This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008 at 12:09 pm and is filed under Web world at large. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
The New Yorker recently featured “Out of print: The death and life of the American newspaper.”
Journalist Eric Alterman speaks of the Internet’s rise, and how it’s made newspapers seem “slow and unresponsive.” Plus, the dawn of websites like Craigslist is killing print classified advertising.
The outcome, according to media entrepreneur Alan Mutter, is that independent, publicly traded American newspapers have lost 42 per cent of their market value in the past three years alone.
“Until recently, newspapers were accustomed to operating as high-margin monopolies,” wrote Alterman. “To own the dominant, or only, newspaper in a mid-sized American city was, for many decades, a kind of license to print money.”
Meanwhile, eMarketer reported more than $8.6 billion was spent on search engine advertising in 2007, an amount that could reach $16.6 billion in 2011.
It gives the impression it’s just a matter of a few years before newspapers become obsolete.
April 5th, 2008 at 9:52 am
Online marketing is way more effective than traditional. Instead of sending a generic message to the masses, you’re sending a specific message to your exact market. Newspapers are on their way out for good. They’ll be museum material within the next decade or two! Sad but true.