Newspapers aren't dying... They're dead!

After working for a media company for 10 years, I came to the conclusion that media as we know it is dead. Not because they won’t adapt to the brave new world of digital media, but because they can no longer operate as near monopolies.

For centuries most cities have had no more than a couple of newspapers and in many cases only one. That’s great from a mass reach perspective but it’s not so great from an advertiser’s perspective. Advertisers have had no choice but to pay monopolistic advertising rates.

Retail and classified forms of advertising, the life’s blood of most newspapers, are proactive forms of advertising. Proactive advertising is advertising that people are actively seeking and many newspapers are actually purchased expressly to find ads.

 

Advertisers no longer need to use mass media to distribute proactive forms of advertising. Today, if you’re looking for offers, you just need to do a web search. With sites targeting every kind of proactive form of advertising, many of them free to advertise with, advertisers are no longer bound to newspapers and their rates.

No matter how successfully newspapers adopt new ways of gathering and publishing news, the business model that has provided them with remarkable margins is gone. No margins => No papers! Few (if any) media companies are in it for journalistic motivations. It’s simple, take away the margins and you take away the motivation.

Case closed...keep on Linking Local

By: Jose Leal