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Originally Posted by ZodWallop
So continue to do what they are doing which is already not working?
Before paywalls go up there tends to be pay cuts and staff reductions. That is why so many local papers have already closed.
What I was trying to say in my earlier post was that newspapers would have been better off if they had adopted paywalls right from the get-go. I remember listening to a podcast a while back about what the internet, news aggregators and Craigslist have done to their revenue. There were fights in the newsrooms about posting their content online for free in the early internet days. But the folks in charge just didn't understand how the internet would grow and take over.
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I know of a number of papers who did just that. In general, newspapers problems on the internet are the same reasons they lost most of their paper subscribers, too many ads and too much cost cutting.
Way back when, Atlanta had two papers, The Journal was the evening paper and the Constitution was the morning paper. The Journal had a conservative lean, the Constitution a liberal lean. It was not uncommon for people to subscribe to both papers. Both had been owned by the same company since the 50's. I delivered the Journal as a paperboy.
In 1982, the two newsrooms were combined to save money, but kept separate editorial staffs (and different comics). I preferred the evening paper, mostly because the morning paper was usually delivered after I left for work and sat in the driveway all day, usually getting soaked if it rained. After a few years, people stopped subscribing to both, since the stories were the same in both papers. Over time, there were a lot more AP stories and a lot less local stories.
In 2000, they dropped the evening paper and had a combined Journal-Constitution in the morning. That was about the time I stopped subscribing. It just wasn't worth it for me anymore. That was well before they had a website.
Frankly the idea that the internet killed the local press is just a smoke screen. The local press killed the local press, which had been dying before all the internet news sites every got started. What killed the local press was losing touch with their customer base and community but that happened well before companies like Google and Craigslist.