The Electronic Newsboy Is Here
July 13th, 2008
Are you curling up with the Sunday paper today or clicking around on the paper’s Web site while watching the morning gabfests?
Probably the latter. More people are eschewing print for the electronic newsboy all the time, which is why every newsroom from the New York Times on down is laying off staff. Readers are getting angry, too: One News & Observer reader in Durham, North Carolina, is suing the paper for cutting staff.
If you find the ongoing saga of the incredible shrinking print media interesting, you’ll love the July 2 entry in this blog by Jessica DaSilva, an intern at the Tampa Tribune. Seems she got the shorts of a lot of print journalists all up in a bunch when she reported on Tribune Editor in Chief Janet Coats dropping, as Jessica described it, “the reality bomb.”
“People need to stop looking at TBO.com as an add on to The Tampa Tribune,” she said. “The truth is that The Tampa Tribune is an add on to TBO.”
There it is in a nutshell: The Web is no longer an adjunct to the print media, it’s the other way around.
Us new media types have seen this coming for years. Some savvy papers have understood this for a while. Others are just now figuring it out. Those who don’t get it soon will be the first to shut down the presses entirely.
As rough as the newspaper business has been in recent years, it’s going to get an awful lot tougher.
Takeaway for marketers: Doing any local advertising? Make sure you’re doing more than getting your ad in the paper.