Who killed the newspaper?
“Newspapers are making progress with the internet, but most are still too timid, defensive or high-minded”
The Economist offers an excellent special report on newspapers and emerging media this week. Fortunately, most of it can be accessed for free online. It highlights many of the problems publishers are worried about, and suggests possible solutions, albeit rather difficult ones.
At first, from the late 1990s until around 2002, newspaper companies simply replicated their print editions online. Yet the internet offers so many specialised sources of information and entertainment that readers can pick exactly what they want from different websites. As a result, people visited newspaper sites infrequently, looked at a few pages and then vanished off to someone else’s website.
Another early mistake was for papers to save their best journalists for print. This meant that the quality of new online editions was often poor. Websites hired younger, cheaper staff. The brand’s prestige stayed with the old medium, which encouraged print journalists to defend their turf. Still today at La Stampa, an Italian daily paper owned by the Fiat Group, says Anna Masera, the paper’s internet chief, print journalists hesitate to give her their stories for fear that the website will cannibalise the newspaper.
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