Quote:
Originally Posted by BWinmill
The death of the newspaper is a bit of an overstatement. Transitioning from newspapers to websites is fairly natural since you are dealing with a textual medium in both cases. Newspapers got that. Newspapers went online. While many of those newspapers may be suffering online, it has a lot more to do with having more competition from domestic and foreign sources than a failure to adapt to the new technology.
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There are good reasons for newprint folk to bemoan the internet but the Washington Post transitioning to the (paywalled) web and ebooks is what is keeping them afloat these days. Barely.
The biggest threat to newspapers, and what is really decimating them, is *not* online news but rather online classifieds; Craigslist and eBay most prominently, Google to a lesser extent. Dozens of small regional operations...
Classified ads was the secret revenue stream that helped newspapers survive the challenge of radio and TV and when that revenue vanished, the bottom fell out of their business model. And for most local papers there is no end in sight; some major metropolitan areas have not only gone down to one "daily" but that newspaper isn't even daily anymore.
Biting the hand feeding you isn't wise.
Here, from 2009:
http://www.theatlantic.com/technolog...spapers/18168/
In more detail:
http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/media/internet/15500/
And more recently:
http://flashesandflames.com/2013/04/...online-battle/