The Survival of Newspapers
Web portals profiting from the news business help the news industry. The survival of newspapers rests in the hands of those willing to adapt to changing reader demands.
On NPR’s Marketplace today, Neil Henry argued that Google should subsidize news reporters and editors because its free Google News service is responsible for declining newspaper readership.
Readership is declining because newspapers have not leveraged their online presence and this is why they are suffering financially.
Google News groups links to similar news stories. The service does not steal content from other sites.
When Google News links to a story, it’s featured for 15-minutes on one of the most popular websites online. This equates to millions of views of a particular headline and hundreds of thousands of clicks to read the full story on the newspaper’s website.
Newspapers have a bigger problem than Google News if they cannot monetize the influx of visitors to its website that it otherwise would not have had.
Online audiences are potentially larger than print audiences, but online audiences demand premium content. Premium content requires quality reporters and editors, but also an advertising strategy that works. Google found one and newspapers can too.
Update: Marketplace used my comment.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 24th, 2007 at 22:19 and is tagged media. 