As I sat in on the deathwatch of my investments, watching as the Dow continued its downtick and my plans for retirement stretched into the evermore distant future, I realized that this could be the death knell for a number of newspapers. Sure enough, the next day The Wall Street Journal reported that the Star-Trib in Minneapolis was facing financial difficulties because credit was going to be hard to get and it was going to cost them more.
Even good newspapers, like the Strib, are in trouble. Businesses also will likely advertise less as consumers tighten their belts and spend less. So: less revenue in the face of increasing costs can mean only one thing: the b-word. We are likely to see more newspapers bite the dust.
What is sad about this is that I was beginning to believe that better newspaper web sites were finally figuring out a business model that would bring enough advertising revenue from the web site to make an honest go of it.
If you want to work on some of this, check out News Design School.
Now I believe that we are in for more bad news from media companies. Even those papers that have embraced the web and created interactive, social-media web sites will have a hard time fighting through this economic rough patch. Still, the papers that are jumping on the web with both feet will be better positioned to survive. Are you one of those?
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