Other reasons for the decline in newspapers? The late reporting, and the political slant.

These companies don’t realize that people are too smart to continue to read “editorials” that are quoted by unnamed sources, and passed off as news.

These guys are lucky to have Google news.
Thanks Andy!

Newspapers think in terms of geography. Back in the day, if you lived in Buffalo you got your news from the Buffalo News. You did not drive to Cleveland to get the Plains Dealer.

So they had the vehicle to sell specific ads of local businesses to local people. And if you were a national business, the local paper was still the best vehicle to get to those people.

Now there is Google News which messes up the papers conventional thinking two ways. First, their local people can read the stories in other papers. That is stealing.

Second, and more importantly, the local advertisers do not want to pay for a non local person to see their advertising. If I am in Atlanta and read the Buffalo News, I will not be buying a car from the Buffalo Ford Dealer.

So the newspapers, whose job is to sell advertising, is losing readers online in one direction, and gaining readers from outside their target market that ruins the ROI for the local advertisers and creates a harder sell for them.

Essentially their marketing methodology is getting creamed in both directions. That is why they hate Google News.

http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/bin/answer.py?answer=40787

However we are determined to buck that trend and go down fighting if that’s what it comes down to. Most papers’ biggest asset is local content so that’s what we’re trying to capitalize on. We’re attempting to build a community around our site through story comments, real blogs, forums, user submitted photos and video, and several other means. The odds are stacked against us, but I’ve always loved a good challenge.

Even the “smalltown local rags” are dying off as their news is pretty corny and they have to kiss the advertisers botties with wanky “five star reviews”

My town Huntersville NC – next to Charlotte – pop 30,000 has a local rag which will fizzle out as we have better newsier local blogs – I own one. I don’t have to beg or kiss up to the advertiser….

David

Do I win something?

Are these guys for real? What’s next are they going to start suing the world for using RSS? What I wouldn’t do to get to the top of Google results for most of the worlds daily news. Cry me a river.

How bout this one Sam Zell. If the Chicago Tribune wasn’t at the top of all the chicago news search results and some random blog was that just regurgitated chicago news, would the tribune company be making more or less money?

My Answer: Less!

And the advertising, my god, there is no focus! Most newspapers sites seem to have the ad lineup of your common scraper site. Used cars, dating services, mortgages, job listings, banners, banners, banners! How about targetting the ads to the article or section of the site someone is looking at? They could quadruple conversion rates by just doing that alone. Most newspaper sites are a case study in ad blindness. People learn fast to ignore 5 of the 6 columns of crap most designs are laid out in.

To me, it has to be ignorance, no matter what the motivation. They are mass quality content providers, that is what they do, produce content all day. They try to monetize this with ads, whether online or offline. Yet, Joe Average Blog eats their lunch all day in the SERPs without hardly trying, so much to the point that engines had to create things like Google News just to ever let those newspaper sites be found. They should be thanking their lucky stars Google News exists, or they would be losing more ad revenue than they could ever dream of. They should be doing heavy duty SEO all day if they hope to survive.

I can date this back to my days in the SF Bay Area when a Head Journo at a Knight Ridder newspaper totally blanked me (told me to get effed) when I told him of my seeing all news online in the near future.

The guy was talking to an advertising bod for the same paper at the time.

Newspaper news is old news and they will suffer more as the “high horse snotty nosed brigade” fall from grace.

The really smart journos are blogging and making dosh with adsense.

Perhaps they could team up with MS and step further back in time…..