Former news editor here. I left the journalism world about eight years ago because of the poor shape the business was in. But I still love journalism and hope it finds a viable business model.

I wanted to address a point that this blog post brings to mind.

There were advertisers then, and there are advertisers now. The advertising market hasn't dried up.

So why was the business model robust then and in shambles now?

Well, one explanation that people often point to is that there are now many more places to advertise. Back then, newspapers were one of the best places to advertise if you wanted to reach a lot of eyeballs. Now you can advertise on Google and other search sites, you can advertise on any number of blogs and other sites through AdSense and other ad delivery networks, you can advertise on social media, you can place classified ads on Craigslist, etc. So newspapers now have to compete against all these other properties in a way they didn't have to do in previous generations.

But there's another consideration that is just as important and doesn't really get talked about as often. With the dawn of digital advertising, where every view, click and conversion is neatly accounted for, advertisers have come to realize that newspaper advertising has always been a low-return-on-investment marketing avenue, even when it was the only game in town. They just didn't have the metrics to prove it.

What we know now is that click-through rates on news sites are really not substantially better than click-through rates on Joe Schmo's random blog -- but they _are_ substantially worse than in certain other business segments, like search.

So the real battle isn't even a battle for advertiser's attention. It's a battle to remain viable even though the advertisers would be better off advertising elsewhere.