Bill Wyman: Five Key Reasons Why Newspapers Are Failing
splicetoday.com
splicetoday.com
Too bad it never went anywhere; it is the best article on this I've seen.
The recommendations at the end of the article almost look like a startup project -- not making a "local paper" but rather a platform others can use to create their own "local papers" without needing much technical knowledge. The startup provides the hosting and tons of templates and pointers to clip art, etc. The customer provides the content. The startup manages the finances and takes a cut of the ad revenues in addition to renting the hosting and software.
Or is that not an original idea?
Something to keep in mind the next time you see a sob-piece on the poor, downtrodden city newspaper.
What I learned in the process of doing that search was how unbelievably biased the newspapers were at the turn of the century. There was minute up-to-the-minute reporting on every conceivable detail of the city, but it was laced with political agenda. You were getting a whole lot of information, but it was no more trustworthy than a blog post.
While we'd like to think that journalists are going to be neutral, they simply aren't, they are human and they let their biases creep into their stories. And the circulation for papers that endorsed Obama was 4 times greater than those that endorsed McCain (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaper_endorsements_in_the_U...)
I was on the Young Adult Board of contributors for the Des Moines Register and one of the editors very much admitted to me that they were losing subscriptions like mad because conservatives stopped reading their paper. Consequently, I was published much more frequently than other members of the board because I have a conservative view on things, while the other 48 people almost all came from a liberal persuasion. I know it certainly wasn't because of the quality of my writing, I know it sucked, but I'm an engineer not an English major.