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The real value of newspaper was never the news; it was the paper. The moneymaker is the platform, not the content.

Once upon a time newspapers were the platform, and they made quite a bit of money selling access to eyeballs. If you wanted to get a message in front of a lot of people, you had to pay a newspaper to do it.

Now on the internet they don't own the platform anymore - tech companies do. Newspapers are just content creators, a much less lucrative business to be in.

by diego_moita5 hours ago|

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More like a death by a thousand cuts.

In the beginning it was eBay and Craigslist siphoning out the classified ads. Then it was AOL, Yahoo, ICQ and YouTube taking away the attention and eyeballs (before the smartphones era). Then came smartphones and social media.

by mc325 hours ago|

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This is it. It's a medium and organizational structure that aged out. Even before social media and Google, people were getting more of their news via 24hr news channels, then came the internet and the citizen journalists, then came social media and now the attention industry. The market was getting smaller and smaller but was accelerated by new technologies and habits.

Same with magazines. There are some niche magazines that still do alright and also what were niche broadsheet publications became online subscriptions where they offered the subscriber an ROI of some kind.

by axus5 hours ago|

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I still check all the news sites who's biases aren't too obvious. But my views aren't paying their bills.

Would news be in a good place if they had the monopoly for online advertising?

by AceJohnny25 hours ago|

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Nah, it's earlier than that. The move to online, plumetting paper ad-sales, and the online expectation that you could access all the articles for free (and ad-block) (oh hey look above the comment with archive.is to bypass the NewYorker's paywall) is what killed The News.

by tvink5 hours ago|

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Sure you can say consumers refusing the ad-ridden paywalled experience killed it, or we could say the lack of adaptation and finding better business models did. I think a lot of players killed themselves off fighting to preserve rather than adapt, or worse have digital content subsidize analog (to this day I keep running into ebooks that cost more than the physical books, and they wonder why people pirate)

by porise5 hours ago|

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Just say Google. The need for keywords plastered everywhere (often hidden in the HTML) was their invention.