Market Place - Newspapers Could Be Bargains, but Few Are Buying - NYTimes.com
Wow! The Sun-Times lost almost $36 million last quarter? Holy cow. I used to be up on media companies and newspapers especially. I'm not sure anymore. The big thing that investors are seeing is that very smart newspaper people (NY Times, WaPo, and McClatchey) and very smart outsiders (Sam Zell, that guy in Philly) can't seem to make money with newspapers. I have not seen what the profit margins are on these properties recently but I will bet that they have fallen rapidly.
For the most part, the people that own these properties do not want layoffs or cutbacks (maybe Tribune co.), and they love the newspaper business. However the era of newspapers dominating the news coverage is ending. Reinventing themselves on the Web is necessary, but at the end of the day, will there be the infrastructure to deliver a newspaper to your door? I'm not so sure about that. We as a society will lose a lot, but somehow newspapers will survive. It'll be in a smaller form, maybe electronic only. Niche markets like business and sports will rise while general reporting will fade.
On the Web, papers need to be better positioned to get the next generation of readers. I heard that most people under 30 don't go to newspaper sites for their news, they prefer Yahoo News and other aggregators. Why is that? This is a brave new world and things are still cheap and fluid. What about getting there first? Local news blogs are starting to compete with the dailies in a real way. In a few election cycles, I'll bet that almost all the people born after 1985 will get there news from the Web sites that are not affiliated with newspapers. If that really happens, then newspapers will truly be in peril.
Wow! The Sun-Times lost almost $36 million last quarter? Holy cow. I used to be up on media companies and newspapers especially. I'm not sure anymore. The big thing that investors are seeing is that very smart newspaper people (NY Times, WaPo, and McClatchey) and very smart outsiders (Sam Zell, that guy in Philly) can't seem to make money with newspapers. I have not seen what the profit margins are on these properties recently but I will bet that they have fallen rapidly.
For the most part, the people that own these properties do not want layoffs or cutbacks (maybe Tribune co.), and they love the newspaper business. However the era of newspapers dominating the news coverage is ending. Reinventing themselves on the Web is necessary, but at the end of the day, will there be the infrastructure to deliver a newspaper to your door? I'm not so sure about that. We as a society will lose a lot, but somehow newspapers will survive. It'll be in a smaller form, maybe electronic only. Niche markets like business and sports will rise while general reporting will fade.
On the Web, papers need to be better positioned to get the next generation of readers. I heard that most people under 30 don't go to newspaper sites for their news, they prefer Yahoo News and other aggregators. Why is that? This is a brave new world and things are still cheap and fluid. What about getting there first? Local news blogs are starting to compete with the dailies in a real way. In a few election cycles, I'll bet that almost all the people born after 1985 will get there news from the Web sites that are not affiliated with newspapers. If that really happens, then newspapers will truly be in peril.
posted by Spud at 9:35 AM
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