It’s kind of depressing when the newspaper business has come to the point where self-deprecation is perfectly acceptable, it’s no joke. Yesterdays Dianne Williamson column in the T&G tried to make light of the troubles the newspaper business is seeing.
Since the analysts predict that newspapers may soon be obsolete, it’s time to consider a new career. The only problem is, I have no skills that would qualify me for a real job.
It always strikes me as a little sad when I try to imagine what it must feel like to be stuck on a sinking ship. But the reality in this case is the ship didn’t get torpedoed the way many like to spin things, its sinking because the captain is asleep at the wheel.
What may be my biggest frustration where local business is concerned, is watching good business go bad and suffer simply because the owners didn’t want to learn new tricks. I’ve talked about this here before, in the form of the Tatnuck Bookseller. But a newspaper is something different, can anyone actually imagine a city the size of Worcester without a daily? Of course not and therein lies the rub. The T&G isn’t going anywhere, it’s just going to continue to get smaller both in scope and impact until it can be bought out by someone who cares less about local news than the Times, which is nearly impossible.
The unfortunate thing is it doesn’t have to be this way. Talk to anyone who’s over 35 in the newspaper business and you’ll get the same tired line about the internet being at fault for declining readerships, it’s code for ‘we’re old and the internet scares us’. All one has to do is take a quick glance at the T&G website and it becomes pretty clear they are willfully pissing potential revenue away. There’s no search engine optimization in play, the advertising is all local which means cheap and their headlines and ledes are written to hit with old ladies in Spencer instead of the news readers discovering and seeding stories via social bookmarking sites like digg, reddit and stumbleupon. And let us not forget the T&G employees who still publicly proclaim the internet to be some sort of fad. These problems can all be fixed, easily.
Last month the WSJ recorded 15 million unique page views, up 175 percent from the same period a year prior. This was probably both the biggest as well as worst reported story in this sector of the quarter, which shouldn’t be surprising, why would publishers want a reminder on how things should be done. Where’s the humor in that? It’s easier to just pretend that nobody reads the news anymore and spin it into a joke, right? If that’s the case then the jokes on us.
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Great article Brendan. They think they save money by using all the Times/Globe articles, but since no one I know read that content, it means we can read the paper in under two minutes. I can look for the 3 articles relevant to me online and I’m done-although finding High School sports is impossible online. If there was more local news, I’d buy the paper daily. Scott Zoback on his blog alone almost provides more local news each week than the T&G. They have some good writers, but it seems each one only writes once a week. Someone at tht T&G should follow his lead and start a HS sports blog. Every parent/relative would read it and you would be getting HS kids in the habit of reading the paper. The more local names you can get in the paper, the more people will buy the paper or today, link to articles and send to their friends.
It’s really too bad the direction it’s going.