"Newspaper Publisher's Are Idiots" -- John Dvorak

I guess this is a John Dvorak week. He had a great column on the vanishing of our digital history and now a great column about the sad state of the newspaper business.

This one really hits at the core of what funeral directors must face, as the outdated business model of newspaper publishing falls apart and one of our key conduits of local communication begins to fail.

What do we do in most parts of the country if the local paper goes out of business? How do we get the word out to the thousands (millions across the country) of people who have no capacity or desire to seek out obituary information online?

Of course Dvorak doesn't address those issues, but he does outline some of the reasons for the failure of newspapers and even suggests a possible approach to change things around again. Perhaps dropping off a copy of his column with your local editor might help. At this point, I'm sure it couldn't hurt.

Here's the opening paragraphs. Follow the link to read the rest:

So now we hear that The New York Times is contemplating the notion of becoming a subscription-based Web site, where you only get to read it if you pay real money. What a quaint idea.

Let me put it bluntly: This won't work. It will completely sink the publication faster than it's already sinking.

The problem with the subscription model for today's big newspapers is the fact that there is very little exclusive information of any real value. The New York Times syndicates much of its content to other papers, so there are alternative sources—not subscription-based—with the same information. Why buy a cow when milk is free?

Starting back in the early seventies, most of the big newspapers around the country were lulled into a sense of security and easy money by eschewing in-house reporting in exchange for syndicated news from the likes of the Associated Press, The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and Reuters.

John Dvorak: Newspaper Publishers Are Idiots

Comments

[walt]

Death notices/obituaries have already started moving to the web. Here I've seen people complaining because the family owned funeral home i work at doesn't post its own notices to the website (which is ridiculously outdated and looks like its 1999 all over again).
When we tell them its in the paper they ask why we couldn't do it on our website too?

I've yet to give them an adequate answer, but i'm just an FD, not an owner.

Time to get your head out of the sand. The communications environment has already changed. Are you gonna roll with the punches or get steam rolled?