More Info than Brains

The Believers at the blogs, and the tech-sites have been calling newspapers DOA for some time now. With the New York Times bleeding money, and trying to compete online, and local newspapers (including the one in my home town) going under all across the country, it’s really no surprise.

While I will step up and defend the value, and my personal preference for newspapers, I can’t say they won’t die. They really are up against a big threat. David Pauly @ Bloomberg.com does a great job of lamenting why we’ll (as a culture, and David personally) miss them – but I don’t think we should count them out just yet.

First, most of the DOA talk is coming from The Believers in the “new media.” The people reading the DOA talk are people who get all their information online. It’s all created a bit of “Nascar Blindness.” The bottom line is that most of the country, in Tennessee and Nevada and Texas, still gets their news from Papers and big-smiling, makeup-caked news at 11PM. Unfortunately, ad agency media-buyers are located in New York and Chicago so they’re part of The Believers. It’s a total circle-jerk, and if newspapers die, it will be a murder, not a natural death.

Now let’s look at other industries that have disappeared completely. The most direct comparison is the rapid message delivery industry, or the Pony Express. The Telegraph killed it in a matter of weeks. Then there is the case of the passenger ocean-liners that were replaced by intercontinental air-travel (well, it converted to recreational cruises). What about the the disappearance of horses as the primary mode of transportation killed by the automobile becoming affordable?

All of these, and the rest, have two very important things in common. First, the deaths were quick and painless. In the case of every dead-industry, the replacement technology was so vastly improved from the prior that there was simply no question. In the case of the automobile, it took some time for it to become affordable, but once it was, the horse-drawn buggy disappeared within a few years. We’ve had affordable internet for about twenty years at this point.

Second, and more importantly, in every case, the replacement industry was profitable. You better believe that Western Union was making money when it replaced the Pony Express, and right away. How can so many, very smart and educated people, be sure that the newspaper industry is dieing because it’s losing money, when they’re claiming that it’s being killed by an industry that’s losing money? It doesn’t make sense until you realize that these smart, educated people also have based their income on keeping the Venture Capital flowing into Internet companies. I’m not saying they don’t believe it, but I am saying they’ve tricked themselves into believing it … and if they keep it up, I think they’ll get their way.