Journal mcgrew's Journal: Why are newspapers dying? 7
A Forbes' contributor says that the "US Newspapers' Problems Come From Their Former Monopoly, Not The Duopoly Of Facebook And Google."
That is only a part of the problem. There are far larger ones.
First, the prices of their newspapers. The skinny little State Journal-Register costs a full dollar and has very little news you won't find in other outlets. The Illinois Times prints theirs free, making money from advertising alone, and it is superior to the incredibly poor SJ-R.
But mostly it's how abysmal their web sites are. Know why I'm not reading your ads? No, not AdBlock; it isn't installed. It's because I've read the article in less time than the incredibly bloated web page loads and far faster than the even more bloated ads load. By the time the ads finish loading, I've already closed the tab. The St Louis Post-Dispatch is abysmal with loading; a full thirty seconds, then it goes blank, and takes another full minute, and every article is like that! They, and almost every other paper, badly need a competent webmaster. Except for extremely long or graphics-laden pages, the damned thing should load in seconds. Hire someone competent, who actually knows HTML and doesn't have to resort to one of those stupid programs that take your 5k of text and turn it into a 5 meg page. Today's sites load slower on high speed internet than back in the 33k dialup days.
Then there's "click to read more" after only half a paragraph is displayed. What in the hell is wrong with those morons? They expect me to subscribe to this garbage and actually PAY for it after annoying me?? STUPIDITY!
Then there are so many stupid pages that render in a six point typeface, gray on white, on a tablet that when you zoom, the ads completely cover the text! With morons like that working for your paper you expect me to believe anything you've written? The science rags are the worst about this, but Newsweek isn't any better. Zoom the page and the stupid social media bullshit covers the text!
Look, morons, nobody goes to your stupid site because it's got a "cool" interface, they go to find out what's happening in the world, and you seem to work hardest at making that as difficult as possible. And you expect me to PAY you for that? How fucking stupid can a person be?
Then there's the quality problem. Two decades ago I rarely saw a typo and never a grammatical error, these days few articles are error-free. You idiots expect me to PAY for that unprofessional garbage?
No, the newspapers are dying from blood loss, caused by repeatedly shooting themselves in the foot. Fire the idiots and you might start making money again! Of course, if you're the publisher, that means you have to fire yourselves, because you're the most moronic at all!
What news? (Score:2)
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Yes, I seldom see anything important in the newspaper that they don't cover on TV news. It's also why I vastly prefer CBS's morning news than GMA, GMA has maybe fifteen minutes of news, with the rest unimportant nonsense like celebrities, TV shows (ABC's, of course), sports stars.
Why in the hell should Venus Williams' car crash matter to me?
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Don't forget craigslist (Score:2)
Don't get me wrong on this, I do like craigslist (I used to love it, now I just like it) and I don't think they did this on purpose at all. Their success though did come at the
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Yes, the linked article says a third of their revenue comes from classifieds, a third from other ads, a third from sales. But historically, classifieds have had far more real estate and automobile ads, and other ads that work better locally.
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