News-Fish In A Waterless Ocean. . .

 

Pale and growing cold as the lifeblood of readers and advertisers drains from them, newspapers are flopping about trying to find the mistake that laid them low.

 

Dinosaurs millions of year ago probably asked the same question, and in both cases, the answer is that they made no mistake, did nothing terribly wrong. The dinosaurs disappeared when the world around them changed dramatically through no fault of their own, and daily printed newspapers are meeting the same fate.

 

Paleontologists speculate about dinosaurs and climate change, but with newspapers, it’s community change, and the change is that the geography-based news community is disappearing, leaving newspapers like fish in an ocean going back to component hydrogen and oxygen atoms.

 

Look at the roll call of the dead and you’ll notice that they’re all tied to a place. RIP the (Denver) Rocky Mountain News, the Cincinnati Post, the Albuquerque Tribune and whoever follows this week or next. Like all newspapers, they were of, by, for and about a geographic community. As Wikipedia says, “Traditionally a "community" has been defined as a group of interacting people living in a common location.”

 

Folks interacted in a common location because it was a major pain and expense to interact much beyond a circle of 20-25 miles. Newspapers fostered that sense of community and fed upon it, telling readers about their own doings and those of outsiders who might affect them. Those readers in turn were offered to advertisers. Newspapers collected from both.

 

There were flaws. If you were peddling cars, you hoped to reach the couple thousand or so readers in a newspaper’s hundred-thousand circulation who were looking for cars – but to do so, you paid to reach everyone. Or you might subscribe to the newspaper because you liked the sports section, even though you seldom read the other sections but paid for them anyway.

 

It was like a couple whose kids were long grown paying real estate taxes to support local schools – they got no direct benefit, but it supported the community. As the folk saying put it “It goes with the territory.”

 

Now the folk ought to update that saying to “There goes the territory,” and with it the base for the editorial and marketing scheme that supported newspapers so profitably for so long.

 

The internet enables the extremely economical transfer of information without regard to geography and forms “communities” the same way. Politico.com serves the political junkie community whether they are on K Street or Kodiak Island. It has a large audience. Click on the web site button it labels “Community” and you’ll find forums about all flavors and subsets of politics, none of them tied to a particular location except incidentally.

 

But as a reader, you’re not likely to find sports, home and garden or any of the other one-size-fits-all trappings of a community-focused newspaper. Nor, as an advertiser, are you forced to pay to reach those who very likely aren’t interested in your product.

 

And if you’re running the place, you aren’t paying for all that content that might or should interest some segment of your geographic readership. You’re just producing the content that you’re rock-solid, damned-straight sure will interest your readership community. Plus, that’s a certainty easily checked.

 

A business model that dumps barely sorted content on a community defined by geography can’t compete for very long with a business model that matches both editorial and advertising content to interest-defined communities.

 

Maybe some newspapers will adapt and survive, but consider: some scientist think that chicken you’re roasting for dinner is a dinosaur that adapted and survived.  A chicken, of course, is insignificant next to a Tyrannosaurus Rex – except that the chicken survives and Rex doesn’t.

 

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