This is a follow-up to this resent post.
Selling news is not at this point a profitable long term business. News organizations large and small are laying off staff, or closing, and I, for one, am saddened. The quality and diversity of news coverage has dropped. In the late '90s I was a college student at Cal Poly SLO. My work study job was at the current periodicals desk in the library where I worked the weekend shift. Any one want to guess what the volume of patrons was at 2:00pm Saturday afternoon? When I was not helping patrons, I read some of the 25 or so newspapers we subscribed to, along with a number of weekly and most of the articles in the science and physics journals.
The differences between then and now are that I cannot find a job that pays me to read for 12 hours a week, and even if I could there would be nothing worth reading. Daily newspapers are filled with the same dozen or so wire service articles, interspersed with reprints of press releases and highlights from police logs dressed up as real reporting. What I used to love about print publications, in-depth, local reporting is gone with the loss of ad review and with it the loss of readership.
In this post I want to look at why there is no market for news today, and some of the ways I think good reporting can start t generate profits again.
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