, but only as a philanthropic venture.
That was me, writing in 2002.
“We’re in a post-profit era for newspapers,” Mutter says, noting the not-entirely-economic reasons behind recent rich guy purchases of the Globe and the San Diego Union-Tribune, not to mention the Koch brothers’ interest in the L.A. Times.
That is Lydia DiPillis, writing on August 5 of this year. She claims, however, that the Washington Post is not a charity case, even though she uses the term “money pit” to describe its current business condition.
Why does no one discuss the “readership” of newspapers; or of other print media?
How long before the issues of “viewership” become a dominant factors (as they appear to be doing in the “monetization” of social media?
Nice analysis from 2002 with a spot-on prediction, here’s a chart that shows what happened.
It seems to me that a key factor in the decline of the daily-delivered newspaper is that the US postal service started delivering bulk ads that the newspapers used to deliver exclusively. Way back in the stone age, when I delivered newspapers as a kid, something like half the bulk was ads and we only got letters by mail. Now 85% of the mailbox is filled with ads and it outbulks the newspaper entirely.
Max