The "end of newspapers" bubble

Last week Michael Kinsley joined the chorus of people predicting doom for the American newspaper:

And the harsh truth is that the typical American newspaper is an anachronism...

The Times, The Post and a few others probably will survive. When the recession ends, advertising will come back, with fewer places to go...

With even half a dozen papers, the American newspaper industry will be more competitive than it was when there were hundreds...

At this point, everyone has heard the list of reasons that the newspaper business model is in trouble (the Internet, the death of classifieds, etc.). But it's absurd to think we'll end up with "half a dozen papers" any time soon. Until recently, that business model generated extremely high profits. Most of the newspapers that are in trouble now are suffering from the results of too much debt, bad acquisitions, etc. We'll surely see continued newsroom layoffs and reduced profits but I would be shocked if every major metropolitan area doesn't still have a print daily in ten years.

The best analogy, I think, is what happened during the dotcom boom. Everyone got carried away and started extrapolating wildly from short-term trends, predicting that online stores would take over categories like toys and pet food overnight. Few of those predictions came to pass. I think the same applies here.

Comments

[Christian Avard]

I'd also throw in there the advent of Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Digg, Yahoo! news groups, etc. They've definitely had an impact on national news outlets profits. Right?

[Sean]

I do hope you're right (especially since I got a degree in print journalism).

Right now, it seems like the smaller the newspaper, the more well off they're at right now. NYT's, WSJ and such expanded their resources so far, with excessive amount of staff, that the problems in both advertising and financial sectors have hit them the hardest.

[David]

I'm pessimistic about the survival of paper newspapers. The internet provides up-to-the-minute access to news reports from all over the world, reports and opinion pieces from independent bloggers, links to sources and related material, and videos. And, it's free. Don't forget that the electronic world is still improving. In order to survive, I think papers will have to move to web-only and learn to make do on much smaller budgets.

One model is Michael Yon, who does war reporting. He does his own reporting, photography, videography and publishing (via his web site). He's a one-man newspaper. He survives on donations.