Are we abandoning print too quickly?
Some people seem to think that worrying about newspaper redesign is like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. I am not so sure. In fact, I am beginning to wonder if the rush to the web — and I have been among the rushers — isn’t a bit premature.
No one has a good business model for making profits off web advertising, which is not growing at the rate we all hoped for, even expected. The pay site model doesn’t seem to work very well either: people are too accustomed to getting access to newspaper web sites for free. Much information can be gotten elsewhere at no cost.
Cutting staff as a way to cut costs doesn’t seem to have helped. Paper and people are the major expenses of a newspaper, so what’s the problem?
I think the problem is way more complex than we have presumed. Newspapers are not widgets, and simply cutting newsroom costs by cutting news staff, as one might lay off workers on the widget production line, is at first blush logical, but it doesn’t address the issues completely.
I am studying this and will post more soon. I believe that people have a different sort of relationship with their newspaper than with a widget, and that relationship is more intimate and interwoven with our personal and social lives than we think. I think the secret lies in understanding the close relationship readers feel with their newspapers (at least for now) and exploiting that approach to keep circulation from this free fall. Newspaper design, in its broadest sense, plays a major role in all this, too.
I would be very interested in getting a conversation going on this. I’ll have more to say next post. Meanwhile, what do you think?